From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Wed Jan 24 2001 - 01:18:03 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> The question isn't whether a temperature change is 'natural' or not,
> or if it has had precedents in the past. The real issue is what will
> its effects be, and do we want to change those effects? As
> transhumanists, I think we in general do not place any special value
> on things being natural rather than man-made, and the same goes for
> climate. Do we want the effects caused by increased amounts of carbon
> dioxide and particulate matter in the atmosphere? Do we want to
> modulate them, or even get rid of these effects - and pay the costs?
I think the first issue is to make sure of what the effects of these
various agents we more or less may be able to do something about are and
are not before we go off worrying overly much about directly modifying
them. It would be especially unfortunate if we take for granted that
reports like the recent highly speculative one from the UN are
scientific fact and make decisions that actually slow the rate of
technical and industrial progress as a result, thus lengthening the
time before we have the technological means to correct such problems in
a much more elegant way than we can today.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:05:16 MST