From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 18:41:57 MST
On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 04:43:35PM -0800, Ian Reilly wrote:
...>
> Let's see, in an ideal world we could live indefinitely - but we should
> continue to
> have kids without limit. Do the math!
...
> The points made on the web site above fit very well with the notion of life
> extension.
Actually it doesn't, but for a deeper cultural reason. The site (and
your post) seems to be based on zero-sum thinking. There is only a
finite amount of resources to go about, so hence all growth must
eventually stop. But the amount of stuff you can do with a certain
physical amount of resources *increases* as technology advances. You can
also make/reach more stuff, most of the current resource limits are
eminently removeable in the long run by ephemeralization and spatial
expansion. There are hard outer limits of course - thermodynamics,
conservation of energy, lightspeed and so on. But the kind of world an
expansive mankind would form in the long run is vastly different from
the Malthusian heat death envisioned by the vhem.
The environmental movement and quite a big chunk of our culture is
steeped in zero-sum thinking, making the issue dividing the cake and
then keeping the pieces in a sustainable way. Never the positive-sum
approach of increasing the size of the cake or finding ways of using it
better, which is the extropian approach. If you think in zero-sum terms
rather than positive sums, things become an issue of competition and
ensuring that nobody gets more than their allotted share - you become
the guardian of limited resources, and stasis is the best you can hope
for. But there are plenty of win-win situations around. Unfortunately
zero-sum thinking leads to a pessimistic approach that makes the
believer discount any such opportunities, since it is so "obvious" that
in the end nobody can ever win that there is no reason to look at
proposed improvements.
Worrying about overpopulation is becoming increasingly outdated; note
how aid organisations have shifted towards fighting poverty - birth
rates are falling, and the big problem complex is more about human
lacking wealth to build their lives than there being too many of them.
Life extension is in any case not a major population-booster (see the
numerous past discussions about this issue), especially given that
people would likely end their lives at a finite rate. As long as the
birth rate (by any process) minus this rate is less than the increase in
available resources over time (for interstellar technospheres it scales
quadratically) the amount of resources per person does not run out.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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