From: John K Clark (johnkc@well.com)
Date: Fri Oct 04 1996 - 12:07:46 MDT
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On Tue, 01 Oct 1996 Lyle Burkhead <LYBRHED@delphi.com> Wrote:
>This is very boring. [...] I find myself in the odd position
>of trying to convince grown-ups that Santa Clause doesn't
>exist.
Lyle, with your short attention span I don't expect you to read this entire
post, it is almost half a page long and no pictures, but maybe you can find
somebody to explain the gist of it to you.
After shooting down the idea that Nanotechnology is logically inconsistent or
would violate the laws of Quantum Mechanics or Thermodynamics or Economics,
and after blowing out of the water the idea that it is possible but not
important, we at last come to the core objection that almost everybody has
about Nanotechnology, it STRONGLY violates Lyle's Law.
Lyle's Law, which I have taken the liberty of naming for a well known member
of the Extropian list, could be stated as follows:
LYLE'S LAW: Whatever the future has in store for us of one thing we should
be certain, the universe must be constructed in such a way that the majority
of late 20 'th century bipeds on the third planet orbiting a small star on
the edge of a run of the mill galaxy will never find things odd.
I don't claim to have rigorously disproved Lyle's Law, but you need a great
deal of evidence before you elevate something to a law of nature. Personally
I don't think there is enough evidence to support Lyle's Law, indeed to my
perhaps superficial eye, there is much that points in the in the other
direction.
John K Clark johnkc@well.com
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