The Life of Man Qua Man on Earth

"The Gentle Seduction"? Or "The Stood Up Date"?

2012-01-31T14:32:00.000-08:00

Back in 1989, during the early days of the Nanotech Delusion, Marc Stiegler published some propaganda about it in a story that I have to admit I found emotionally effective at the time. He titled it "The Gentle Seduction," and it originally appeared in Analog magazine. But looking at this story now, I consider it unintentionally misleading.

Consider this passage, for example:

"Have you ever heard of nanotechnology?" he asked.
"Uh-uh."
"Well, with nanotechnology they'll build these tiny little machines--machines the size of molecules." He pointed at the drink in her hand. "They'll put a billion of them in a spaceship the size of a Coke can, and shoot it off to an asteroid. The Coke can will rebuild the asteroid into mansions and palaces. You'll have an asteroid all to your self, if you want one."
"I don't want an asteroid. I don't want to go into space."
He shook his head. "Don't you want to see Mars?You liked the Grand Canyon; I remember how you told me about it. Mars has huge gorges--they make the Grand Canyon look tiny. Don't you want to see them? Don't you want to hike across them?"
It took her a long time to reply. "I guess so," she admitted.
"I won't tell you all the things I expect to happen," he smiled mischievously, "I'm afraid I'd really scare you. But you'll see it all. And you'll remember that I told you." His voice grew intense. "And you'll remember that I knew you'd remember."

And then the simple-minded female protagonist during the following decades begins to experience, in small steps, a series of gee-whiz medical and technological marvels which ends up extending her life by more decades, then centuries, millennia, and beyond (!), not to mention expanding her capabilities to superhuman levels.

Cool enough, I guess. But I have the impression that Stiegler set his story in a fictional world corresponding to what he thought of the real state of "nanotechnology" in the late 1980's. Over 20 years have passed since then. What the hell happened to all these miracles the nanotech boosters promised us since the time of Ronald Reagan's second term as president? Apparently we haven't even gotten to the pre-pre-pre-etc. miracle stage by now.

This makes even less sense than I first noticed.

2012-01-29T20:37:00.001-08:00

The Robert Heinlein ~~geek~~ fan who compares Newt Gingrich to a Heinleinian hero writes:

To a generation of middle-aged voters who grew up on Heinlein and the writers he influenced, the Gingrich message and the Gingrich style have a real resonance. You can see this in how Gingrich has successfully positioned himself as the defiant individualist in his challenging of the media establishment and how easily voters have been convinced to dismiss his unconventional personal life. The fully realized individual is above conventional morality and is not accountable to anyone but himself. The more Gingrich defies those who would judge him the more he proves that he is the kind of individualistic superman which Heinlein's writing has convinced us that we all ought to be. We identify with Gingrich and live vicariously through him, more like a literary character than a real human being.

Uh, what about Gingrich's conversion to Catholicism? I don't think Catholic moral teaching advocates that the self-actualized Catholic becomes a "fully realized individual . . . above conventional morality and . . . not accountable to anyone but himself," much less attain the status of an "individualistic superman." If anyone could become like a Heinleinian superman in real life, I doubt he would go to a Catholic priest for confession. If anything, a priest might seek out the Heinleinian superman for advice.

The idea of a "Heinleinian Republican" deserves further study. People have already noticed and written about Ayn Rand's influence on modern conservatism. I have Gary Weiss's new book on order, for example. Heinlein's life nearly coincides with Rand's, yet he wrote a lot more, over a longer period of time, and in a way which reached about the same kind of demographic as Rand's novels. It wouldn't surprise me if the evidence supports the case that he likewise exerted an unacknowledged but substantial influence on the thinking of the American right in the early 21st Century.

The weirdness of paleofuture movies

2012-01-29T15:16:00.000-08:00

I have to laugh sometimes when I watch an old movie which portrays life decades into "the future" relative to the time of the movie's making, and then notice that it shows wrong or even preposterous things happening in a year I can remember. I don't count the movies which show life just a few years into "the future" from the time of the movie's release, like On the Beach or The Omega Man.

For example, the year 1970 in Things to Come:

The year 1980 in Just Imagine. The opening scene of New York's flying car traffic inspired imitations in later movies and cartoons:

The weird mix of hits and misses in 1999 A.D. (intro only in this clip):

And, of course, the various adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four over the years, along with 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel set in the year 2010.

A number of other movies made ~25-40 years ago portray life in the next few years:

Rollerball (set in 2018).

The Running Man (set in 2019).

Blade Runner (set in 2019 as well).

And the one I watched the bulk of late last night on TCM: Soylent Green (set in 2022). Something about the year 2020 acted as a kind of attractor for many of these films made in the 1970's and 1980's.

And a bit further out, Things to Come does double duty by showing a kind of utopian life in the year 2036 towards the end of the film.

I haven't watched Soylent Green in years, and several things about it struck me. One, it has the look-and-feel of cyberpunk without the cyber, because it doesn't mention or show computers in 2022. Old book-oriented scholars, rather than computer-hip youngsters with tattoos and other body mods, play a role equivalent to hackers in the cyberpunk genre. Yet like in cyberpunk, Soylent Green shows a dysfunctional, if not failing, technological civilization dominated by a mega-corporation which has the monopoly on the main food supply.

Its view of street life also reminds me of what I read about living conditions in the former Soviet Union, where ordinary, shabbily dressed and probably unwashed people have to stand in line much of the day for food rations of dodgy quality. The men wear European-style caps and the women wear scarves, just like you would probably see now on the streets of Russian cities.

The movie's view of social inequality seems a bit off to me. The richest people live in apartments with 1970's middle class conveniences like air conditioning and hot running water, along with sex workers called "the furniture" who come as part of the deal (apparently these guys don't have wives or children), and these tenants have the money and connections to buy scarce goods like liquor, soap, and real food but in small quantities. The courtesan of one of these rich men brought home a piece of beef, which would make about two small steak dinners, as a special treat for her master. Apparently normal agriculture and animal husbandry still function somewhere on the planet to supply this market, but the movie doesn't show how or why that works.

In other words, everyone in the world in 2022 must have gotten poorer in absolute terms, not just relatively, if the so-called rich men have to live like 1970's urban bachelors of the sort Hugh Hefner marketed to with Playboy magazine, but subjected to food rationing as well. That makes for an interesting contrast with all the propaganda lately defaming the so-called "one percent."

Hollywood doesn't seem to produce these kinds of movies so much these days, perhaps as a result of the decline of the idea of "the future" in Western thinking; we especially don't see portrayals where people endure bad stretches of "the future" to reach better living conditions and a happy ending, like in Things to Come. The Star Trek franchise seems to have fallen on hard times as well, though Gene Roddenberry created it as secular humanist propaganda decades before the "New Atheism" phenomenon should have made it seem more relevant, not less. I get the impression that the culture lately resists transmitting speculative portrayals of "the future" in general, good or bad. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy writes of the educated men in the Roman Empire during the rule of the Antonines that they "looked to the past for what was best; the future, they felt, would be at best a weariness, and at worst a horror." Have we gotten to a similar point in our history?

Newt Gingrich, the paleofuture candidate

2012-01-28T19:24:00.000-08:00

I started to pick up on this myself when Newt brought up the idea of a moon base as a goal for his presidency:

The Rise of the Heinlein Republican (Dave Nalle)

With his surge in the polls I've been trying to get a handle on the philosophy of Newt Gingrich, and after finally seeing signs which should have been obvious all along and confirming them with a bit of research, I realized what I should have caught on to long ago, that Newt Gingrich is a Robert Heinlein Republican.

Like many in my generation I grew up reading Robert Heinlein's Science Fiction novels almost religiously. Heinlein's dystopian vision of the future and his romantic obsession with man as superman was enormously appealing to a teenager growing up in the space age. The Heinlein man could perfect himself and conquer the universe singlehanded by sheer determination and willpower. Heinlein's theme was the triumph of the individual over time in Methuselah's Children, over space in The Man Who Sold the Moon, over conventional morality in Stranger in a Strange Land and over the governments of lesser men in Farnham's Freehold. Heinlein's political philosophy of Rational Anarchism is summed up by the Professor Bernardo de la Paz in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:

"In terms of morals there is no such thing as a ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free, because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything that I do."

Heinlein's muscular, militaristic individualism carried with it a deliberate intention from the very first to influence politics. After World War II Heinlein experimented with direct involvement in politics, served in elective party office in California and ultimately campaigned for Goldwater in 1964 and may have ghostwritten ads and speeches for his presidential campaign. In this period Heinlein had a friendship and rivalry with fellow writer L. Ron Hubbard. They supposedly had a long standing bet to see who could start a religion which would change society. Hubbard's answer to this challenge was the creation of Scientology. Heinlein's answer came through his writing and the ideas expressed in some of his bestselling novels of the late 1960s and its ultimate product seems to be Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich has admitted to being a Heinlein fan and his own fiction has a clear Heinlein influence. Gingrich is also friends with and has collaborated with Science Fiction author and former Reagan era technology adviser Jerry Pournelle, who sees himself as the heir to Heinlein's ideas and literary tradition. Pournelle was a protege of influential neolibertarian thinker Russell Kirk, and has written extensively on politics from a neolibertarian perspective. Neolibertarianism is a branch of libertarianism which fits the Heinlein model quite closely. It at least partially deemphasizes the principle of non-coercion and places a strong emphasis on individual liberty, disdaining bureaucratic government and elevating the military to a near iconic status. The world envisioned in Heinlein's Starship Troopers is very much the world of the neolibertarian movement.

Gingrich has clearly taken the Heinlein ideology to heart on many levels. His serial infidelity and request that his wife engage in an open relationship are pure Heinlein. Heinlein was an avowed libertine who practiced open marriage and advocated total sexual liberation and rejection of conventional morality as a recurrent theme in much of his writing. Gingrich's obsession with colonizing the moon is also straight out of Heinlein's work. Some of Heinlein's most influential writing centers around the colonization and development of the moon in books like The Man Who Sold the Moon and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Gingrich's hostility towards bureaucracy, flaunting of the conventional political process and love of innovation for its own sake are pure Heinlein. His egotism and obsessive character are also straight out of Heinlein. Gingrich himself has much in common with megalomaniacal developer Delos D. Harriman in The Man Who Sold the Moon, though Gingrich seems not to understand that the self-destructive Harriman was intended more as an anti-hero than a role model.

Many observers of the libertarian end of the political spectrum see Heinlein's vision and the ideas of the neolibertarians as the "ugly" side of libertarianism. Disconnected from social morality and focused on the responsibility of the individual to himself and not to society, it can lead to views which verge on being an oxymoronic kind of libertarian fascism. Ironically, this aggressive subset of the generally much more innocuous libertarian movement seems to have much greater political marketability.

To a generation of middle-aged voters who grew up on Heinlein and the writers he influenced, the Gingrich message and the Gingrich style have a real resonance. You can see this in how Gingrich has successfully positioned himself as the defiant individualist in his challenging of the media establishment and how easily voters have been convinced to dismiss his unconventional personal life. The fully realized individual is above conventional morality and is not accountable to anyone but himself. The more Gingrich defies those who would judge him the more he proves that he is the kind of individualistic superman which Heinlein's writing has convinced us that we all ought to be. We identify with Gingrich and live vicariously through him, more like a literary character than a real human being.

Sorry, I just don't see Gingrich's appeal, and I generally like Heinlein. Gingrich's habitual lying, his corruption, his three consecutive wives (he seems to abandon the current one when she gets seriously ill) and his serial religious apostasies signal an unstable and unreliable character to me, and I don't think he has any business becoming president.

I find Mitt Romney acceptable as a candidate, especially because I consider the super-rich as "early adopters" of the lifestyles that ordinary people could enjoy in a few centuries if we can sustain exponential economic growth (by no means a self-evident scenario, I admit). American families have a median net worth of about $100,000, or so I've read. Assuming constant dollars and 2 percent economic growth interpreted as the return on the capital in that amount with reinvestment & compounding, $100,000 grows into $100 million in about 350 years. That would seem to get you to the threshold of "super wealth" by today's standards, and into the neighborhood of Mitt Romney's family fortune. So to my way of thinking, Romney has more of a futuristic aura about him than Gingrich, especially because I suspect that bourgeois, patriarchal and conservative values will return to social dominance in the next few generations, led notably by the example of Mormonism.

Jeez, not this again.

2012-01-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

Eric Drexler's ex-wife, Christine Peterson, still has some leadership position with the Foresight Institute, which I consider ironically named, given that its history of nanotech advocacy should embarrass those people by now. I don't know if she has a regular job and just runs this dubious "institute" on the side. But I get the impression that she continues to drink the Nanotech Kool-Aid, especially after reading this announcement:

Foresight co-founder among panelists discussing role of technology in human existence

Foresight Institute Co-Founder and Past President Christine Peterson was among four panelists addressing the role of technology in human existence for a Stanford University Continuing Studies series. From a report in The Stanford Daily by Marshall Watkins “Bay Area thinkers ponder ‘life’“:

Christine Peterson, co-founder and president of The Foresight Institute, a public interest group seeking to educate the community on forthcoming technological advances, emphasized the increasingly prominent role that nanotechnology has come to play.

Peterson noted that nanotechnology has the potential to create new materials and make vast advances without the side effects, such as pollution, that would currently ensue. She allowed, however, that the near-invisible and highly sensitive technology might enable intrusions on privacy.

“We need to know what data is collected,” Peterson said, “how it is used and how long it is retained. We have those rights.”

Peterson highlighted the medical benefits of nanotechnology, noting, “The ability to control atoms and molecules would mean that there really isn’t a physical illness [that] we wouldn’t be able to address.”

The report quotes the moderator of the panel, author Piero Scaruffi, as stating that the four panelists were picked because “They discussed life as in the future, rather than life as in the past.” We can certainly expect that life after advanced nanotechnology has been developed will be fundamentally different from life up until that point.

Does Christine have a calendar? Doesn't she realize that we live in "the future of nanotechnology" that her ex-husband wrote about back in the 1980's, and that it simply doesn't exist? How much longer can she keep this up before people lose interest in these empty promises, stop inviting her to their conferences and stop donating to her "institute"?

Contrast this delusion with genomics over the past 20-25 years. In 2012 we can see that genome sequencing works; has gotten dramatically cheaper; generates real data; and has begun to transform our understanding of biology, evolutionary history and medicine.

In other words, we live in "the future of genomics" from the perspective of 1990 or so, and some of its potentials have started to pay off. It doesn't disappoint because it exists in the real 21st Century, not in the paleofuture 21st Century promoted by certain aging Baby Boomers, including a politician in the news lately who still thinks we live in "the space age."

Max More's speech at TedX Hong Kong

2012-01-25T08:53:00.000-08:00

I have trouble appreciating the objection that you might not know anyone upon revival in Future World. We often wind up in situations like that now, for example, when you go to college, join the military or start a new job. Usually you have friends and relatives in the background somewhere, but not always. A lot of the people who migrated to the U.S. basically did it without ever seeing their friends and families in their home countries again. Cryonauts might find themselves in a similar situation as well, unless you befriend enough cryonicists like yourself beforehand. Some of them might make it through revival with you. I can see how that could lead to an awkward time for me regarding a certain woman.

I wonder if rejuvenation would conflict with self-actualizing into Max calls an "ultramature" person. For example, if you had a 300-year-old Lenina Crowne sort of woman, which would have the upper hand in her behavior when she meets a man who appeals to her hypergamous mating inclinations: Her judgment, or her hormones, assuming that women in Future World would still work that way physiologically? In other words, the development of judgment seems to happen independently of one's age, and it often fails to develop at all, given all the seniors I've known who didn't impress me as wise. The aging of an unwise person, for example, the sort of guy who fathers bastard children he can't or won't support, picks fights with similar guys over issues of status ("honor") and commits assorted crimes, works to our benefit by making him less troublesome. Would you want to rejuvenate that guy if he couldn't learn to control himself back when he had an efficient metabolism and plenty of testosterone, and he doesn't show signs of learning to do that now?

