Re: Who Should Live?

Delvieron@aol.com
Tue, 16 Mar 1999 23:53:03 EST

Who should live? What is the Extropian value of bringing back old models of humans?

First, it depends on your perspective....if you are some future society, then there may be no value. Then again, if you are the one hoping to come back, there is a HECK of a lot of value.

But I would argue that there is a value in bringing back the frozen dead
(besides altruism). They may not be as smart, or as fast, or many other
things as the future population, but they have two PROVEN qualities. One is experience....a fairly rich cache of them, which when incorporated into that future society, may prove useful. For example, if the Amazonian Rainforest is gone, and you're trying to recreate it as a tourist attraction, it might be useful to hire as consultants some people who actually visited it while still around to make sure you're getting the "feel" right. Or let's say we've finally found some ETs, turns out they are not friendly, but the last war was outside living memory....unless you spent some time in the deep freeze. That hands-on experience of battle mixed in with state of the art might be useful. Oh, but that sort of ties into the second quality, SURVIVAL. These relics of the past are are personalities that were pretty strongly wired to find ways to escape entropy. Now, granted, the future may know some ways to program this in, but these would be truly tested models. Upgrading the cryonicists and using them to augment the future's understanding of what it means to be a fighter, and to beat the odds, may be more valuable than anything else we could bring to the future.

Then again, maybe not....but I like to think so, and what is life but the constant struggle fulfil seemingly futile hope?

TRANSCEND!

Glen