Re: What Extropians can do

From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sat Aug 04 2001 - 12:29:00 MDT


"Chen Yixiong, Eric" wrote:
> Yes, I understand very well the difficulties involved in financing
> such an operation. Perhaps we can stick to a land-based
> micronation-colony and wait until 30 years later for technology to
> advance sufficiently that it will bring down the cost of such a
> space-based colony from impossible to perhaps a few hundred million
> or even less than a hundred million of today's dollars.

http://www.extropy.org/extprn3.htm - the bit about practical optimism,
especially. (Not to use it as "holy writ", but more as inspiration.)

A good (IMO) case can be made that passively waiting for technology to
develop will make the odds quite high that the technology will either:
* not develop
* develop in some bad (for us) way
* develop far too late for it to do us much good (anti-aging doesn't
  help if you're a 200-year-old dust pile, space access and colony
  building doesn't help if the Luddites have already taken up arms and
  shot you and all your friends, et cetera)

Isolate yourself in a small micronation, and you give up the resources
which allow you to conduct research - even if said research is
constrained by popular opinion. This is probably much more of a
problem than you realize, so I invite you to consider, say, Somalia
conducting advanced research. Granted, the average education level
would be higher, but the resources available are comparable - and
destitute poverty would probably be almost as rampant, without a
pre-existing industrial base. (If something is easy to design but hard
to finance, it's still hard to actually create.) Frankly, as far as
one's continued ability to affect the world goes, that's only a few
steps above going into cryo.

You also, ironically, give the Luddites that much more of a target:
weapons of mass destruction are more easily employed when everyone who
would be affected is extremely unpopular with the deployers. (Saddam,
for instance, had no problem deploying biological weapons vs. the
"Satanic Westerners"...assuming he had said weapons, which seems
likely.)

Finally, where on Earth could you found a colony? Even Antarctica is
"claimed" (in that no nation may impose its sovereignity on any part of
the continent). There are some small islands, but none nearly large
enough for what you seek. (The "Mars colony", for instance, is
technically within the jurisdiction of Canada, I believe, which has no
problem with it since the colony's only trying to be technically
isolated. For instance, a murder - in the unlikely event that the crew
got that stressed out - would be handled as any other homicide once the
LEAs got there.)



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