The irony of the womb debate

2012-01-24T08:32:00.000-08:00

Regarding:

Brave New World: UK ethicist wants women to abandon motherhood, use artificial wombs

I find it ironic that secular ethicists who advocate something like this (not many so far that I know of) say that we should employ more intelligent design in the production of new people. You see this irony in Brave New World: Lenina Crowne, despite her apparent ditziness, came into existence through intelligent design in one of the utopia's "hatcheries"; while John the Savage, who represents traditional humanity and its different set of world views, came into existence through random chance, namely, a contraception failure and natural pregnancy.

This debate also has a cryonics connection. Robert Ettinger inserts a brief argument for using artificial wombs in Man Into Superman (1972). Specifically:

"M" is for Her Misery

Attempts to make women "equal" have seemed hopeless (as well as indecent) to some in view of apparently changeless biological function-carrying children in the womb, childbearing, and suckling. These represent physical handicaps which have given women nearly slave status in most cultures; but they also account for her elevation to a position of acknowledged nobility and special claims. A father is just a man, but a mother is a martyred saint. This situation, however, seems near an end.

Actually, it is a little hard to see why suckling or carrying a child should produce a special bond, any more than in other forms of parasitism. Does one feel special tenderness toward his tapeworm? It is true that some pediatricians have claimed advantages for breast feeding, but I imagine few mothers of bottle babies will admit to a lesser intensity of motherly feeling. Likewise, even though fathers desert their families somewhat more frequently than mothers, I doubt very much that the average father is any weaker in ability to love than the mother. (The desertion rate is affected by many other factors, including greater job mobility for men.)

Certainly breast feeding is on the way out, despite occasional flurries of fashion. It must go because in too many ways it degrades the woman. It reduces her to a biological machine, an elemental function rather than a fully human person. It restricts her, physically and psychologically; it sets narrow limits on things she can do and times she can do them. It interferes with her career. It may alter her sex life. In short, it is an intolerable imposition, which was once a virtue only through necessity. It is attractive now, one suspects, mainly to those women who want to be career mothers, who seek status in the easy way available even to the laziest and least capable, or else to those who are confused and misled. (Of course, the lazy and incapable have to live too, and we must also take account of exceptional temperaments. No doubt for a while there will be a place for the career mother, if she can latch onto a career father.)

Well within the next century, the term "bottle baby" could apply not just to nursing, but to gestation. Ectogenesis, or extra uterine gestation or "test-tube babies," will become feasible according to expert prediction, and as soon as the practice is economical, it may very possibly be quickly and almost universally adopted. There has already been partial success in joining sperm and egg and growing the fetus in an artificial womb; when the technique is perfected, women will be fully emancipated from the bondage of their bodies.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, babies were "decanted" rather than born, and "mother" was a dirty word. Huxley's world was an antiutopia, but for confused and not entirely valid reasons. Many women don't believe it, but I am convinced ectogenesis will be a nearly unqualified benefit, and that almost all women will welcome the chance to be "fathers" instead of mothers. At first, they will claim their main reason for approving of it are that the fetus will receive greater protection and more reliable care under controlled conditions, and possibly that husbands will have less inconvenience, but they won't miss the swollen bellies and the backaches either. If some women insist on carrying the unborn "under their hearts" (and over their bowels), perhaps science will still serve them, and provide them with marsupial pouches so they can continue to carry the young after birth, like the kangaroos, giving them even more transcendental motherhood.

"Huxley's world was an antiutopia, but for confused and not entirely valid reasons." And I tend to agree. Huxley couldn't have foreseen or controlled how people who read his novel would repurpose some of its ideas for practical ends. For another example, back in 1994, during my one and only opportunity to meet Robert Ettinger, I heard him say that he got the idea for cryonics from Neil R. Jones's otherwise unremarkable science fiction story, "The Jameson Satellite." Only Ettinger said that Jones didn't see the implications of his own idea: Instead of depending on aliens to revive frozen individuals, we could depend on our own people to do that when it becomes medically feasible.

I don't particularly care how babies get here, as long as I don't have to pay for them. The current feminist ideology views the state as a husband substitute, to spare women from the indignity of having to marry beta males. The welfare system which instantiates this ideology basically subjects the entire, tax-paying male population to a fraudulent paternity suit for child support.

John Kobylt's rant in defense of Mitt Romney & rich people

2012-01-14T07:02:00.000-08:00

Kobylt even mentions Ayn Rand:

Cryonics and the paleofuture's depleting capital

2012-01-13T08:19:00.000-08:00

You can find a lot of profiles like this one in the two magazines published respectively by the two main cryonics organizations. (Long Life magazine just published the one shown above.) I've had similar influences in my decision to sign up for cryosuspension as well, just from the coincidences of the time I grew up in. I saw Kubrick's movie in the theater when it came out in 1968, I watched the moon landings, and I read Robert Ettinger's Man Into Superman as a teenager.

Very well, the past shapes us and we have to acknowledge its power. But that doesn't mean we have to keep recycling ideas from the past when they no longer work or make sense to younger generations. Cryonics comes from a contingent historical situation in the 1960's which has long since passed. In a way, cryonicists have depended on a fund of paleofuture capital which shows signs of depletion in our current lifetimes. We can't just keep invoking the failed space age, 50-60 year old science fiction stories by long dead authors, 1980's fantasies of "nanotechnology," 30 year old arguments by skeptics (or denialists?) of Malthusianism and other debatable constructs to defend our quest for survival. Nothing can make you sound more outdated than the paleofuture ideas you espouse, as we can see from the example of FM-2030 in the years before his suspension.

I noticed another kind of paleofuture capital-depletion while reading an ebook version of Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese's famous portrayal of some of the figures of the sexual revolution which began among Americans in the 1950's and 1960's. Apparently these individuals felt bored and constrained by mere middle class survival in the relative peace & prosperity of postwar America, so they decided to push the boundaries in published sexual expression (notably Hugh Hefner) and through the sexual version of what John Stuart Mill in the 19th Century called "experiments of living."

One of the personalities Talese devotes much attention to, John Williamson, interested me, partly because he reminds me of guys I know in cryonics. Williamson started out life as a cracker in backwoods Alabama, spent time in the U.S. Navy where he became a self-taught engineer without a college degree, then worked in the early space program. Apparently he had some kind of existential crisis circa 1960 where, Talese writes, Williamson "stayed up late reading books on philosophy, religion, psychology, and science fiction paperbacks, which he devoured by the dozen." Then, Talese writes, Williamson discovered Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which "suddenly and inexplicably revived his spirit." So far this could have come from a cryonicist's profile in one of our magazines, with Robert Ettinger's first book substituting for Rand's, though many cryonicists acknowledge Rand as an influence as well; but Williamson didn't discover cryonics. Instead he went into another direction. Based on his reading of Rand's novel, Williamson decided to create a Galt's Gulch of liberated sexuality, originally by invitation only, but with the longer term goal of spreading an ethic of non-jealous, non-possessive sexual freedom throughout American society.

Unfortunately Williamson's project turned him into a creepy cult leader who set up a compound called Sandstone in Southern California where he held orgies and broke up other people's marriages in the process. I've noticed that jealousy and possessiveness haven't gone away in the decades since then, despite Williamson's experiment of living, because they have a biological basis derived from the evolution of reproductive success. I think I can fairly call the Sandstone experiment a failure in transforming the human condition.

Though from hindsight I can see how Williamson could have made this error. Intellectual opinion in the mid 20th Century assumed environmental or behaviorist models of human nature, and many intellectuals tended to argue that you could transform human nature by changing social & political constructs. After all, they had the example of the Soviet Union, that cool utopian civilization which had set out to build "the future that works."

We know now how the Soviet Union turned out, along with similar utopian experiments in places like North Korea. Modern cognitive science has shed much light on how the human mind works, and the limits of its plasticity. You just can't mold people to fit ideological fantasies of human perfection, at least not through the environment and education.

As for Williamson's legacy, human nature has reasserted itself. The social consequences of promiscuity and the breakdown of marriage don't argue in favor of Williamson's world view. Yet if someone in 2012 still spouted that sort of ideology as cutting edge stuff, as some of the polyamory advocates do, then that would signal that this individual lives in a dysfunctional past, cognitively speaking. You might as well talk like a Marxist from a century ago and prophesy the accomplishments of the coming communist revolution. The ideologues who promoted the more utopian claims of sexual liberation back in the 1960's, much like the advocates of psychedelics, created a paleofuture which sounds impractical, dangerous and irresponsible now.

Fortunately cryonics doesn't have this kind of reputation. For one thing it has never gotten popular, and for another thing I don't see how its widespread adoption could cause undesirable social problems. However cryonics desperately needs an infusion of new human minds and energy. I find it encouraging that the Human Connectome Project shows signs of going to useful places, and that the X PRIZE Foundation, which has possibly at least cryonicist on its Board of Trustees, has proposed an Organ Cryopreservation X PRIZE. Without building up our fund of future capital and making sure it doesn't go paleo on us, more and more people will just write off us aging cryonicists as a bunch of paleofuture dead enders.

Romney's "fire" comment

2012-01-09T21:19:00.000-08:00

This struck me as bold & insightful, and I would like to see Romney defend the principle involved instead of apologizing & backing down.

I would also like to see the principle extended to other areas to weaken the power of abusive governments.

For example, high-earning Americans who live in a state with an undesirable tax situation, like, say, California, can fire that state's government and hire the government of another state with no state income tax. Apparently Tiger Woods did something like that when he moved from California to Florida.

Other bad influences in my childhood

2012-01-08T14:26:00.001-08:00

Underdog, rather like Roger Ramjet, tweaked on Super Energy Pills.

Wile E. Coyote, one of the earliest geek characters in American cartoons that I know of, played with explosives.

Fred Flintstone had a compulsive gambling problem.

George Jetson loafed on his job.

Jane Jetson, George's wife, stole his wallet.

Yukon Cornelius carried a loaded revolver in his pants.

Granny Clampett ran an illegal still to make moonshine.

And Captain Kirk shagged hot space babes he just met.

Another interview with Max More

2012-01-06T19:09:00.001-08:00

The year 2012, then and now

2012-01-05T14:50:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, while driving to Prescott Valley, AZ, for my weekly shopping trip, I chuckled at how banal life looks in our mysterious, far-future year 2012. We have no flying cars, no robotic servants, no clone armies, no space colonies, no nanoassemblers, no nuclear powered flashlights for sale at Sam's Club, etc.

Oh, I suppose my iPad would have looked really science-fictional and futuristic to me as a child in the 1960's and 1970's. But I drive a 1989 model car which still requires gasoline, that 19th Century miracle fuel. And speaking of 19th Century tech, I also stopped by Costco and spent close to $20 for a new LED light bulb, to complement the one I bought last week. I wanted to see how they perform, and to have the ability to say I adopted them early, rather like my adoption of cryonics. They seem to put out an acceptable level of light, and they might even pay for themselves:

In fact in my 50's I regularly have "the future of X" experiences, where I've lived long enough to see what has become of many of the X's I heard so much about in my younger days. Many of these X's have turned into either illusions or ashes, sorry to say, including:

X = "space colonization," which must really suck for those of us who joined the L-5 Society back in the late 1970's.

X = "artificial intelligence."

X = "nanotechnology."

X = "the postindustrial leisure society."

Connoisseurs of the paleofuture will recognize these and other X's. Someone on one of the websites I visit occasionally has even coined the phrase "paleofuture shock" to describe the cognitive dissonance between the imaginary future constructed by the last century's futurists and science fiction writers, versus the reality.

You can get that paleofuture-shock feeling by walking past the faux-Jetsons' style buildings on the campus of Oral Robert University in Tulsa, for example. Back in high school, in 1977 I'd guess, a friend of mine and I drove across town to attend some scholastic event there, and I joked that we'd have to make a meal of the food pills ORU served as part of its futuristic image. (Yes, I know what that shows about me: Teenage geek. At least I could never get into Tolkien, and I didn't understand the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons.)

Oral the televangelist either didn't have enough money to construct his buildings properly back in the 1960's and 1970's, or else he had the money but just didn't want to spend enough of it, so his niggardly investment left Tulsa with a bunch of gimcrack eyesores which not only look paleofuturistic, but also need constant maintenance to stay usable. After Oral's death and his sleazy son's looting and mismanagement of the place, ORU didn't really have any reason to exist any more, in my opinion, and I would have made a clean sweep with some dynamite and bulldozers. But I didn't have a say in ORU's fate, while an Oklahoma businessman who founded Hobby Lobby decided to rescue it by donating multiple millions of dollars from his own fortune. That sounds like a bad sunk-costs decision; I could have thought of better uses for his donation.

But I digress. I suppose I should also take note of the fact that a lot of bad X's haven't happened, at least not yet, like nuclear war, Malthusian collapses, deadly global pandemics or the conversion of the U.S. into an Oceania-like police state, outside of TSA-controlled American airports.

Lately some high profile people have started to talk about the mismatch between the vision and the reality, and even the goofier transhumanists have had to acknowledge their contributions. Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen both spoke at a recent Singularity conference, for example. Apparently the transhumanists have started to scale down their more grandiose, falsifiable claims. I'd like to think that I've played a small role in this, perhaps due to my recovery & posting of FM-2030's now notorious predictions for the year 2010. But I know I just don't have that kind of influence:

As for cryonics, another holdover from futures past which still has a foothold in reality, I've tried throwing out some ideas to get cryonics out of its paleofuture ghetto and into the real 21st Century, but without success so far. I find it encouraging that some people on the outside of our immediate circles have shown interest in it, however. I look forward to reading Sebastian Seung's new book, for example.

And the X Prize Foundation has announced the following:

Organ Cryopreservation X PRIZE

The global need for breakthroughs in the availability and access to organs has never been greater. The potential value or organ cryopreservation is immense on several levels. First, the technology could obviously have potential for the preservation of internal organs that currently have only a brief window of viability after being removed from a donor. This could substantially increase the effectiveness and decrease the cost of organ replacement by reducing the geographical and time constraints on organ transplantation. Second, thanks to burgeoning advances in tissue engineering, cryopreservation could also provide a way for people to store and manage replacement organs grown from their own stem cells instead of waiting on a compatible donor. Lastly, advances in organ cryopreservation will be essential to specialists in different cryobiological sub-disciplines. For example, this includes the reversible cryopreservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. The X PRIZE envisions the Cryopreservation X PRIZE as A $10M prize for the first team to transplant a human or animal vital organ (heart, lung, liver, kidney) into five animals that lacks their own, with 3 months’ post-transplant survival, having stored each organ below –120 degrees C for at least a week before transplantation.

Needless to say, my jaw dropped when I read this. The remainder of my life in the 21st Century might not disappoint my futurist expectations so thoroughly after all.

Lenina Crowne, the 21st Century American girl

2012-01-01T19:29:00.000-08:00

I've had an on and off project of writing a lengthy review essay about Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (BNW) as a humanist utopia, given that Huxley seems not to have had full control over his own thinking processes when he wrote it, so that it sends messages that Huxley might not have consciously intended. BNW assumes a high degree of cultural literacy which many educated people now lack, and doing a workmanlike job of interpreting it would require me to read the writings Huxley absorbed by early 20th Century intellectuals who disapproved of "modern times." Yet many of these works have fallen into obscurity by now, partly because the world experienced worse problems starting in the 1930's than the ones which engaged intellectuals earlier. I know Huxley wrote BNW partly in response to the various utopias H.G. Wells wrote about a century ago, for example. I've had a go at a couple of Wells's utopian tracts disguised as novels, and I find them deservedly unreadable.

As for BNW's unintended messages, Huxley shows that at least in that stage of his life, he disapproved of promiscuity and other forms of hedonism. Yet generations of adolescent & teen boys, myself included in high school, have devoured BNW for its depiction of a utopia based on sex & drugs. The boys' response to BNW invites comparison to how many of the same boys also read Robert Heinlein's Stranger In a Strange Land, again for its depictions of sexual promiscuity and altered states of consciousness. Only Heinlein, unlike the early Huxley, intended his novel to serve as advocacy for sexual freedom. Apparently Heinlein wrote Stranger because he wanted to propagandize for the swinging lifestyle that I suspect he and his wife Virginia took advantage of in the military community of Colorado Springs in the 1950's. Huxley, by contrast, apparently had a more conventional life and outlook at the time.

