From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Jun 02 2001 - 20:37:00 MDT
Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>
> In a message dated 6/2/2001 10:56:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> lcorbin@ricochet.net writes:
>
> << Would either of you roll over and die if we found out
> for certain that life in this sector of the galaxy
> could not continue for more than an additional century?
> Of course not! >>
> I am guessing that the smartest of people would be disturbed by the
> eventuality! Especially with the notion of eternal death or value death/ego
> loss for our Buddhist friends. News of this would surely permeate our
> literature and thoughts. Escape fantasy would be the meme of the day, for
> that is what we would only have left.
>
Not for me. I would be simultaneously turning the world
inside/out for the best theories that might allow escape from
this sector (warp drive) in time on the one hand and exploring
all theories of mind transcending the physical on the other
hand. Simply ignoring the problem or pretending it did not
exist would not occur to me.
> For me, the slow, hard, road of technological advances over millennia seem
> more reasonable, even on a list which holds that in 99 years we will have
The road is not uniformly slow or uniformly hard. The pace
accelerates. Do you deny this? If you do not then what leads
you to believe that it will be millennia before very far-out
possibilities and choices overtake us?
> attained 'parousia'. Cryo seems a good idea, but a poor technology. "Rotting
> in Good Health" may ultimately prove the better answer-tho' I wouldn't swear
> by it. Where Michael Perry sees the cold sleep of dead bodies as a reasonable
> answer, I see the fine tuning of an Ultimate Mind, more to my liking (shades
> of religion). But I echo's Perry's despair in the notion that the existential
> problems need a solution.
If they do then I suggest humbly that we become beings who can
find and if necessary, create one. There is no need for being
stuck in rotting meat gracefully or otherwise. There is no
reason why I should consider this acceptable unless I believed
this is just an "illusion" or a "training VR" or some such.
Even if I believed that I think it would be a better solution to
the "test" to rewrite the parameters of the "problem".
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:07:55 MST