In article <106nl87$1je30$
[email protected]>,
Evelyn C. Leeper <
[email protected]> wrote:
But the logical continuation of that is that humans who believe in
Heaven shouldn't be afraid of death, and the humans who believe in >reincarnation/samsara shouldn't be afraid of death either. And
while that is true of many sincere believers in either of those
belief systems, a lot of people fear death, avoid death, and in
general would prefer to stay alive. From a logical point of view,
this doesn't make a lot of sense. And in fact Mickey says that he
always feels scared. (It's not clear how he knows this, since the
recording of his memories is not done in real time, so he should
not be able to remember the last seconds/minutes/hours of his
lives.)
[Hal Heydt]
By that logic, as someone somewhere between atheist and agnostic,
I should be afraid of death. I'm not. I first faced my real
chance of death a bit over 25 years ago and found it didn't
bother me at all. (The situation was preping for bypass surgery.
Not all who undergo it survive. My vastly bigger fear was
surviving with brain damage, which can also happen.)
Quietly, for a good many years, I have maintained that, if
Dorothy's beliefs were correct, I will tear the afterlife apart
seeking her out. If my beliefs are correct, all that is left of
her are the words she wrote and the memories of the living. If I
manage to carry out her last wishes, I will find out which of us
is correct after at least another 17 years.
I leave it to the reader to decide how likely this
plan is, either in getting people to agree to it, or in creating a
fully self-sustaining city when almost all the inhabitants are
either children or permanently pregnant women.
See Asimov's story featuring "Might Maxon". I've forgotten the
story title, but someone is sure the know once the character name
is present as a trigger.
Musk does add the qualifier "if launch rate growth is
exponential." This assumes 100,000 people transferred during each
launch window; Musk sets a million people as what is needed for a >self-sustaining civilization, and seems to assume that is also
sufficient. The logicians among you know that "necessary" and
"sufficient" are not at all the same; if Forth Worth, Texas (a
city of a million people) were somehow transported to Mars in a
protective bubble, everyone would starve fairly quickly, assuming
they didn't run out of oxygen first. How Musk thinks a highly
technological civilization can be self-sufficient on Mars in forty
years is a mystery.
Graydon Saunders in his "Commonweal" books
grapples--peripherally--with the issue of how many people it
takes to sustain a "technological" society. They periodically
bring up the issue of whether or not 1.5 million is enough.
There are references to a list being maintained of what they
cannot--at any given moment--make for themselves with the note
that the list starts with "abrasives" and isn't getting any
shorter. One periodic mention is finding a substitute for
tropical gums for binders in printers ink, as the Second
Commonweal is completely within the temperate zone.
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