Huxley also didn't seem quite to know what to do with the novel's character Lenina Crowne. I wouldn't exactly call Lenina the "heroine" of the novel, but more of a place filler for a necessary female character and a symbol of the debased sort of female personality Huxley wants us to view as a product of his futurist utopia. Yet Lenina to me seems to have grown in stature with the passage of time. She comes across at first as vacuous and shallow. Her locker room conversation with her friend and coworker Fanny could almost have come from a chick movie or a reality series like Jersey Shore. And it wouldn't require a stretch to imagine that Lenina carries a smart phone on her fashionable Malthusian belt, has Twitter & Facebook accounts, and goes to feelies with her boyfriends to see the latest adaptations of Twilight novels. It wouldn't even come as a surprise if Lenina sports some piercings & tattoos, though Huxley doesn't mention them. Yet despite her superficiality and pettiness, Lenina shows signs of developing into a deeper and more complex character as she begins to appreciate the Savage's conservative, traditional view of love & sex; but Huxley kills her off at the end before we get the see her transformation. I consider that one of the novel's inexcusable flaws.

Huxley according to some scholars modeled Lenina literally after young California women he met during a tour of the motion picture industry, accompanied by Charlie Chaplain. Yet I don't think that Huxley realized that the sort of female personality he found both compelling and distasteful would come to dominate in many developed countries, thanks to education, affluence, contraception & consumerism. We have a world full of Lenina Crownes now, in many countries, but especially in the United States. The character he created almost neglectfully as a plot device for BNW has leapt off the page and entered the real world, and perhaps not for the better, according to some advocates of patriarchy.

At least the real-life Leninas usually come across as approachable and nonthreatening, though perhaps a bit "spacey." I don't know if I would care for a world full of women like Lisbeth Salander, who incorporates goth, computer geek and warrior woman tropes from the 1990's. Given the potentially long journey into the future that I and other cryonicists could make, however, we might encounter women even odder than the ones we've known in our current lives. Perhaps both the Leninas & the Lisbeths, along with many other types of women, could find places in our hearts in the coming centuries.

Bad influences in baby boomers' childhoods

2011-12-29T19:12:00.000-08:00

I laughed at this:

As a child I saw Tarzan almost naked, Cinderella arrived home after midnight, Pinocchio told lies, Aladdin was a thief, Batman drove over 200 miles an hour, Snow White lived in a house with 7 men, Popeye smoked a pipe and had tattoos, Pac Man ran around to digital music while eating pills that enhanced his performance, and Shaggy and Scooby were mystery solving hippies that always had the munchies.

Not to mention that Roger Ramjet tweaked on "proton energy pills" (figure out the acronym); Wonder Woman tied people up with her lasso and made them obey her; and Jonny Quest's dad, Dr. Benton Quest, didn't have a wife but lived with a man named Race Bannon, and together they took in a boy named Hadji they picked up from some Third World country.

Steven Pinker's speech at a Freedom From Religion Foundation Conference

2011-12-29T17:28:00.000-08:00

I haven't heard if Steven Pinker has argued for his thesis about the decline of violence in front of conservative religious groups. Try selling this idea to a bible prophecy conference, for example, because these events tend to draw people who have an investment in a deteriorating global society and a violent "end times."

In other words, Pinker has framed his argument in a way which sounds like propaganda for secular humanism. I don't have a problem with that, necessarily, if most of Pinker's case withstands the criticism it has received since he published his book:

Atheist billboards in Phoenix

2011-12-29T17:07:00.000-08:00

I don't have the sense of Arizona as an especially religious place, possibly a side effect of its generally rootless population; a lot of people cycle through here and then move elsewhere because of its unstable economy and the southern desert's famous summers. (The Phoenix Paradox: America's sixth largest that nobody wants to live in, apart from the hardier types, which so far haven't included many cryonicists unless they need to move to a hospice near Alcor. A harsh land can bring out the best in man's spirit.)

But putting these up doesn't hurt:

Tried to read Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"

2011-12-24T09:07:00.001-08:00

The first volume, at any rate, though I lost interest about a third of the way through when a character says, "I'm getting old. Sixty-two." Then I performed a benefit/cost estimate of reading the rest of the novel, which I found deficient for other reasons, and decided to throw the paperback into the trash.

Why do those Foundation novels have the reputation as classics, any way? Asimov could imagine a galactic empire lasting for thousands of years, the FTL travel to make it feasible, and a new science called "psychohistory" which can predict mass social behavior millennia into the future - but not radical life extension. Robert Heinlein at least had the cognitive plasticity to imagine how a society of long-lived people might come about, and how it could work.

Asimov also assumes that we would just find suitable Earth-like exoplanets all over the place, so many in fact that the characters in his far future had forgotten where humanity originated. While the modern census of exoplanets has only gone on for about 15 years, and it has observational biases in favor of "hot Jupiters" and exoplanets with orbital periods shorter than Earth's year, I suspect we won't find that many Earthlike planets in orbits around their respective stars' "Goldiliocks zones." The few that might exist won't have large moons like Earth's to stabilize their rotations, either, so that their axes would tend to wobble a lot and result in unreliable climate zones. Or they could get tidally locked, with only a ribbon around the terminator as potentially habitable. That doesn't mean we couldn't make them more habitable with enough engineering, however, but I get the impression that Asimov's exoplanets come practically in turnkey condition.

Ironically, Asimov and other scientifically knowledgeable people in the mid 20th Century accepted the existence of exoplanets as a faith position, based on no evidence at all, while at the same time skepticizing other people's evidence-free woo-woo beliefs. Just by coincidence the exoplanet belief had some resemblance to the reality when progress in observational techniques started to find evidence.

In general the sampling of the Foundation story I've read doesn't impress me. Perhaps I came at it at the wrong age, or in the wrong historical period. Gregory Benford, in a recent profile in Cryonics magazine, thinks highly of Asimov and regrets that he didn't get cryopreserved. Benford writes this poem:

ISAAC FROM THE OUTSIDE

by Gregory Benford

For years I knew Isaac from the outside,
through dread nightfalls and fresh daybreaks
over the galactic empire,
seeking as a teenage kid from Alabama
to know a future that hung foggy, shadowed.
Till I met him and in his penthouse high saw
Shades drawn against the immensity lurking over
Central Park. He would not lie in a bed against that
outer wall, he who deployed battle cruisers
through the starlit sevagram, and was a guy
who would not fly
in airplanes (one roller coaster was enough)
No, not tough
that way. Afraid of heights, yet he lived in a penthouse
because Janet wanted to,
for the view,
and once—only once—in a tux
high above Manhattan’s flux
he backed out on the balcony
for a photo, never looking around.
Or hearing the sound
of time’s sure falling.
Still, he saw the silky realm above,
even if those city-planet dwellers of Trantor
also feared their heavens. New Yorkers, all,
they loved their warrens.
Why not look further? I wondered,
while you debate the Galactic Empire’s politics
in comfy rooms.

He would not entertain, when I brought it up,
the odd, chilly idea of cryonics.
“I’ll die with my books on,”
he said, “and be gone.”
And the other dreamers:
crisp Heinlein, folksy Simak,
crusty Jack Williamson, wise Silverberg,
ever-young Clarke, even Fred Pohl in his rational rigor—
all wrote of passing like sunrise rays
through the cold nitrogen lens to see
landscapes beyond our gray reality.
But none I found would take a “free freeze,”
as one cryonerd told me.
Ginny Heinlein said he (and she) didn’t want him
to come back
from that dark silent cold,
though he was bold
and sure a better destiny brimmed ahead.
Bradbury sipped a cool dry martini
(having gotten two for Aldiss’ one)
and deployed the neighborhood argument:
“I’d be alone in a world I didn’t know,”
forgetting that’s the way he came in.
No warm wife or daughters, maybe
—though why couldn’t they come?—
yet fans aplenty, time-steeped in his voice, nostalgic.
There up ahead beckons a life
splashed across a bright new world,
and more–
vistas strange beyond the punctured metallic sky
huge above Metropolis.

So I wondered why he did not rage against
the fall of that night.
There’s much up ahead, he said,
But you’ll be…dead.
Whatever the odds, Isaac (and yes, they are small),
at the very worst you would lie in a sterile dry hospital
(bed on an inside wall, please)
amid all those strained dim faces dear to you,
your past peeling out behind,
a plot outline
run backward.
Morphine-soft air and coughing out your last,
about to endow your Foundation,
end of story, yes.
Yet the cryonics techs down the hall,
waiting for the last notes strumming
in the back of your woozy mind
at a still center, would give a gift:
you’d smile –
and go to that great deep release
with a thin sliver of hope.

Rick Potvin wants to know about my penis.

2011-12-19T08:41:00.001-08:00

I can think of a better title for this AlterNet story.

2011-12-17T10:35:00.000-08:00

It says, "How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation."

I think it really should say, "How the progressive indoctrination machine failed to seduce generations of young men into making them do what progressives want."

I find it amusing that progressives continue to attack Ayn Rand, though some of the criticisms seem beside the point, like her alleged infatuation with a murderer in her 20's. Fortunately progressives never idolize sociopaths & murderers like, say, Che Guevara; why, I bet you couldn't even get a T-shirt with Che's image on it.

No, I suspect that Ayn Rand's influence on the right pisses off progressives because it bypassed their educational and propaganda systems based in elite universities. Rand went straight to the people by offering her novels & other writings in a competitive market, and she had plenty of takers. After incubating in the hinterlands for a couple of generations, Rand's alternative view of society has recently emerged as an effective form of resistance to progressivism. Progressives feel that they have lost control of the framing situation, and they don't know how to respond to Rand's challenge to their agenda.

AlterNet's title for this attack on Rand also brings to mind the sense I have that progressivism doesn't act in the best interests of society's lower status males. The welfare state offers women a substitute for the yucky beta males they would otherwise have to marry to support their children. That leaves beta males pretty much disposable and undervalued. The Strict Father world view of conservatism, by contrast, tends to act more in the interests of beta males by restricting women's often self-destructive sexual inclinations (through outlawing abortion, for example) and leaving marriage to beta males as a more appealing option.

That advanced civilization called Australia

2011-12-10T18:10:00.000-08:00

From Three in marriage bed more of a good thing, quoting an Australian sociologist named Niko Antalffy:

The polyamorist community includes a large component of tertiary-educated professionals and academics because, they say, they are able to assimilate the intellectual sophistication of the polyamory thesis.

"We now know that sexual monogamy is neither natural nor common and has never been," Antalffy says.

"The institution of marriage and cultural assumptions of monogamy arrived with agriculture and property ownership. In the last four to five decades everything has changed, though: religion has lost its grip on life, we are rich in material goods as well as opportunities, we have greater choices in lifestyles, there's more equality and equality of opportunity, women can make do without having to be married to a man who keeps her.

"And this brings out human desire, which is multifarious to say the least. Polyamory is the sweet result of modernity."

People object to polyamorous relationships of two or more women and one man because the math allegedly doesn't work out. Yet in much of the U.S., especially in the Eastern and Southern states, women outnumber men.

Larry King, potential cryonaut?

2011-12-07T10:36:00.000-08:00

Larry King expresses a progressive attitude towards the conquest of death in this video clip. I encourage him to follow up on his wishes with action to get signed up.

The implosion of the Occupy hoax?

2011-12-04T16:21:00.000-08:00

I found this interesting:

Dead Movement Walking: Top Six Signs the Left And Mainstream Media Have Hung Occupy Out to Dry

I would like to throw out an additional conjecture for the movement's implosion: The young male Occupiers realized how badly they had fucked up in our new media environment when they advertised their loser status to the world, and in reaction they had inadvertently generated widespread mockery from more successful men, especially strangers.

Young men hate it when their betters publicly humiliate them and question their manhood. These guys in the Occupy movement might as well have identified themselves as an organization of adult male virgins, given the contempt they've drawn upon themselves.

John Kobylt versus Occupy cultist

2011-12-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

John Kobylt's rant about Black Friday, November 28, 2011

2011-11-29T18:55:00.000-08:00

Green energy bubble?

2011-11-26T19:24:00.000-08:00

I've had my doubts about "replacing" fossil fuels with solar power & wind power for several years now. If these technologies made thermodynamic sense, they could easily support themselves and power their expansion as well, without the need for subsidies.

Instead I've noticed that the factories which manufacture solar panels & wind turbines get their electricity from fossil fuels, nuclear power or hydroelectric sources, not from solar panels or wind turbines already installed. Guess what? Oil companies have traditionally used oil to bootstrap the extraction of additional oil because it works thermodynamically, up to a poInt, without having to get subsidies which hide where the energy really comes from.

For some recent stories:

Dutch fall out of love with windmills

Solar power: Google pulls the plug

'Green' debacle: Tens of thousands of abandoned wind turbines now litter American landscape

Of course, the facts haven't stopped the Occupiers from adding calls for more "green energy" to their lists of ignorant & irrational demands.

"The Bridge in Your Mind"

2011-11-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

"They built the bridge in their minds." Ooh, spooky. But I agree with the general perspective. This shows how the better parts of Ayn Rand's world view, minus the Rand cultism, continue to infiltrate into the culture and contribute to a kind of alternative humanism on the American right.

In other words, Rand cultists can say some interesting and defensible things which we don't hear often from others. Consider their interpretation of today's holiday, for example. Rand cultists, like this one, argue that Thanksgiving celebrates man's ability to produce and trade, and to enjoy the fruits of his efforts - a perspective which leaves god beliefs optional. Christmas, in the Rand cultists' view, serves a similar function. (I guess they would consider April 15, which penalizes production and trade and deprives us of the fruits of our efforts, a kind of anti-Thanksgiving.)

And consider this as well: You can go to an American supermarket open on Thanksgiving day, and at the very last minute buy everything you would need for the standard holiday meal, including wine and fresh flowers if you choose. We shouldn't take this marvel for granted, and we should show more appreciation for the institutions which make it possible.

Voluntary decivilization

2011-11-12T15:20:00.000-08:00

Conservatives who ridiculed the Occupy movement early on as the Flea Party came pretty close to the truth. In addition to reports of outbreaks of lice and preventable infectious diseases in the various camps, the New York Times also reports an outbreak of magical thinking:

Demonstrators do maintain a medical tent, filled mostly with over-the-counter medications and alternative treatments, like herbal remedies. Some have spotted shamans walking the premises, Mr. Carey said, though licensed doctors and nurses often take volunteer shifts in the tent as well. Some strap flashlights to their heads, like workers in a mine shaft, because the site becomes so dark at night. (The tent has no electricity.)

Miniature bottles of hand sanitizer have appeared sporadically inside the park, though it is unclear who placed them there. Volunteers at the medical tent also have on-call contacts in acupuncture, chiropractics, massage therapy and psychotherapy, protesters said.

Herbal remedies? Shamans? Acupuncture, chiropractic and massage therapy? Yet according to the calendar we've nearly reached the year 2012. I can remember what we used to call stories about technologically advanced civilizations set in the year 2012: Science fiction. In some ways the Occupy culture resembles world views before the Enlightenment.

Other things about the Occupy craziness strike me, like how it attracts people who ran up huge debts to get useless degrees in the social sciences and humanities, then complain that they they can't find jobs. And how the somewhat more docile participants have complained that alleged "provocateurs" have used the gatherings as cover for vandalism, theft and other crimes.

Well, what did these simpletons expect? When they advertised that 99 percent of the population should share their grievances and participate in their protests, they failed to consider how many career criminals, sexual predators and opportunistic lawbreakers that figure includes. Without a process to vet the participants, you get what you implicitly invite to your party.

Given the underwhelming nature of the Occupy movement so far, I have to agree with what L.A. radio talkshow host John Kobylt says about it: The Occupy movement displays a lack of intelligence and rational thinking necessary to plan and work towards practical goals. If anything, the camps look more and more like what Kobylt calls "outdoor mental institutions."

