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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7358