X-Message-Number: 7363
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Reply to Donaldson 2
Date: Sat, 28 Dec 1996 02:10:15 +1100 (EST)

Thomas Donaldson writes,

>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'm not quite your vintage, but I remember them too - I especially recall
my father worrying when the first "Club of Rome" report came out. Those 
projections, happily, were quite unrealistic. 

There is one thing, however, that doomsayers can say for sure about the
coming century that they have not been able to say about any period in
the past: unless we achieve an exponentiating technology, our population
must stop increasing before 2100. Based on human history and on all
biological analogy, it's difficult to see why this should not be cause
for some trepidation.

>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?

I'm hardly suggesting that we should experience any immediate
catastrophe.  I don't imagine we'll even begin to directly experience
global-scale resource bounds for at least a generation.  In that time,
perhaps, we'll develop more than adequate technology to deal with the
situation - all I'm suggesting is that, since this is not certain, we
should do everything we can to attain that technology ASAP. I see the
situation as something of a race.

>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.

Just so.

>BUT I refuse to believe that people in  
>general are SO inept that their collective control must necessarily turn out
>catastrophic. 

Necessarily? No, that's not what I'm suggesting. The up-wing page merely
attempts to sort human affairs by the criterion of preparation for the
exigencies of human growth. Sorting things this way results in a
political dimension that, I think, has not been widely recognised, but
which should be understood if we're to undertake rational plans for 
development in the next century.

I don't think this is a particularly controversial way to look at things
- but I confess I am surprised that would-be Cassandras, like the
Millenialists, do not generally seem to trouble with analyses from this
perspective.

Peter Merel.


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