Natasha Vita-More on NPR's "Studio 360"

2011-11-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

And some objections to badly needed human re-engineering from one of those "bioethicist" parasites:

Life in the 21st Century looks the way it looks.

2011-10-21T20:37:00.000-07:00

I have a co-worker about my age who said she wants to wear shiny, "futuristic" clothing and makeup for a Halloween party.

I told her, "Uh, Lorna. Look at the date on the calendar and the way people dress now. We live in 'the future' from the perspective of our childhood. And we don't dress all that differently from the way our parents did."

I don't think she understood my point, however. What does a "futuristic" look mean these days, any way? Many Americans in 2011 sport piercings and tattoos, which few Americans had in the 1970's, but on the whole the clothing we wear has stayed conservative. I doubt we'll dress like this in the 2030's, for example, though this couture must have seemed plausible to producer Alexander Korda when he commissioned "futuristic" clothing designs for his film Things to Come (1936):

"Atlas Shrugged" meets script doctors

2011-10-21T18:27:00.000-07:00

Hollywood has people with a curious profession called script doctors, namely, experienced screenwriters who have mastered the craft and get called in to study and improve promising but flawed screenplays for movies and TV shows. I've heard of analogous experts who call themselves novel doctors.

Reportedly the people who gave us the first segment of the widely panned Atlas Shrugged film adaptation (which I haven't seen) have decided to convert the rest of Ayn Rand's novel to film. Given the ideological nature of the project, I can just imagine how badly it will turn out if they stick too closely to the novel. I can also imagine what a regular script doctor might say to these individuals in response to the following aspects of the novel:

First of all, if you set the movie in our immediate future, you can't have Galt's Gulch mysteriously hidden in the Rocky Mountains, like a Republican version of Shangri-La, when millions of Americans visit the Rockies every year and the audience knows about Google Earth, satellite photos, GPS, air traffic control networks, tracking of cell phone calls and so forth, even if the hero John Galt kludges together an invisibility screen over the valley.

Secondly, if you play the Galt/Dagny aspect of the plot straight, Galt's stalking-like behavior will remind them of unsub characters who threaten innocent women in police shows like Criminal Minds. Viewers might also pick up on Galt's implied adult virginity, especially if they've read the novel, and laugh at the character's expense. You have to downplay those aspects of the story somehow.

Thirdly, you just can't have Dagny Taggart's sister-in-law, Cheryl Taggart, commit suicide after Dagny makes an emotional connection with her, and yet have Dagny go on with her business as she does in the rest of the novel like nothing out of the ordinary happened. Dagny in a film version should show grief because of Cheryl's suicide, and also anger at her brother Jim because of his shabby treatment of Cheryl. (Given that anomaly in the novel, I've wondered if Rand inserted the part about Cheryl's suicide just to get rid of a character she couldn't figure out how to use, without working through all the consequences in the plot.)

And fourth, you'll have to play the latter half of the film adaptation like a zombie apocalypse or a Mad Max movie. You just can't have the heroes hang out in Galt's Gulch for a few months while America experiences a massive Malthusian collapse, and then show them going back to work and rebuilding an industrial society, again like nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Too much of the support structure for a modern economy will have fallen to ruins by then, and America's cities will look like Life After People.

I can think of some other objections a script doctor might make, like to the part in the hobo Jeff Allen's story about the mean, ugly 8-year-old girl who got braces under the 20th Century Motor Company's new employee benefits plan, and how a disgruntled auto worker struck her and knocked out all her teeth. Would you really want to show that on film to demonstrate the depravity caused by health & dental insurance? Passages like that in Rand's novels support the impression that she really didn't like children.

No, to me a proper film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged would have to try to capture the novel's weirdness. In my imagination it would look something like Sky Captain, and it would need cgi work in post-production to represent Rand's literary prosopagnosia. Rand describes the heroes' faces almost like geometric objects, and the villains' faces like a gooey, disgusting chaos. So the post work would have to modify the villains' faces, at least, to push them into the uncanny valley and elicit the sort of revulsion Rand wanted the readers of her novel to feel towards them.

But, of course, nobody listens to me, so the Atlas Shrugged film project will just turn into a different sort of disaster.

Cryonics on "Castle"

2011-10-21T10:03:00.001-07:00

You can watch the episode on ABC's website. Mike Darwin analyzes it here.

The premise of the Castle series strikes me as implausible: A hack crime novelist tags along with a homicide detective who looks like a supermodel slightly past her prime. She lets him participate in interrogations of suspects and so forth, despite the fact that he lacks the training or the authority to do so, no matter how many crime novels he may have published commercially. It makes about as much sense as the premise of the Tarzan and Jane stories, where an attractive, young, upper-class English woman goes off to live with an ape man in the African jungle. Could either situation happen in real life?

Setting aside my inability to suspend disbelief, this episode may have broken new ground in the portrayal of cryonics in popular culture for several reasons. One, the police treat the fictional cryonics society with respect, instead of storming into the building to tear the place apart like what happened to Alcor in the late 1980's. Two, it portrays the cryonicists as normal people with a passionate commitment to an unusual idea, instead of making us seem like a bunch of kooks, cranks and misfits. (Yeah, I know, some of us supply material for that stereotype.) And three, it turns the hostile-wife phenomenon on its head by showing a woman so committed to the use of cryonics, both for her husband's survival and hers, that she violates the law to get her way.

It just disappointed me that this cryonicist woman and her point of view didn't get more screen time. Where can I find a woman like that in the real world?

We have a word for "being your own boss."

2011-10-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

From a new Gallup poll:

Yet some christians have a problem with the desire for "being your own boss," otherwise known as entrepreneurship, which they demonize as "the self-directed life":

I'd like to see the entrepreneurial model of life-direction (Become your own CEO!) spread through the culture, if only to counter the self-sabotaging futility which characterizes so much of human existence and feeds the growth of nihilistic leftism. To its credit the Atlas Society has published articles about this approach on its website, instead of focusing exclusively on the sort of Ayn Rand superlativity which most people find weird and cultish. You can see examples here and here.

Surviving another rapture

2011-10-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

Hal Lindsey appeared on a talkshow recently to plug his end times nonsense, while also addressing his competitor Harold Camping's prediction for today. I found this saddening to listen to, basically because one foolish old man chastises another foolish old man for holding to a similar folly: "No, no, no, Harold! You don't understand the rules of the game. You don't set dates for the rapture!"

So how does it happen that one man spends his life in folly and reaches his 80's like Hal Lindsey, while another manages to accomplish useful things and winds up like, say, Warren Buffett?

I still think Lindsey owes a public apology to everyone he has spooked with his doomsday fantasies since 1970. Give it up, Hal. You'll die soon from one of the usual causes just like everyone else, without getting "raptured."

As for christian apocalypticism in general, christianity can't get away from the fact that it started out as a doomsday cult. People in this religion will keep coming up with new variations of the end times because the cult's founding texts support that interpretation.

I also have to wonder if many christians need to believe they live in the last days - yes, the prophesied events will really happen this time! - because they know on some level that christianity will eventually disappear, without any rapture, tribulation or second coming. Would people living 10,000 years from now even know about christianity, apart from a handful of scholars who study ancient religions?

And how much would the scholars in that era know about christianity any way, or about anything else which started 12,000 years in their past? The last ice age ended 12,000 years ago relative to us, but have any religions from that time survived to 2011?

Epicureanism and wealth

2011-09-24T07:36:00.000-07:00

I've done some reading about history lately, and I've noticed the unappealing aspects of what our ancestors called "wealth," namely, the fact that until fairly recently, the wealthiest people in society had to live under conditions we would consider "camping," even if they could afford expensive perfumes to mask their unwashed body stench, wore soiled and lice-ridden silk clothes, ate spoiled but well-peppered meat off of golden plates, and had slaves, servants and clients to order around.

I've also noticed the deficiencies of traditional philosophical critiques of wealth. For example, I've just finished reading The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt, about a 15th Century CE humanist scholar who discovered a manuscript of Lucretius' De rerum natura in an Alpine monastery and reintroduced a set of unsettling ideas into Western civilization around the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation, when more and more printed editions of Lucretius' poem went into circulation among the educated. Lucretius propagandizes Epicurean philosophy in a way which the Latinists of the time found compelling and disturbing, and I have the impression that his secular cosmology fueled a kind of alternative Reformation among Europeans who began to allow themselves to think about the untenable aspects of christianity despite their indoctrination.

But to the point of this blog post, in Chapter 8 Greenblatt lays out Lucretius' principal doctrines, which anticipate to an amazing degree what modern secular humanism advocates, except in one notable area. Epicurus and his followers taught and practiced a kind of monastic lifestyle based on withdrawal from society and a minimal use of resources, based on an argument about the simplicity of humans' natural needs for their happiness. Given the pervasive poverty of human societies before the industrial revolution, that made sense; when you have few requirements, you can satisfy them with little effort. Greenblatt writes:

Most people grasp rationally that the luxuries they crave are, for the most part, pointless and do little or nothing to enhance their well-being: [Quoting Lucretius] "Fiery fevers quit your body no quicker, if you toss in embroidered attire of blushing crimson, than if you must lie sick in a common garment."

Well, now, let's look at this more closely. First of all, with the wealth produced by the modern economy, people can eat nutritious diets year round; that has the effect of making the human body more resistant to infectious diseases and parasites which can cause "fiery fevers." People guessed at the connection between nutrition and vulnerability to diseases even in premodern times: Fernand Braudel in The Structures of Everyday Life quotes a peasants' proverb about how a full cooking-pot provides the best protection against malaria, back before people figured out the connection between malaria and mosquitoes.

Secondly, in the modern world we have the knowledge to control infectious diseases and parasites through public health measures like hygiene, vaccinations and sanitation. Some of these measures don't even involve high technology, like draining swamps, isolating your drinking water from fecal contamination, and making and using soap to keep your hands clean. People in the ignorant and impoverished past, even Epicureans with their slightly more advanced state of enlightenment, didn't know how to do those things, or else they didn't have the resources to do them.

And thirdly, if you still come down with an illness like the flu which causes a fever, you can take aspirin or another drugs to alleviate your symptoms, take a bath, put on clean pajamas, lie down on clean sheets in a comfortable bed in a temperature controlled room, and rest until you feel better. And during your convalescence you can also drink clean water ("plenty of fluids"), watch television, listen to recorded music and surf the internet or read books and magazines on a tablet PC, all things which Lucretius couldn't have imagined as alternatives to suffering a fever in the conditions he knew.

In general, the modern humanist outlook differs from the suffering-oriented secular world views of the past, including Epicureanism, because we can do more to alleviate suffering now. Why? Because the nature of wealth has qualitatively transformed since the Industrial Revolution, so that wealth itself has become more powerful and effective in improving our lives. The traditional philosophical disdain of the pursuit of "luxuries" doesn't make as much sense now when even philosophers can appreciate the value of having a reasonably comfortable recovery from a fever thanks to the greater potentials of wealth.

Does the Cryonics Institute still deserve my attention?

2011-09-23T08:16:00.001-07:00

I have to wonder about that, considering that Robert Ettinger created it primarily for the cryonic suspension of his mother, his two wives, several of his friends and, eventually, himself. Yet he never seemed interested in trying to make it into a technologically progressive venture, though perhaps he couldn't have done that any way for reasons beyond his control; I haven't visited the facility, but I have the impression of it as a paleofuture, preserved-in-amber sort of monument to Ettinger's 50-year-old vision. You'd almost expect it to become a branch of the Henry Ford Museum.

CI has even charged the same amount for a suspension for years, in effect a paleofuture price; and if you don't contract for separate arrangements for perfusion with cryoprotectants from the Suspended Animation company, apparently it just does a straight freezing of your body in liquid nitrogen - which practically defeats the purpose of cryonics because the mammalian brain responds in disastrous ways when you do that to it.

So how much of CI's desultory existence derived from Ettinger's influence? Now that he has gone into his own probably self-defeating cryonic suspension, will that give younger cryonicists with a commitment to getting things right the opportunity to step into the vacuum and make CI into something more dynamic and effective? Or will CI just continue to drag along as a marginal, financially threadbare effort until some catastrophe causes the loss of all of its suspendees, Ettinger included?

And in general, what would it take to give cryonics the sort of energy and excitement we associate with the recent emergence of the knowledge economy? I don't expect two guys in a dorm room to come up with an idea for a breakthrough in cryosuspension which turns into a business in a few years comparable to Apple, Google or Facebook, and which also happens to make them billionaires; but can we find a sweet spot between the two extremes which will push cryonics out of its 1960's dowdiness and inadequacy, and allow it to enter the respectable company of iPads, personal genomics, exoplanetology and other areas of the 21st Century's dynamism?

I got a flu vaccination today.

2011-09-14T20:31:00.000-07:00

And I haven't "depopulated" yet. In fact, I feel fine.

Who has the energy for crank magnetism?

2011-09-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

I just marvel at people with borderline psychiatric issues who can generate the cognitive energy to pursue all kinds of crank obsessions which have no practical significance to their lives: Conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, fringe political view points, fringe medical speculations, problems in marginal countries which don't matter that much in the scheme of things, etc.

By contrast, I don't care about 9-11 "truther" obsessions, a coming ice age, blaming the world's problems on Jews, the electric universe, Libya, fluoridated water, Lyndon LaRouche's nonsense, HAARP and all the other garbage with collects in some people's minds.

No idea too nutty for Rick Potvin

2011-09-11T08:29:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2011

Latest Time cover might be a clue as to how the buildings were demoleculurized.

Source [Static] Time's latest cover might
indicate the truth-- that a particle beam weapon powered by the ionosphere
demolecularized the buildings.

The disintegration of the WTC buildings couldn't have been done with jet fuel. The debris and dust at the base of the tower was far far less than the total volume of scrap of the building, equipment and people. Most of it vapourized or demolecularized into a fine dust. The dust has never been analyzed. The amount of energy required to do that had to have been provided from a source. The source of power that most people don't realize is 100 miles over our heads in the ionosphere. Tesla proved that. And Tesla had invented superweapons based on the principle over 100 years ago. The memorial of light beams is a joke because is covers up the weapon "in plain sight" and now TIME has revived that memorial on its cover, making the daring "in plain sight" cover-up of the source of the particle beams: Space-- or the ionosphere. The precise beaming of particle beams can now be executed. This was a demonstration of a new class of weapon.

Thomas Donaldson on "The Death of Science Fiction" (1986)

2011-09-10T08:13:00.000-07:00

Apparently Thomas didn't consider the possibility that science fiction could "die" because of the deceleration in progress, as in Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation thesis, leading people to reduce their expectations about "the future." By contrast, the fantasy genre, which Thomas dismisses because he thinks its focus on witches and princes doesn't address modern concerns, has thrived in the past quarter century. Harry Potter goes to a special school to study magic, not to learn, say, nuclear munitions, spaceship navigation or virtual wargaming to help defend Earth from an alien attack.

I can think of recent examples in science fiction where the authors treat "the future" as a game instead of an exercise in serious foresight. For example, John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation (2011), about the discovery of an intelligent species on a Earth-like exoplanet, insults the reader's intelligence by having the human characters in some unspecified time in "the future" use allegedly futuristic gadgets called "infopanels," when we can buy those things now from businesses like Walmart and call them smart phones, tablets or iPads. He might as well have portrayed televisions as a futuristic technology and given them a fancy name, like the "visiplates" in 1930's science fiction. In other words, Scalzi didn't want to bother with the challenge of thinking about what life really could look like in a society capable of interstellar travel. His novel would make more sense if he set it in 2011 in a place like New Guinea and have it deal with cryptozoology.

Thomas's observation that cryonicists should (ideally) focus on "the future" as a personal issue still remains valid, however. Though with the aging, infighting, attrition and financial problems of the cryonics movement, I can see how that has gotten problematic. It also doesn't help when some cryonicists still engage in handwaving about imaginary "molecular nanotechnology" and "mind uploading" as the solutions to our survival problems, when physics or neurobiology may not allow these things to exist or happen in our universe. It probably damages the cryonics movement's credibility with serious, educated people who might otherwise feel inclined towards our goals to keep invoking speculative futurology from circa 1990, when the world has moved on from then without progress towards these technological fantasies.

