From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Fri Jan 17 2003 - 00:50:07 MST
Come on guys!
Harvey Newstrom and Spike
Computers beat people at chess, mice get to live twice as long and slimmer to boot, materials for space towers are being produced in greater and greater quantities, anti-matter production is gearing up including anti-hyrdrogen, beam weapons are zapping down missiles left, right and centre, production of test runs of laser powered lights sails and space tethers and robotic fighter planes are old hat, ABM systems are being tested, animals are being cloned in droves, we have a tiny space colony (I guess you should call it that), fusion power experiments have accelerated, robots walk up and down stairs, digital paper companies produce materials with tested refresh rates of 5 million (thus far)[Gyricon], proteomic testing scoots ahead at 30 times the previous rate, genetic and proteomic therapies are sprouting like mushrooms... hardly imagination. Sure it's not full fledged yet. The motor car took a few years to take off too. 1894 versus 1915 is an inadequate but funny correlation for 1994 versus 2015.
Mike Lorrey:
"Remember when subscribers to the extropians list were uniformly pro-freedom, pro-gun, and pro-capital? Thugs, grabbers, and looters got flamed off the list"
Does flamed mean dissuaded from commentating through persistent repeated rebuttal?
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I guess in a sense the extropian list will become more and more a reflection of wider political and social divergence because assembler nanotech is prone to be adopted by upwingers and socialists as easily as libertarians, plus there are as has been noted many types of libertarians and anarchists. The gun and capital punishment thing cannot really help the libertarian cause too much in the long run because the political reality is that the Eurasian West and most of the rest of the West has rejected this approach (in some cases only in theory). Whether it is pleasant or not, this reality will begin to bite as you begin to encounter more and more European/Russian extropians and the translation machines start to work more effectively (at least for carefully constructed simple grammatically correct phrases). Extropianism to me is about positive growth and the benefits of technology and freedom (including freedom of local government under whatever larger moral umbrella is necessary). That is probably its common ground. The adherents of the weird (some) American and (some) libertarian beliefs in gun access and capital punishment will also find it more difficult as more and more transhumanists leak into the extropian movement bringing with them a concern for immortalism (whether they are in favour of longevity treatment, augmentation or uploading) and thus a focus on the irreducable value of conscious life.
Towards Ascension
Avatar Polymorph
34 After Armstrong
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