den Otter wrote:
> Not necessary. After all, you wait until things really start looking
> bad, which likely means that nanotech is becoming practical, and
> uploading is only decades away (at most). Even without nanotech
> one could create a colony on Mars which could operate for years
> on end.
What good would that do? To sustain an industrial civilization you need a population of hundreds of thousands of specialists. If you want to have tech advance, you probably need to increase that to several million people (so that you can afford to have a few hundred thousand of them devote their lives to research). The only scenarios I can see in which we could build a colony that size are the ones where fast burn Transcendence turns out to be impossible in the first place.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com