From Cryonics magazine, June 1986:

CRYONICS AND THE DEATH OF SCIENCE FICTION

by Thomas Donaldson

At one time or other in their lives, many cryonicists read science fiction avidly. I myself have a lot of attraction for it. At bookstores I will go to the science fiction section and look over the new books available. But for some reason, I almost never find what I want and leave the science fiction section empty-handed.

Cryonicists also will note, much more than most people do, how hostile most science fiction seems to cryonics. Cryonics almost never appears, in science fiction, as a positive thing. From Larry Niven's "corpsicles," one of whom is batted to the center of the Galaxy and back like a tennis ball (in "A World Out Of Time"), to Norman Spinrad's Jack Barron (in "Bug Jack Barron"), who is the victim of the evil plotter Benedict Howards who holds a stranglehold over life and death through his control of cryonics, science fiction authors have never caught on to the wonder and promise of what we are trying to do.

Furthermore, even immortality has a bad press among science fiction authors. One of the most interesting, and most characteristic, ways in which immortality comes to us is as a gift (or a curse) from the aliens. It's rarely something we human beings discover for ourselves. We discover Faster Than Light (FTL) drives for ourselves quite often, but immortality (which in practical terms is likely to open up the stars at least as effectively), almost never. Even John Varley, who of all the contemporary science fiction authors has most assimilated the possibilities and meaning of biotechnology, has his biotechnology coming to us via aliens from the "Ophiuichi Hotline," not as the result of our own scientific and economic efforts. (Varley is a very interesting case and deserves extended discussion elsewhere).

What is the reason for this bias among science fiction writers? What accounts for this hostility?

The reason why science fiction authors don't like immortality and cryonics is because it means the end of science fiction. Now, I expect this to be a controversial hypothesis, especially with any science fiction fans who are also readers of CRYONICS, but I think I can defend it well.

Let's look at the role that the future plays in science fiction. Its biggest role is to provide a faraway unreachable place, the ideal location for dreams and terrors. No one expects to live in the world of Robert Heinlein's Friday. It's just a place to play with ideas and possibilities. Frederick Pohl is another interesting case in point. In "MAN PLUS," Pohl gives us a castrated bionic man (does anyone out there believe that such a thing could seriously happen as Pohl described it?). In "AGE OF THE PUSSYFOOT" (which is one of the most positive science fiction novels dealing with cryonics), the story Pohl presented seems very unlikely when seen in its own terms. Why would all of these people flee from life and responsibility by entering suspended animation when a global crisis arises? We might just as easily (and incredibly) suppose the plot device of everybody deciding to go to sleep just before the dam breaks! The elements which these stories lack is concerned, careful involvement with reality. I don't mean that their authors have to get everything right, I mean that they don't even try.

In science fiction, the future is a convenient place for dreaming. No one would ever actually end up there. They could have chosen Timbuktu or Ethiopia just as well; except that nowadays retirees with heart conditions can buy tickets to Timbuktu for $400, and sleep comfortably at the local Hilton when they arrive.

And so, into this fandom of the "future" as the quintessentially unreachable and faraway place, steps CRYONICS AND IMMORTALITY. The future suddenly stops being "Friday"'s world and becomes the middle of next week. It's close. Nobody writes science fiction about the middle of next week. They look at their schedules to see what appointments they have.

What would happen to Friday's world if most of the people who read Heinlein's book seriously expected to be there? They would read it in the same frame of reference in which they read their appointment schedules. If they seriously believed it (very unlikely!), they'd immediately start thinking of what they could do to stave off such a disaster. Or, more likely, they wouldn't even bother to read such fantastic drivel.

Embodied in science fiction we see a particular attitude toward the future which is fundamentally nonactivist. The future is a place of dreams, to be visited only by dreamers. There's nothing wrong with dreaming, but it's hardly what we, as cryonicists, are doing when we think about and plan for the future.

The important thing about science fiction is the location of the dreams and the consequences this implies. Any sustained plan of action aimed at altering the world must involve coming to grips with the future. If the future is the location of our dreams, we cannot seriously attempt to come to grips with it. I once attended a science fiction convention because, on the surface anyway, it seemed a likely place to recruit more cryonicists from. What better group of people to approach than one which was concerned about, as a serious issue, the world of the future?

But my expectation was far from the mark. I didn't find people who were interested in getting to the future, or even people who were concerned about the real possibilities of tomorrow -- or the next hundred or five hundred years for that matter. What I found was people who were interested in playing mind games. People who were interested only in building intellectual sand castles; complicated fantasies which would be washed away with the next wave. The science fiction community, virtually to a man, was not populated with people who were at all concerned about the future as the location of action, but rather with people who dressed in costumes from the Middle Ages or who were concerned with creating interesting, exciting, and above all safe fantasy worlds. Safe because there was never for a moment the possibility they could experience any of the danger, hard work, or disappointments associated with those worlds -- were they to become real. (One is reminded of the definition of adventure: Someone a thousand miles away having a hard time.) All of us have dreams and fantasies which we would never wish to see become real and in which we would never invest more time or energy than it takes to create and contemplate them on a rainy afternoon. There are many, many more of these kinds of dreams than the real ones -- the ones that change the world and shape the future. To take an activist attitude toward the future can be very threatening to someone who places their idle dreams and escapist fantasies there.

Stop and look at science fiction for a moment. Really look at it. What does it concern itself with? Why, contemporary themes, of course!: pollution, or nuclear disaster, or changes in reproductive biology which are on the horizon or are already here. Dreams, after all, are the way we emotionally absorb our desires and experiences. Everyone has such desires, fleeting attractions (sexual and other), worries about job, spouse, prospects, fantasies of winning the Lottery and being the center of everyone's gaze. Every single one of these dreams depends upon very particular circumstances of time and place. Even a small change in economics or biology would make such a dream pointless.

Once someone (who was not and never will be a cryonicist) asked me what my ambitions were, after I was frozen and revived. To which I could only answer that all such ambitions depended too much on time and place, to have specific ambitions in such a future would be like wanting to be chief oarsman in the trireme in 1986.

Our present dreams assume a LOT of specifics about our biology. A species able to change sex at will just wouldn't have the same kinds of fantasies we have now. No way! Even if that just became an OPTION, the fantasies would have to change. I believe that this underlies a lot of the hostility science fiction has shown to biological technology. Even to noncryonicists, it's very evident that as we advance in THAT direction, the basis of our fantasies will blow away. An accurate tale of the future would tell the story of people doing alien things to achieve goals equally alien. This is not the stuff of which people want to make their fantasies today.

This isn't even a problem unique to biological technology. It's just a statement about history and change. Six hundred years ago the enterprising young man wished to attain knighthood and a fiefdom of his own. There was no such thing as a nation-state, hence no concept of patriotism, nor of the common good. To attempt medieval knighthood in 1986 becomes laughable. It had even become laughable by 1600, as Cervantes showed (but then, who reads "Don Quixote" now?).

Science fiction authors therefore have a problem. They want somehow to transpose a contemporary world into another fantasy world, but without too many elements of fantasy. In particular, with nothing which would portend a fundamental change in the way people think, in what they believe and thus in how they behave. A bit of extra gadgetry, sure, but no fundamental inventions.

I believe this is why (citing a major contemporary development) computerization escaped them so much. Asimov's "FOUNDATION" novels, for instance, take place tens of thousands of years from now yet in a curiously 50's kind of world, where the sorts of things we do with our personal computers are done in the Fifties' way. Not only that, but Asimov is clearly aware of the technology. That's exactly what his robots are about. The interesting point about this is what this technology (his robots) is not doing rather than what it does.

Even birth control (a very tame biological invention!) plays little apparent role in this science fiction. Why? Because it was too fundamental, not enough like a gadget. Birth control meant something. It meant that women and men could neither of them have exactly the same kind of sexual fantasies, terrors, and inhibitions they had before that time. The dreams got changed. Only a little, but they changed.

In fact, biology and medicine have lots more to do with our dreams than do spaceships. Let's consider Poul Anderson's books, the Flandry series and the Polesotechnic League. These are novels of swashbuckling and derring-do. A really advanced medical technology, even of repair (much less of immortality) turns them to drivel. (Cryonicists experience this kind of shift in perspective every day: decapitation just does not have the same meaning to us!) What would happen to Flandry if he had had himself cloned and his memories duplicated? Flandry would go on, but his story would lose a lot in the transition.

We can see that a lot of art forms will be changed by immortality. Crucifixion scenes, for one, are likely to disappear... and yes, folks, science fiction is one of those art forms likely to disappear.

I think that for any human tool or device there is its particular form, and then behind that, the more general needs that it satisfies. Sure, the horse and buggy disappear, but the need for individual transport goes on. One interesting question to ask is "what may take the place of science fiction?"

Let's look at fantasy as an alternative. Fantasy takes place in a world by definition unreachable, because it does not exist. It's also a much more archaic world, where magic is used instead of technology. The fundamental problem with fantasy is that we've evolved a lot since the days of the witch and the prince. These old symbols just don't speak to a lot of our concerns today.

On the other hand, most science fiction stories don't present really technologically advanced worlds. Often the rocket just substitutes for the airplane: it gets you to another place, another world, what does it matter how this world came about or where this world may be? In science fiction terms, the trouble with a REALLY advanced world is that the concerns of people within it will bear about as much relation to our own dreams and terrors as witches and princes do.

One possibility for what will eventually happen is that the "future" might disappear from science fiction. It's easy enough to remove the pretense that these stories take place in the future. You simply invent another world, an alternate world. Some of the best "science fiction" stories I've read do exactly this. The point is that a story which takes place in the future must invent a historical connection between the present and the story. It must concern (like the world of Robert Heinlein's "Friday") entities like the California Republic, which bear some relation to the real here and now state of CALIFORNIA (a ridiculous one, after scrutiny). If the story hinges on some piece of new technology, what allows this other world to have it even though we don't (yet)? Proponents of science fiction of course may object that such a story would lose reality. Well, reality is a strange thing to ask of a work of fiction! What we ask of a work of fiction is that the conduct of people and affairs in it not violate our sense of how real people would really act. We ask this of all serious stories.

The other possibility is that science fiction may become populated with people who are genuinely concerned about the future and genuinely interested in what it will really be like. It is possible that science fiction authors may appear who are concerned with exploring the impact of developments that can be seen and predicted with some confidence today, but which are truly some distance in the future.

There would be several requirements to be met before such science "fiction" writers could appear. The first would be that they will have to care enough about the future to find out what's really ahead. They'll have to do their homework on biological technology and molecular engineering. They'll have to do some deep thinking about people: what makes them what they are; where do their needs and wants come from and how will changes in their biology and their technology alter these needs and wants? In short, they'll have to start thinking about and writing about the future not as some place merely to "escape" to, but rather as a place to live in.

By now, most of you will realize that the one essential change required to make that transition is to believe, really believe that you are personally going to confront that future. Only cryonicists can do that, and the fact is, most of us are too busy consulting our appointment books and worrying about how we're going to keep that date with tomorrow to give much thought to anything else.

So much for the future of science fiction.

Responses to Ayn Rand's alternative humanism

2011-09-07T15:51:00.000-07:00

The September-October issue of The Humanist just came out, and I had hoped that it would publish my letter in response to its wrong-headed article about cryonics in the July-August issue.

I had no such luck, and I have a separate blog post about that article in the works. The letters section did print a couple in response to the July-August issue's article about humanist films which argues for including the film version of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead in that genre.

Specifically, the article says the following:

And the letters say in response:

As the letter by Bob Zannelli in Ocala, FL, shows, lately Rand's critics have fixated on an obscure episode in Rand's 20's, a decade when most of us do stupid things, where she became intrigued by the story about a teenage boy named William Edward Hickman who reportedly kidnapped and murdered a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker. The mystery novelist Michael Prescott wrote about this odd period in Rand's life several years ago, based on published information about her; and Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra mentions Hickman in connection with Rand even earlier; so the Hickman problem hasn't exactly hidden in plain sight. Progressives and mainstream humanists didn't care about Ayn Rand until some prominent people on the right started to talk about her influence on their political views, then they rediscovered this information about her and now regularly use it as a shortcut to try to discredit her.

Rand does give me the sense that she didn't like children, and her hostility towards them comes across in Atlas Shrugged. The hobo Jeff Allen, who had seen better days as an auto worker, tells Dagny Taggart about the time one of the frustrated men at his former employer had struck "a mean, ugly little eight-year-old" girl named Millie Bush who had gotten braces under the company's new health care plan, and had knocked out all her teeth! Rand, in other words, uses her authorial ventriloquism in a way which shows that she didn't want us to feel sorry for the girl's assault and permanent disfigurement, even though as a child she had no control over the situation. I guess Randian heroes don't need orthodontics in their youth.

Rand tries to "balance" that by describing the Objectivist mother (which sounds like a contradiction in terms) in Galt's Gulch who tells Dagny that her two thriving boys, aged 4 and 7, represent the woman's "career," one which she couldn't practice in the socialist America beyond the heroes' doomstead because of all the irrational philosophy they would encounter. When I compare the two depictions of childhood, the latter one about the boys' upbringing in utopian conditions seems to me pro forma and, well, not "heartfelt," for lack of a better word. The former one, about the girl and her braces, hints at something about Rand's real opinion of children. Did Marion Parker make a cameo appearance in Atlas Shrugged as Millie Bush?

And even if the novel does show a holdover from Rand's interest in Hickman, does it really address Rand's world view to focus on this aspect of her life? She didn't write novels celebrating child murderers, after all. I notice that people on the left who become infatuated with terrorists and murderers like Trotsky, Mao, Che Guevara, etc., and who even put up posters of their images in plain sight, don't seem to receive the same opprobrium. Why do they get a pass for admiring men who wreaked murder and rapine wholesale, while condemning Rand who had an irrational infatuation with a murderer with only one known victim? (The Wikipedia article doesn't indicate that the teenage Hickman killed "serially," as the letter in The Humanist claims; but that hasn't stopped Rand-haters from embellishing the story about him at Rand's expense.)

No, I suspect something else accounts for the WTF? reaction mainstream humanists display when they have awakened to the existence of the Rand phenomenon after its long incubation: They see her world view, despite its nutty and absurd aspects, as competition for their version of humanism in the culture wars. And as the example of China's fleeing millionaires suggests, that world view does have its plausible aspects; it does model how many of the world's alpha producers see the state as a dangerous manifestation of human behavior that they either have to manage, avoid or evade for their survival. Instead of focusing on that part of Rand's philosophy, Rand's humanist and progressive critics try to change the subject by dragging out something embarrassing from Rand's past which doesn't matter that much to our lives in the here and now.

Ayn Rand doesn't seem likely to go away, and I predict that the efforts by mainstream humanists and AlterNet types to discredit her won't work because they still act according to her framing of their agenda. Like it or not, it looks increasingly as if the mainstream humanists have a competitor which they don't know how to respond to on its own merits, apart from the use of ad hominem and well-poisoning attacks against it. Ironically they have plenty of empirical arguments they could use instead, but mastering those takes some preparation.

More shrugging Chinese Atlases

2011-09-07T09:16:00.000-07:00

And yet progressives profess not to understand why the world's alpha producers seek tax heavens, sovereign individual status, passports from other countries, "five flags" arrangements and so forth:

Top of Chinese wealthy's wish list? To leave China

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese millionaire Su builds skyscrapers in Beijing and is one of the people powering China's economy on its path to becoming the world's biggest.

He sits at the top of a country — economy booming, influence spreading, military swelling — widely expected to dominate the 21st century.

Yet the property developer shares something surprising with many newly rich in China: he's looking forward to the day he can leave.

Su's reasons: He wants to protect his assets, he has to watch what he says in China and wants a second child, something against the law for many Chinese.

The millionaire spoke to The Associated Press on condition that only his surname was used because of fears of government reprisals that could damage his business.
China's richest are increasingly investing abroad to get a foreign passport, to make international business and travel easier but also to give them a way out of China.

