Michael Lorrey [retroman@together.net] wrote:
>Show
>me a nut with a nuke and I'll be ready to show you off world capability (If its
>so easy for him to get a nuke, then it should be just as easy for me to build a
>nuclear powered rocket!!!!)
Exactly. Much of this discussion seems about as useful as the old 'but look at the population growth curves, everyone will be starving by 1980' stuff which completely ignored changes in technology. The plain fact is that if crazies have this technology then the rest of the world does too, and the non-crazies are likely to have it first. If we can destroy the Earth then we'll easily be able to get off it.
The exception to this is the kind of government control situation people have talked about. If this power is restricted to a few people and a crazy gets access to it somehow then we die. If it's generally available then we'll probably be far away by the time the crazies destroy the Earth... and sooner or later someone will, simply because it can be done and because to a future galaxy-spanning human-descended society Earth will be an important symbol.
Mark