From: Chris Hind (chind@juno.com)
Date: Mon Dec 16 1996 - 13:12:31 MST
I said:
>>It's not to be taken seriously.
>>If you don't like it then simply delete it.
>
>However (to paraphrase), "One can die as surely from a million pinpricks
>as from a single sword thrust.". I get plenty of junk mail from random
>ad agencies -- et tu, Chris? (Max, actually, in case he's still following
>this.)
Yup, I sure do.
>The danger in the snowball and all chain letters is their exponential
>nature. The note isn't just sent to 100 people and back -- it's sent to
>"everybody you know". I personally could make it to over 1000 people
>easily -- I wonder how many each of them can reach? Follow that exponential
>growth curve out a few steps and the traffic could become dizzying, and
>well-connected people could end up getting dozens of copies without sending
>out a single one -- no wonder chain letters have such a bad rep! Some
>net.gurus I know have been predicting the meltdown of the Internet backbones
>for a while now (apparently it's already started) -- this sort of thing
>certainly doesn't help matters.
Bzzzt! The idea of the Death of the Internet has alot in common with
society's entropic fixation with an imaginary overpopulation problem. I
have great faith in human ingenuity because of it's proved-record of
effectiveness throughout history. We can always stack more people higher or
lower on the planet or even send them into space. Genengineering will allow
us to accomplish incredible feats such as vegetable trees or fruit trees
going through cycles having more fruit than leaves. I read in the LA Times
a while back that they've discovered a hormone to turn any bud on a plant
into a flower so that eventually we could turn any thorn, leaf, or stem bud
into a flower to eventually grow into fruit. In China they're already
breeding two kinds of rice together to create a "super rice" for the 21st
century that could feed thousands more. And to cut down the evidence
supporting the idea even further, the population increase in western
countries has been steadily declining. As for the internet, the major
telcos have invested huge sums of money in it and are nowhere near allowing
it all to go down the tubes. Annual chain letters are a perfect way to test
out the infrastucture and besides this specific chain letter only occurs in
the month of December because it's a "snowball fight". This may prove to be
an internet test-run that occurs at the close of each year due to the
populatity of the meme. This meme could very well force the telcos to
upgrade their systems and allow us many free resources when the "snowball
fight" dies down. You may wish to quickly dub me naive, but the supporting
facts are all there so all the wasted breath over overpopulation and the
death of the net are just more disasterbation.
- Question Tradition -
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