The United States is the most popular destination for Chinese emigrants, with rich Chinese praising its education and healthcare systems. Last year, nearly 68,000 Chinese-born people became legal permanent residents of the U.S., seven percent of the total and second only to those born in Mexico. Canada and Australia are also popular.

It is a bothersome trend for China's communist leaders who've pinned the legitimacy of one-party rule on delivering rapid economic growth and a rising standard of living. They've succeeded in lifting tens of millions of ordinary Chinese out of poverty while also creating a new class of super rich. Yet affluence alone seems a poor bargain to those with the means to live elsewhere.

Despite more economic freedom, the communist government has kept its tight grip on many other aspects of daily life. China's leaders punish, sometimes harshly, public dissent and any perceived challenges to their power, and censor what can be read online and in print. Authoritarian rule, meanwhile, has proved ineffective in addressing long standing problems of pollution, contaminated food and a creaking health care system.

"In China, nothing belongs to you. Like buying a house. You buy it but it will belong to the country 70 years later," said Su, lamenting the government's land leasing system.

"But abroad, if you buy a house, it belongs to you forever," he said. "Both businessmen and government officials are like this. They worry about the security of their assets."

This shows the danger of attributing too much benevolence to China's selective use of economic freedom. Its leaders don't want to allow more freedom in general, and they plan to expropriate the country's new wealth to advance their political and military agenda. The exodus of rich people from China will help to defund these leaders' projects.

More support for my thesis about Ayn Rand's alternative humanism?

2011-09-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand sounds nutty and confused about a lot of things; but in some ways her world view still makes relatively more sense than the slough of abnegation offered by progressives. She wouldn't scold people who enjoy a breakfast of corn flakes, orange juice and premium coffee, for example, just because corporations produce and market those goods. Nobody keeps Americans from eating the daily ration of gruel progressives apparently think we should have for breakfast instead. And in general, Rand says we shouldn't feel guilty for: Existing; exercising both our physical and our cognitive powers (e.g., sex and thinking) because she emphasizes mind/body integration; wanting material goods; wanting to develop ourselves; wanting to become financially successful through honest means; wanting radical life extension* (implied in her writings); and other goals progressives seem to object to. She has a dissenting humanist cast to her thinking which makes mainstream humanists uncomfortable because she emphasizes self-regarding aspects of human life, which puts her more in line with the pagan Greek tradition and at odds with the christian moral assumptions mainstream humanists seem not to have liberated themselves from as much as they believe.

At least some humanists have started to catch on. The issue of The Humanist magazine which features a wrong-headed article about cryonics also has an article about films with humanist themes which argues for including the film version of The Fountainhead:

After humans cast off the shackles of religion, what’s left for our species but to bask in the glory of humanity itself? We are presented with humanism, as if it had slipped on a Superman costume. It is magnificently symbolized by Gary Cooper, hands on hips, standing atop the tallest skyscraper in the world, his shirt blowing in the wind like a cape. I’m not being cynical here. This image is a good thing.

I suspect the leftist attack on Rand's popularity among conservatives also reflects a struggle going on for the "ownership" of humanism in the U.S. Instead of showing conservatives' hypocrisy, the fact that many conservatives no longer consider her atheism a deal-breaker suggests to me that they have started to participate in the secularization process along with the rest of American society. I don't endorse everything the Rand cultist in this video says, but he does address the growing acceptance of Rand's atheism on the right:

* One of my cryonicist friends call Rand's philosophy "the poor man's immortalism."

Another video about Tyler Cowen and the Great Stagnation

2011-09-03T16:37:00.000-07:00

Tyler Cowen's TED talk on the Great Stagnation

2011-09-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

A national registry of atheists?

2011-09-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

Time for cryonicists to learn Castilian?

2011-08-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

I've just now heard of this, and I don't know what to make of it:

New association wants to build facility to store 500 frozen human bodies in the Madrid Sierra

A cryonics association wants to build a new facility in the Sierra of Madrid with the capacity to maintain 500 cryogenically frozen human bodies until such a time as advances in science will allow them to be brought back to life.

It’s understood that the association has already been in contact with the Mayor of El Escorial, Antonio Vicente, who told El Mundo newspaper that he doesn’t see it as a ‘crazy idea’, but warned that there could be restrictions given the town’s location within the Guadarrama National Park.

Vicente said he is prepared to study the proposal once there is more concrete information and documentation.

The recently created Ibero-American Cryopreservation Association has chosen the Madrid Sierra because of its central location, the low risk of earthquake and the cool temperatures. The association’s president, Francisco Roldán, said the facility, which would include a research laboratory, would provide individual capsules with liquid nitrogen at 196 degrees below zero.

Bodies could be maintained almost indefinitely, he said.

The facility would provide between 250 and 300 direct and indirect jobs, and would need investment of up to 50 million €.

Cryopreservation of human bodies is not however currently permitted under Spanish legislation.

Francisco Roldán's webpage (in Spanish).

Eh, reading this page with the Spanish I remember from junior high, the guy sounds like a public relations hack.

A future history idea

2011-08-30T20:16:00.000-07:00

A sudden collapse of American military power leaves American forces in Afghanistan and surrounding regions stranded. They can't fight their way to a friendly country and seek passage home, like in Xenophon's Anabasis, so they seize control of their regions and create what future scholars will call the Americo-Bactrian state.

So, what does that imply about a character descended from those Americans, several generations removed, who manages to get to an advanced science-fictional civilization (I would guess predominantly Chinese) and have adventures in Future World?

My take on the Coffee Invitation in the Hotel Elevator incident

2011-08-29T10:52:00.000-07:00

Atheists should not necessarily dismiss religious teachings about women just because religions spread weird claims about things which we can't observe, like the gods, the afterlife, alleged miracles and so forth.

Men have had the ability to observe women all along, by contrast, and the doctrines they've formulated about women and attached to religious traditions just might incorporate some defensible but politically incorrect facts about female behavior.

In other words, atheists in the human nature realist camp don't necessarily have to defend feminism if the facts support traditional views of women's behavior instead of feminist exercises in Opposite Day thinking.

I have Skype on my iPad 2.

2011-08-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

Search for the Skype user name "advancedatheist," email address holyspiritdenier@gmail.com .

In case you think I exaggerate.

2011-08-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

Stupid Hal Lindsey's world view has poisoned many people's lives. Some of his victims have posted reviews of his most famous book on Amazon:

Soul Destroying...

Obviously, none of this came to pass. But I'm still here. I was brought up, steeped in this stuff, honestly believing that the world was going to end in 1977 / 1982 / 1986 / etc. I grew up with no sense of mortality, expecting to be raptured up into the air at any moment -- I would never die, we were the last generation. But I'm still here, and now I'm dying. My body was not tranformed, it has just worn down. How do you reconcile this? If "they" were wrong about this, then what else were they wrong about?

One Star - But Only Because Negative Numbers aren't a Choice

I read this book when I was a kid (I'm 45 now). It scared the bejeebers out of me which I now realize was the whole point. (Fear is a POWERFUL way to manipulate people - ESPECIALLY CHILDREN!) Because there was no one around I could turn to who would explain to me about sensationalism and greed, I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. I put off planning college and a career for a number of years because I couldn't see the point - after all, who wastes their time rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? When I think of the years I wasted because of this book, I get really, really angry! This book was NOT an isolated incident - the religious perspective it grows out of systematically reinforces the same ideas.

It'd be funny if it weren't for all the destroyed lives...

In 100 years, Hal Lindsey will be remembered in footnotes of history books that equate him with past failed prophets like William Miller (the Adventist who predicted the coming of Christ in 1843), Ann Lee (the Shaker founder who declared the start of the new Millennium in the 1840s), Joachim of Italy (the world would end in 1260), Jan Matthys (a Reformation-era doomsayer who caused a Branch-Davidian style slaughter), and Montanus (the original false prophet of doom, who said Jesus would return in Asia Minor in the 2nd century). Like them, Lindsey felt behind him a trail of disappointed, dispirited people who took him seriously. Lindsey predicted that the world would end by 1988 - and guess what, we're still here! A lot of people altered their entire approach to life; they put off college, put off marriage, and did NOTHING to make the world a better place - after all, why help care for the poor, fight the persecution of Christians overseas, or work to stem the moral decline of America when IT'S ALL ABOUT TO GET BLOWN UP ANYWAY. In fact, the rise in abortions, environmental destruction, starvation, disease, etc. is A GOOD THING, because it confirms our FAITH that the RAPTURE is about to happen!

Lindsey got away with this nonsense in the 1970's and 1980's because the U.S. lacked an organized and self-conscious culture of religion-skeptics which could find one another and act as "consumer watchdogs" to warn people against falling for these hoaxes and delusions. The internet has changed the rules of the game, so now we can put these grifters, charlatans and cranks like Lindsey on notice that we won't let them spread their doomsaying without our publishing criticism in response.

Do the right thing, Mr. Lindsey: Issue that public apology.

Cryonauts as religious security risks

2011-08-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

Just pure speculation on my part: What if the people in Future World would feel reluctant to revive cryonauts because they fear that at least some of us could inadvertently reintroduce religious beliefs that they consider undesirable or even dangerous?

How could this occur? People with fringe religious beliefs now generally don't pose much threat to our society unless they act upon them in ways which harm others, like radical Muslims, christian parents who let their children die from treatable diseases because they believe in faith healing, or Mormon polygynist men who "marry" 12-year-old girls. Religious obsessives like these examples generally haven't shown interest in cryonics.

Well, suppose that the people in Future World have a technology like the Krell Machine, but unlike the Krell in the movie Forbidden Planet, they've constructed a firewall to protect society from anyone using it to create something harmful, even unconsciously. (The movie uses Freud's psychoanalytic term "the Id" [das Es] to describe the refractory, unconscious part of the mind.) Their Krell Machine doesn't necessarily have to produce stuff; it could also generate software constructs as directed by the minds of the people in Future World.

The society in Future World might also have taken measures to control antisocial tendencies in the minds of its inhabitants based on a deep understanding of cognitive science, including measures to suppress the destructive aspects of religiosity. (If the worst manifestations of religiosity don't demonstrate "monsters from the Id," I don't know what does.) So they might not worry so much about the prospect that we would restore forms of religious belief and practice which have long since died out, because their minds would not suffer from that kind of susceptibility.

What could they worry about instead? Introduce into that society revived cryonauts who come from the era of "feral" human minds, and our monsters from the Id might find ways to breach the Krell Machine's firewall to create the religious equivalent of, say, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Of course, our resuscitators could revive us and put us in quarantine as well, with no access to the Krell Machine. If the Krell Machine becomes as necessary to making a living in Future World as the internet shows signs of becoming in our world, then we could find ourselves seriously disadvantaged, indeed, at least until Future World can find better ways to accommodate us, or we can find those ways ourselves. If we revive with radical life extension, we'll certainly have the time to work on this "interesting" problem.

Time for a Hal Lindsey Apology Project?

2011-08-23T19:57:00.000-07:00

I've played around with this partly-baked idea: Start a letter-writing campaign to Hal Lindsey to demand that he issues a public apology to all the people whose lives he has poisoned with his "end times" nonsense since 1970.

You can find his website here. He apparently lives in California, but his support staff operates out of Tulsa (which doesn't surprise me):

Address:

P.O. Box 470470
Tulsa, OK 74147-0470
United States

Telephone:

1-888-RAPTURE
1-888-727-8873

E-mail: questions@hallindsey.com

If you have had a bad experience because of Hal Lindsey's doomsday teachings, feel free to post them here. Or you can communicate with me privately: holyspiritdenier@gmail.com

Heading into "David Mabus" territory?

2011-08-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

Rick Potvin has posted an incoherent word salad about gatekeepers, "ice age truth" and "Judaics":

MONDAY, AUGUST 22, 2011

Cryonics has gatekeepers, guards and guardhouse that will instill pause.

Nice looking innocuous guardhouse occupied with hidden but potentially threatening and unreasoning guards.

I've been forced to pause to consider the association of certain names in cryonics with the rejection of the coming ice age and with Judaics. The tactics being used by what I've confirmed are cryonics gatekeepers on the internet are outside the bounds of what I prefer to deal with-- which is the search for truth. Instead of wrestling with issues, cryonics gatekeepers attack the purveyor of ice age truth personally, by making false associations and delivering what might be interpreted as veiled threats. Even this post could be construed by the guards as potentially "damaging to cryonics" and I would likely recieve an anonymous vieled threat before too long. On the other hand, it may be innocuous enough to not attract that kind of response. I've heard from insiders that it's actually a good thing that outsiders understand that cryonics has teeth to defend itself. So this post could actually be interpreted as "good publicity", ironically.

Homework Question: To any anonymous cryonicist, is this okay to post or am I going to be slandered and attacked again? Thanks for your civilized consideration at this point. Thank you. [Discussion Outline]

Tulsa's baby steps towards rationality

2011-08-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

I've watched most of the videos posted on on the Thinking Atheist's YouTube channel from Tulsa's recent atheist conference, the first of its kind in Oklahoma as far as I know. Compared with videos I've seen from higher status conferences, the talks at this one seem kind of mediocre. It featured three atheist activists whom I would consider third tier - Seth, the Thinking Atheist; AronRa; and Matt Dillahunty - along with a couple of local people in Oklahoma whom I hadn't heard of previously.

Though in context, Tulsa's atheists have to start somewhere. This conference drew over 300 people and apparently left the participants with a sense of accomplishment. It will take awhile before someone like P.Z. Myers, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris would consider it worthwhile to travel to Tulsa and talk to an audience there about the advantages of critical thinking. Give it time, though.

Some observations: AronRa seems intelligent and knowledgeable about science, but I had trouble watching his video because he looks like a villain from a Chick tract, or some guy I'd see in a biker bar in Arizona. Why does he dress that way?

Seth's talk and the talk by the former ORU professor-turned-agnostic sounded too introductory-level to me, though perhaps they felt the need to spoon feed some basic ideas and information because of the relative newness of organized atheism in Tulsa.

I could especially relate to the part in Seth's talk where he recounts his christian upbringing and how his church used end times propaganda, specifically a film which shows the beheading of christian converts during the "tribulation." as part of its process to break down adolescents and make them "accept Jesus." The message: If you accept Jesus now, then you'll have a spot reserved for you when Jesus evacuates his followers at the rapture; otherwise, if you convert later, the bad guys will chop off your head. Yeah, benign child rearing practices at work there.

I didn't see that particular film, but in 1972 or '73 I read stupid Hal Lindsey's book, The Late, Great Planet Earth, which had inexplicably become a best seller in the 1970's and which started the current round of rapture nonsense plaguing American culture over the past 40 years. That book messed with my mind for several months until I read books by more rational people like Isaac Asimov and Robert Ettinger and started to see the problems with the theistic world view. Unfortunately I lived in Tulsa's "rapture ready" religious environment for many more years and had to put up with the beliefs of fundamentalists and evangelicals. I find it encouraging to see that a few hundred relatively sane people (so far!) in Tulsa have decided to band together and create a social space of rationality for themselves.

Ark of fetishism

2011-08-21T08:25:00.001-07:00

I don't understand why the existence of physical artifacts with some vague connection to religious myths and legends substantiates these stories' woo-woo claims. Anthropologists have a name for this belief: Fetishism.

For example, Muslims pray five times a day to a probable meteorite housed in a temple in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca. The existence of this rock doesn't mean that it supports the validity of Islam.

Similarly, the existence of the ruins of the Temple of Delphi doesn't mean that the Greek god Apollo exists and at one time sent cryptic messages to female mediums there, even though famous historical people in antiquity like the philosopher Socrates consulted these "oracles" for advice.

Yet today we see stupid shows on cable TV, like the SyFy Channel's Legend Quest, based on the premise of finding alleged artifacts connected with biblical stories, like Moses' staff, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Lance and the Holy Grail, with the implication that these artifacts might have woo-woo powers which challenge the current naturalistic world view of educated people. Assuming for the sake of argument that pieces of stuff like these things exist in the here-and-now, and that you could handle them, so what? Muslims who go on their pilgrimages to Mecca can press their lips to their cult's magic rock, but Westerners generally consider that an exercise in fetishism, and not a point in favor of Islam's truth claims.

