X-Message-Number: 7358
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #7347 - #7354
Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 13:14:27 -0800 (PST)

To Mr. Merel:

Forgive my skepticism but I have already heard far too much doomcrying which
never resulted in anything. I am 52 years old, going on 53; I vividly 
remember all the stories in New Scientist and elsewhere telling us that we
would suffer ecological and economic collapse before the end of this century.

I look around me and, sure, some poorly managed countries are indeed suffering
ecological and economic collapse. But the entire world???? Forget it. And we
were supposed to wipe out all life on Earth after a nuclear holocaust between
the USSR and the US? Where did THAT prediction go?

It's not that I don't believe things can go wrong. The question is really "how
badly wrong?". And I doubt very much that things can go SO badly wrong as to
result in global annihilation, even of technological civilization --- which,
if anything, is likely to be more durable than previous civilizations which
have disappeared. Sure, changes can happen too, and those changes can be
fundamental: as cryonicists and immortalists we are trying very hard to see
such changes happen ASAP. But that is hardly the end of a civilization, it is
its transmutation into a new form.

And of course our technology brings responsibility with it: where before we
simply had to put up with fate, every ability to control that fate means that
now WE (collectively, sometimes individually) are responsible for events which
used to be put down to fate alone. BUT I refuse to believe that people in  
general are SO inept that their collective control must necessarily turn out
catastrophic. Sure, we can see awful things coming. But that's a sign that
we will do something before they are right on top of us: the truck driver
turns.

			Long long life to all,

				Thomas Donaldson


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