Re: RELIG: Colonizing Hell

Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Sat, 04 Jan 1997 19:20:37 -0600


> Somehow I have the feeling it is easier to build small biospheres inside
> hell than terraform the whole thing; as Piers Anthony wrote in his
> occasionally hilarious _For Love of Evil_: "Changing Hell was like boxing
> with a big pillow; you made an impression, but it didn't change anything".

Bah. If we wanted easy, we'd take over Heaven instead... although
another old physics joke is that Heaven is actually hotter than Hell.
"The light of the sun shall be as forty-nine times the light of the sun
on Earth" or however that saying goes - calculate equilibrium
temperature to reradiate all that energy - result: Heaven is hotter than
the vaporizing point of the *lake* of sulfer!

> Besides, we have forgotten how to deal with the demons. What rights do
> they have to their natural environment?

None whatsoever. Just once, just once in the whole damned :) history of
time, why shouldn't the previous residents genuinely and actually be
unreservedly evil sadists who were kicked out by their moral superiors?

-- 
         sentience@pobox.com      Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
          http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
           http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer:  Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.