I could say the same thing about the idea of building fetishes based on descriptions of them in ancient religious texts. Creationist Ken Ham, for example, who according to what I've read sounds like a crank of the highest order, wants to build a full-scale replica of Noah's Ark at his creationism theme-park in Kentucky based on the description and measurements found in the book of Genesis. Ham reasons thusly:

To rebuild the Ark, to full-scale biblical dimensions, as a sign to the world that God’s Word is true and its message of salvation must be heeded (Romans 3:4, 5:12).

Just as the Ark in Noah’s day was a sign of salvation, as well as judgment, an Ark rebuilt today can be a sign to point to Jesus Christ, the Ark of our salvation, and to coming judgment (II Peter 3:5-13, John 10:9).

I don't see how these claims follow from their premises. The ability to build things based on descriptions in stories doesn't mean that these things must have existed for real at one time, much less acquire mystical powers in the process. Peter Jackson's set builders and prop makers built things for Jackson's LOTR movies based on Tolkien's descriptions of them in his novels, including the One Ring; but no rational individual believes that Tolkien's novels portray historical events, and nobody believes that the prop Ring used in the movie gives its wearer supernatural powers in real life.

I get the impression that christians' anxiety about their doomsday cult's future drives both creationism and end times beliefs, especially because many christians combine both interpretations of their scriptures. These christians know that their world view doesn't make sense in light of modern scientific knowledge, especially given the vistas of space and time science has revealed to us; so they want to center the universe around humanity and compress its time scale down to something which makes humans seem cosmically important. It seems more likely to me that if humanity survives, christianity will disappear eventually without an apocalypse to signal its ending.

The need for a "Wal-Mars"

2011-08-20T19:11:00.000-07:00

When I walk through a Walmart (admittedly one of my favorite places to shop), I like to fantasize about how many things that company sells which would come in handy on an interstellar expedition: Food, tools, clothing (apart from space suits, of course), firearms & ammunition, flashlights & batteries, first aid kits, cameras, PC's, etc.

Apparently David Brin and Bud Sparhawk have had similar thoughts:

Water and Wrenches, Belts and Suspenders

Someday, Earth civilization will send emissaries to Mars. Over the long run, the task of exploration cannot be left only to robots. If we are ever to know Mars from a human perspective we must have eyes on the ground, feet in the soil. People offer unbeatable advantages of intelligence and adaptability. But getting to Mars and other deepspace destinations with crews of living men and women won't be easy.

Among the many obstacles we must overcome are the immense cost of such an expedition and the need to ensure a much higher, almost-guaranteed probability of success. Mission designers must overcome major technical issues along with barriers both physiological and mental. A detailed plan will include procedures for orbital transfer, landing, performing science and returning to Earth. These problems will take years - likely decades - to resolve.

And yet, it turns out that some fundamentals are still the same as they were when Shackleton and Amundsen probed the Antarctic, or Hillary and Tenzig took on Everest. All of them fretted about one thing, above all. Supplies, supplies, supplies.

Ninety percent of the time, energy and expense of those exploration treks went into laying down caches of necessities. Doing so properly ensured survival when it finally came time for the blitz to the summit or pole. Failure to get it right helped doom the ill-fated Scott Antarctic Expedition. When we send human crews to Mars, we would do well to remember this and provide what they need, without scrimping, well in advance. In fact, prudence suggests that we not even launch the human components of a Mars expedition until at least twice as many consumables are already there on site, both orbiting the planet and on the surface, as they would need, even if accidents happen. (The Apollo moon landings did not fit into this pattern, because they were essentially sprints toward a much closer objective. More like Lindbergh than Amundsen.)

As it turns out, this kind of advance-provisioning needn't delay matters at all. It will take many years, or decades, to design, critique, and build the manned components. Meanwhile, the greater bulk of material needed by any expedition will be almost completely design independent: water, food, wrenches, shovels, microscopes, sampling bags and other basic tools, and supplementary maneuvering fuels like hydrazine will be needed, whether the explorers travel by rocket or railroad. Moreover, these "general" supplies make up a great part of the mass of any expedition.

Many science fiction writers have shown an awareness of the need for simple tools and supplies when it comes to the conjectural colonizing of other planets. You might use some super-advanced space ship or other technology to get you to a habitable exoplanet, but then you'll need tools as simple as knives to start to build wealth there and make the planet support you. Robert Heinlein shows a fictional example of this in his "juvenile" novel, Tunnel In the Sky, which reads like a cross between Stargate and Lord of the Flies. In the novel Heinlein postulates that a technology based on Earth can send people through temporary "tunnels" in space-time to Earthlike exoplanets. Earth's government wants to get people off the planet for Malthusian reasons, but to improve the emigrants' odds of success it has institutionalized survival ordeals for late teenage and college-aged people for a fixed number of days on uninhabited exoplanets. Only in the novel's case, an astronomical event cuts off the youngsters from returning to Earth, so they assume that they can't go back and start to recreate their understanding of adult society on the exoplanet. The characters' threshold of adulthood and the abundance of young women keep the young men from turning feral like in William Golding's novel.

The youngsters manage to hang on despite their underpreparedness. And Heinlein writes that each colonist carried a knife:

It was the all-purpose tool, for cutting leather, preparing food, eating, whittling, basketmaking, and as a make-do for a thousand other tools; their wealth came from knives, arrows were now used to hunt - but knives shaped the bows and arrows.

So of course Mars explorers and eventually colonists will also need knives, perhaps of the hard-wearing "tactical" sort favored by American warriors in places like Afghanistan, shipped well in advance with other supplies according to Brin's and Sparhawk's reasoning.

Max More nearly leaves the 21st Century.

2011-08-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

Max More, CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, recently avoided cryostasis. From the 3rd Quarter 2011 issue of Cryonics magazine:

I just survived my second car wreck.
Having returned from giving a cryonics
talk in Southern California, I was driv-
ing home from the Phoenix airport when I
got into a situation that caused me to swerve
to avoid a collision. At freeway speed, that
swerve was hard enough to send my car out
of control. It spun around and ran head first
into the high concrete divider wall of the 51
freeway. I remember thinking, “This is it.”

My car was totaled. To my astonish-
ment, I stepped out of the car and found
myself almost completely uninjured.

Praise be to seat belts and airbags. My
old car had no side air bag, so it was fortu-
nate that I slammed into the wall head on.

When this sort of thing happens to most humanists/atheists/skeptics/etc., they usually say something to the effect that their brush with death gives their lives so much meaning; then they go back into terror management and try not think about death until the next episode of mortality salience.

Max, by contrast, arguably displays sterner stuff, and I can well imagine his redoubled efforts to make cryonics work. Please stick around, Max. We need you in this century, though knowing you I think you would do just fine in centuries to come, when the necessity arises.

Another perspective on christianity's Long Now problem

2011-08-14T09:21:00.000-07:00

Scholars alive 10,000 years from now who study ancient religions would know a lot more about a successful religion - call it Religion X - which starts 8,000 years from now than they would know about christianity, mainly because they would have fresher and probably more abundant historical information about Religion X's origins and development.

In other words, from their vantage point Religion X originated 2,000 years ago, but christianity originated in the much deeper and more obscure past of 12,000 years ago. Does any christian believe that christianity can survive for another 10,000 years, or even another 1,000 years, given its unfulfilled prophecies about the "end times"?

Excellent talk by a former christian who deprogrammed himself

2011-08-14T07:49:00.000-07:00

I can't help but think that the christian who becomes an atheist in the current context in effect puts his mind into a time machine, and travels 100+ years into the future:

Christians love eternity, but not time.

2011-08-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

I get the impression that many christians, especially the ones susceptible to biblical literalism and creationism, find the scientific view of our historical position in the universe unsettling, to say the least.

One, they tend not to like the idea that humanity has a long history before christianity, especially a prehistory going back hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture and civilization. That interpretation of the past raises awkward questions about human origins, the fate of all those billions of people who died without hearing the gospel, and why christianity came along so late in the game.

And two, they tend not to like the idea that humanity might have a long secular future ahead of it.

Why do they seem to feel this way about our unprivileged position in the history of the universe? Setting aside the whole creationism clusterfuck, first of all, christianity can't get away from the fact that it started out as a doomsday cult which predicted that Jesus would return "quickly" and wrap up the business of the human species. That hasn't happened after 2,000 years, even though every generation or so we see kooks like Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye and Harold Camping who preach or publish their warnings about the christian end times. This embarrassment keeps recurring because the cult's own scriptures present the idea of an imminent apocalypse, clearly and in multiple places, even from Jesus himself. The polling data show that this belief persists in the christian mainstream, at least in the U.S. Considering that Americans generally don't read the bible, where do they pick up this notion, if not from preachers and popular novels like the Left Behind series? The fact that the apocalypse never happens throws doubt on Jesus' identity, integrity and authority.

Secondly, the prospect of a Long Now, to coin a phrase, lying ahead of humanity also raises the possibility that christianity could disappear in the passage of centuries. Assuming that humanity maintains a continuity of literate civilization for the next 10,000 years, would the people living 100 centuries from now even know about christianity, apart from a few scholars who study ancient religions?

This discomfort with our orientation in the history of the universe probably contributes to many christians' desire to hasten the arrival of the "end times." They want the supernatural dénouement to happen in their lifetimes, not only to validate what they believe, but also to make sure that it happens before the christian religion itself disappears. What does the rapture delusion really indicate, if not a fear or expectation of the literal disappearance of all the "true christians" from the planet? Christianity's contingent emergence, duration and likely disappearance in history means that it doesn't have any more "metaphysical" significance in the scheme of things than any other arbitrary world view humans have developed.

The short answer: No.

2011-08-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Rick Potvin, in the context of his obsession with the circumstances of Robert Ettinger's recent cryonic suspension, asks:

By the way, what are people doing dying at 92 anyway? I thought the idea around here was to EXTEND lifepan? Where are the cryonicists who are 140 years old? Doesn't Life Extension Mix work? WTF? ---Rick Potvin

No, of course Life Extension Mix doesn't "work," except as a money-making scam for certain cryonicists. (I don't know if Robert Ettinger ever used it, BTW.) And more cryonicists interested in the integrity of the movement should point out the obvious, just as I've tried to draw attention to the pseudoscience of postulating that "nanotechnology" will work like macroscopic mechanical engineering, and provide us with a revival mechanism which could restore at least some people from cryonic suspension as early as 2050(!). For some reason the alpha cryonicists who have a say in running things in 2011 seem to resist the idea of organizing cryonics as a multi-century project.

BTW, Mike Darwin has started to post about the current inadequate state of "life extension" interventions. I've read about this stuff since the late 1970's, and I notice that the people who conduct these experiments on themselves still seem to die pretty much on schedule.

A critical review of FM-2030's last book

2011-08-11T08:15:00.001-07:00

One of my correspondents even calls FM "a caricature of a transhumanist." I disagree with the reviewer's contention that wanting to re-engineer the human body to make it less vulnerable to organ failure and death derives from a religious impulse; we call that goal "medicine" instead of "religion" for a reason.

Source of this review:

(Amagansett, NY: Amagansett Press, 2011)

I don't mean to be uncharitable but the author of Countdown to Immortality, who was born as Fereidoun M. Esfandiary and the author of such well regarded novels as Identity Card, changed his name to FM 2030 and began preaching that human immortality, based on prosthetic body parts, DNA revitalization and plastic surgery, was just around the corner, seems to have gone off the deep end. I say that because, in explaining his hopes, he spends precious little time on scientific achievements that might increase longevity before launching into his dreams of a world of levitating bodies; rebuilt, super-strong limbs, and intergalactic colonization. To put this in a more positive way, as a work of science fiction, the book is not half bad, but if you take it seriously, you're in trouble.

For one thing, he follows the route, so common in world religions, of saying the mind (or soul) is everything; the body nothing. He writes, "How absurd that such a promising phenomenon as human life with all our potential for infinite growth should still be at the mercy of a liver or a heart – a blob of flesh. "He expounds further – this is all bold in the original but I'll skip that – "Why do we need bones and joints? Why blood and veins and arteries? Why do we need any vital organs? How vital are they?"Or, to sum up his thought, "The human body is overbureaucratized - full of superfluities and obsolescences."

Add to that hatred of the flesh an ethnocentrism that knows no bounds. Take as example, one particularly offensive to me as my wife's family died in the Vietnam war, how, discussing the injuries in wars, he touts the mortality rate of wounded soldiers in Vietnam as only 1.7 percent. He adds, "In the 1970s healthcare administrators began to realize that a critically wounded soldier on a battlefield had a better chance of recovery than a city-dweller injured in an accident."

His statistics of mortality is obviously that of only U.S. GI's, but the vast majority of the deaths were on the other, winning side. The U.S. had about 58,000 deaths while the North Vietnamese lost 1,100,000. The Communists didn't have the luxury of medivac helicopters, plasma and trained doctors and so couldn't have achieved the life-saving statistic over which he gloats. That is to say, he ignores the real toll of the war. As this and other passages in his book make clear, his program for saving "humanity"defines that category rather narrowly as consisting exclusively of the Western elite.

Let me change tack now by saying, if the book is taken as light science fiction, it is worth a read. The author does have a rich (if narrow) imagination and vivid style. Take when he describes how once all of "humanity"is flying around with its jet-packs, we still need "highways." "When individual freeflys become popular we could begin to transform our freeways into flyways. (Just as at one time we converted our stage coach trails into auto routes.) We can cover these flyways with some cushioning substance such as foam or rubber or some other resilient material and require people to fly over them. In case your vertical lift craft or jet-pack malfunctions and your emergency parachute does not deploy, your fall will be cushioned."

I've already mentioned his disdain for internal bodily organs. Here he explains how we can get rid of the digestive system! (Again, I will not bold the whole passage as he does.) "Isn't it time we outgrew the crude process of stuffing grub in our mouths to sustain ourselves?... Why fritter away time and resources producing – distributing – consuming food stuff?"Quoting another futurist, FM continues, that we have to "close the nutrient-waste cycle within the body such that no material would enter or leave. The gaseous, liquid, and solid wastes of the body would be reconverted to oxygen and fuel while other wastes would be reconverted into needed structural materials... [all powered by] a compact fuel cell or miniaturized fusion power device."

Now, with a lot of these cumbersome organs gone, who needs a skeleton? "Our bodies will evolve into sleek, ultralight structures. In time to come the body weight of an average six-foot transhuman may be around 80 pounds. Such an ultralight body will not need much of a skeletal framework." And flesh will also change. "The new skins may be transparent ... for quick access to the body's microcircuitries."

I won't spoil the book by revealing other surprising and often outlandish predictions, but if that's to your taste, get this book. If you want serious reflections on life extension, however, you are going to have to keep searching.

Ferdinand Lundberg nearly describes today's America.

2011-08-07T21:10:00.001-07:00

From The Rich and the Super-Rich (1968), Chapter Seventeen:

If they prove nothing else the widespread American riots, increasing and spreading from the 1940's and 1950's into the 1960's, prove that the American ruling class, given the political instrumentalities of its rule through low-grade stooges, is unable to rule at home. The general cry goes out for law and order, yet there is steadily less and less law and order, more and more crime and insurrection as Lyndon B. Johnson calls for national days of prayer. For prayer rather than science or reason is the tool of the political medicine men. What is happening as the average citizen looks on in disbelief is that an outworn, patched politico-economic system is cracking, while no serious steps are taken to ascertain the causes and remedies. The causes of American insufficiency, at home and abroad, are political, not economic, or at least political before they are economic. Better put, they are cultural. Serious problems cannot be solved on the basis of a consensus of value-disoriented dolts.

"For prayer rather than science or reason is the tool of the political medicine men." The white men's Ghost Dance which Texas governor Rick Perry led in Houston yesterday reminded me of this passage.

And again I ask: Why do we put up with this doomsday cult based on a ghost story about a guy who allegedly "rose from the dead"?

So much for paleolithic nutrition.

2011-08-05T19:42:00.001-07:00

We'll have to go back to austerity diets we can afford to save precious money, based on gruel, polenta, grits, oatmeal, rice, potatoes, etc.

And now we know why our elders told us so much about life during the Great Depression.

"Christianity scares Captain Picard."

2011-08-04T17:22:00.000-07:00

And I don't blame him for feeling that way about the prospect that a rational society will "get religion" again:

Christian ghost stories

2011-08-04T08:14:00.001-07:00

I grew up as an east Tulsa kid. In the 1970's my family lived near 26th & Garnett, just a few minutes' walk from the branch library which opened up at that intersection in 1975, and years before Spanish-speaking newcomers started to colonize the neighborhood, as you can see from what that library offers now.

My maternal grandparents and my mother's two sisters lived in west Tulsa, however. Visiting them required about a half hour drive across town and over the bridge spanning the Arkansas River.

In 1972 my mother let me go with one of my aunts to a youth outing at this aunt's church. We went to a wooded park in west Tulsa (I couldn't point out the location after so many years), which had electrical power so that the church people could set up a screen and show a Dracula movie late at night - one of those Hammer Horror jobs starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (both of whom years later had parts in the Star Wars films, BTW). During an intermission, the adults served me and a bunch of junior high school-aged kids I didn't know some hot chocolate (not very good, as I remember it), then the preacher or a youth pastor gathered us around and asked us what we would do if Jesus "returned" that very night and caught us unprepared to meet him - with the implication that Jesus would wreak something horrific on us adolescents if we admitted to inadequacy in our preparations, like not having "given our hearts to the lord" or whatever.

This incident resembled the telling of a ghost story, but it seemed scarier than a ghost story in context because our elders had taught us to believe that this dangerous and powerful woo-woo named Jesus really exists and has plans to show up at any moment to "judge" us - or else he'll just wait until we die unshriven, and then he'll have his way with us in the afterlife.

Thinking about this now, I have to wonder how much of the appeal of christianity has depended on its use of the equivalent of ghost stories to manipulate people through irrational fear. The Harold Camping fiasco amounted to one big ghost story which some people actually believed, but I suspect the practice goes back to christianity's earliest days. I can just imagine how the firebrands in this doomsday cult's first few generations would catch low-status people in the Roman world during their off hours, mainly children, servile women, slaves, peasants and the ancient equivalent of blue collar guys, and tell them ghost stories about this recently revealed god named Jesus and how he would do mean things to them some day unless they renounce their traditional gods and accept him as their new alpha deity. Just to show that puny mortals couldn't fuck with this new god, he demonstrated his power by rising from the dead! (They knew better than to deploy this conversion strategy at first on educated, higher status pagans who had studied philosophy and rhetoric and probably had acquired some habits of critical thinking.)

We see the modern versions of that now, and not just in backwards countries where missionaries tell their ghost stories about Jesus to the villagers around the camp fire and hope these tales can frighten them into converting. Sunday school teachers in churches across the country confine children with their parents' consent every week and tell them ghost stories about Jesus, whether the children want to hear these stories or not; many of them would probably prefer to read or hear about Harry Potter instead, just as I could have enjoyed the vampire movie without the spooky sermon.

Fortunately we have a game changer which makes this process harder now for christian zealots: the internet. I suspect that the christian cult programmers who try their ghost stories on adolescents in the U.S. encounter more skepticism and resistance now from the kids who have looked up adverse information about christianity and theism online. Josh McDowell, the famous christian apologist, has even complained about the internet recently:

“The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not,” said McDowell, who is author of two books on Christian apologetics, More than a Carpenter and New Evidence that Demands Verdict.

Well, tough shit, Josh. If it makes your job harder when young people have access to information and points of view unfavorable to your side, what does that say about the credibility of your ghost stories about Jesus in the first place?

Paratime Wars?

2011-08-02T19:39:00.000-07:00

What would Verkan Vall and the Paratime civilization do if the civilization on another timeline entered a technological singularity and independently discovered temporal transposition?

Got this in my email yesterday.

2011-08-02T18:43:00.000-07:00

Wow! An atheist conference in Tulsa, with over 300 in attendance! The old redneck town might have some potential to become cognitively livable after all, in case I ever want to move back there:

[ACTOK] ACT August Newsletter

Whew. July was an exciting month! In case you were living under a rock, a freethought convention was hosted by yourAtheist Community of Tulsa and held right here in Tulsa.

The response was incredible.

In its inaugural year, FreeOK doubled Skepticon's and theTexas Freethought Convention's debut attendance...combined!

318 atheists and freethinkers from Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota gathered at All Souls Unitarian Church for a nine hour state...er,(correction)...regional convention.

Speakers were Dr. William G. Morgan, Abbie Smith, The Thinking Atheist, AronRa, and Matt Dillahunty.

If you missed it, videos will be uploaded weekly to The Thinking Atheist's channel found here and shirts will be available soon.

In addition to that exciting news, we acquired our 500th member on July 7th. We are now the 40th largest out of the 561 atheist Meetup groups worldwide and are arguably one of the most active and fastest growing.

August is a new month, however, and we are not even going to take enough time off to enjoy our accomplishments!

We have a lot going on this month, however due to the heavy workload for FreeOK, the calendar isn't entirely filled up and complete. However, we will have the regulars (Social dinner, Drinking With Atheists, Official Meeting, Post-Meeting Dinner, Secular Family Day, secular humanist volunteerism, Bible Study, et al.) and include a sermon on racism, a response toThe Response, and more. For the current news on this month's activities, please visit our calendar. More dates and events will be added as we go along so please check back.

This month, we will begin seeking legal counsel to learn more about and (maybe) eventually become a 501c3 tax-exempt (non-profit) organization. We shall also begin the prelimary stages of drafting bylaws and establishing a heirarchy of members and officers.

As always, any and all participation is welcome and we would love to have you out for one of our many fun, exciting, and inspiring events for the month of August.

Something that is not in the news yet, but may be soon is that the Sand Springs city council meetings are invoking sectarian prayer. Expect ACT to substantiate its acronym by responding in an effective yet non-confrontational way.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me. I read every email that I receive and respond to almost every one.

Are you tired of religion? The closet? Isolation?
Remain passive no more. ACT!

William Poire
President
Organizer
Atheist Community of Tulsa
www.actok.org

--
This message was sent by William Poire (president@actok.org) from Atheist Community of Tulsa.
To learn more about William Poire, visit his/her member profile

Paleo-future ad in "Life Extension" magazine

2011-08-01T19:10:00.001-07:00

From the September 2011 issue:

I don't care for that magazine in general. One, it sells pills which don't work. Two, it uses a fear-based approach to try to get you to buy those pills. And three, apparently the editors still have a paleo-futurist outlook instead of paying attention to current events, if this ad says anything.

The Creekside Preserve at dusk, Sunday, July 31, 2011.

2011-07-31T19:29:00.000-07:00

I took this with my iPad 2:

Rich people prepare the future life of the poor?

2011-07-30T17:53:00.000-07:00

From Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, p. 184:

Luxury does not only represent rarity and vanity, but also social success, fascination, the dream that one day becomes reality for the poor and in so doing immediately loses its old glamour. Not that long ago a medical historian wrote: 'When a food that has been rare and long desired finally arrives within reach of the masses, consumption rises sharply, as if a long-repressed appetite had exploded. Once popularised [in both senses of the word - becoming "less exclusive" and "more widespread"] the food quickly loses its attraction... The appetite becomes sated.' The rich are thus doomed to prepare the future life of the poor. It is, after all, their justification: they try out the pleasures that the masses will sooner or later grasp.

How I know Jesus never healed or resurrected anyone.

2011-07-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

If Jesus existed historically, had woo-woo powers over the human body because of his divinity, and used these powers to heal the sick and raise the dead, then I have an obvious question:

Wouldn't these treatments have stuck?

I mean, if Jesus had healed someone of, say, leprosy, wouldn't he also have healed this person proactively against all other diseases, including aging? It would seem rather cruel of Jesus to heal a leper, only for the patient to die later from cancer, kidney failure, the plague or something.

The same goes for Jesus' alleged resurrections. Wouldn't Jesus have spared Lazarus from having to die again, if he raised him from the dead in the first place because of his friendship with him?

I wonder about these questions, because we clearly don't see any of these people who received supernatural medical interventions from Jesus around now, which means that every last one of them must have died "off stage," so to speak, nearly 2,000 years ago.

Otherwise we would have to postulate that Lazarus in his deathless body still walks the earth in 2011 like a character from Highlander. Christians in my lifetime have put a lot of effort into trying to make the bible fit with our observable reality some how, hence the creationism and bible prophecy industries, which overlap to a large extent. (Christians who believe in one tend to believe in the other.) Yet I've never heard of an apologetic explanation for why all the people Jesus healed or resurrected have long since disappeared, unless Jesus' miracles come with a short-time warranty not mentioned in the gospels.

The kind of "diversity" progressives despise.

2011-07-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

Progressives talk a great deal about the value of "diversity," so much so that when they get into academia, they enact policies with absurd consequences, as Heather Mac Donald describes in a recent essay.

Yet progressives clearly despise a kind of "diversity" which doesn't want to play along with their utopian fantasies: Self-reliant people, entrepreneurs, people who prefer their own company, loners, rugged individualists. I display some of the characteristics of those people myself, and I identify with them to large extent. (That probably accounts for my liking of H. Beam Piper's stories with his theme of the Self-Reliant Man.)

Yet progressives tend to frame us as bad people because we lack a sense of "empathy" and "community," we live "selfishly" and so forth. In reality they complain about us because we don't fit their view of human nature, and we present opposition to their political agenda. For example, when a progressive says "empathy," he really means something like "paying higher taxes." Individuals who can think of better uses for their own money and vote accordingly therefore seem "narcissistic" or "sociopathic" to progressives, especially if we also mention that we've read Ayn Rand's novels and like some of things she says.

This sheds light on what progressives really mean by "diversity": They mean a diversity of physical characteristics like skin color, but they don't mean a diversity of human minds (which probably also accounts for their IQ denialism). The sorts of human minds which shrug off progressive values which make no sense to them don't deserve special consideration in the progressive world view.

I imagine 22nd Century humanists will take a radically different view of things.

2011-07-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

"Wait a minute. Humanists a century ago said, 'Death gives life meaning'? Seriously? How could anyone believe such nonsense?"

Or as Robert Ettinger phrases it:

The reactionaries, in their muddled thinking, cherish a delusion as dangerous as it is pathetic, viz., that somehow by rejecting biological improvement and extended life for themselves, by choosing humanity and mortality for their families, they can stay the tide of history and assure the perpetuation of their quaint and squalid little world. The danger lies in their reaction when it gradually dawns on them that they are only consigning themselves to oblivion in what is a quite needless and thankless sacrifice, that their descendants will neither emulate nor admire them. What will be their dismay, what their fury, when they perceive that they have cast themselves on the rubbish-heap of history, that they will soon be one with Australopithecus!

ABC News story about Robert Ettinger

2011-07-27T19:14:00.000-07:00

Link (embedding disabled)

The video clip features Robin Hanson, who talks about how he and his cryonics-hostile wife have agreed not to talk about his cryonics arrangements.

BIG MISTAKE, Robin. Dump the bitch now while you still can, then assign power of attorney to someone who respects you (your wife clearly doesn't) and who will try to carry out your wishes for cryotransport.

And I don't care how "heartless" this sounds. Your survival takes priority over uxorial convenience and comfort.

Made of sterner stuff than the typical geek

2011-07-25T21:52:00.001-07:00

Robert Ettinger, while flawed in many ways like everyone else, in one sense displayed a better sort of manhood than the typical geek or science fiction fan. He didn't just fantasize about becoming an "immortal superman," the phrase he uses in Man Into Superman; he then tried to figure out how to become one through the application of scientific rationality, and that led him to publicizing the idea of cryonics and eventually founding the Cryonics Institute, which has now cryosuspended him.

That separates someone like Ettinger from the sorts of guys, often holders of servility jobs, who put on costumes based on science fiction characters and go to, say, Comic Con.

Ironically one cryonicist ordered Ettinger to "Rest in peace" (it has the imperative form grammatically). I really despise that expression. I'd like to replace it with something like, "Don't get too comfortable in that dewar," because we want to see cryonauts resuscitated and back among us when it becomes feasible to do so.

Many people dismiss Robert Ettinger as a crank.

2011-07-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

But at least he tried to apply some scientific rationality to the problem of getting people, himself included, to a time when the advanced state of health care could revive us from cryostasis and keep us in good physical and cognitive shape indefinitely. Mike Darwin in his reminiscence of Ettinger writes about how much mileage Ettinger got from the preliminary scientific and technological developments he knew of in the early 1960's when he wrote The Prospect of Immortlity:

In 1964 the discovery of DNA was only 11 years old. cloning, genetic engineering, routine organ transplantation (let alone heart and lung transplantation) were years to decades away. Detailed exposition of enabling technology such as molecular level cell and tissue repair were 30 years in the future. Nineteen-sixty-four was a time when vitalistic ideas pervaded both culture and medical science, and death was perceived in binary terms; a patient was either dead or alive, with no middle ground or intermediate states. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) had been invented by Peter Safar in 1960, only four years before the publication of The Prospect of Immortality and the first mass citizen training in CPR was still 8 years away: Leonard Cobb held the first citizen CPR training sessions in Seattle, WA in 1972. Passage of the Uniform Determination of Death Act did not occur until 1978, 14 years after the publication of The Prospect of Immortality. Successful cryopreservation of the first human embryo, a bundle of less than 60 undifferentiated cells, did not occur until 1983: 19 years after the publication of The Prospect of Immortality and 23 years after Ettinger first circulated his brief tract summarizing the idea of human cryopreseration as a means of medical time travel. At a time when most of the United States had no emergency medical system (EMS) and ambulances were hearses driven by Funeral Directors, the concept of cryopreservation as a vehicle to rescue by advanced medical technology was understandably incredible.

Cryonics depends upon a number of paradigm changing observations: Death is a gradual process rooted in progressive loss of biological structure (information) and is not a binary condition in most cases. Life does not depend upon continuous function or metabolism; widespread cryopreservation of human embryos was required to bring this idea into the public consciousness. Cryopreservation is possible for a wide range of cells and tissues, and even when uncontrolled freezing occurs, vast amounts of cell and tissue structure remain either intact or inferable (i.e., theoretically possible to reconstruct and restore to health and life from their damaged state). Advances in biology and medicine offer the prospect of growing new organs and regenerating or replacing damaged tissues; this is no longer considered wild speculation, but rather, is today progress expected by the public as a result of the logical progression of biomedicine. Finally, the ideas of nanoscale engineering and computation and their implications for cell and tissue repair (nanomedicine) are still not fully appreciated by the public, although understanding and acceptance of these ideas is growing.

In contrast to the degree of scientific enlightenment the cryonics argument requires to appreciate fully, a poll taken in 2010 shows that about two-fifths of the American population believes that Jesus will return to Earth by 2050! Many of the christians who criticized Harold Camping did so because Camping set dates, not because they reject Camping's eschatology. Compared with that degree of ignorance and superstition in the American population, Ettinger's world view makes him sound like he came from some advanced, futuristic civilization out of science fiction.

Cryonicists have a teachable moment here because of Robert's suspension, and I'd like for us to use it to get the framing to work to our advantage. More to follow.

Robert Ettinger, 22nd+ Century Man

2011-07-24T07:44:00.002-07:00

Robert Ettinger reportedly deanimated and went into cryonic suspension yesterday, joining his mother, his two consecutive wives and many of his friends at the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan.

Robert and his second wife Mae Ettinger (née Junod) lived in Arizona in the 1990's, and I got to meet them once at cryonicist Don Laughlin's ranch near Kingman in June 1994. I told Mr. Ettinger how much his book Man Into Superman meant to me, and how I thought he deserved more credit for the "transhumanist" movement which had started to appear by then. I also asked Mae if I could buy a copy of her book The W-0-T position or self-actualization for women, the sort of book I wouldn't bother with now given my disillusionment with women (long story). She graciously mailed me a copy later.

BTW, my visit to Mr. Laughlin's crib had its surreal aspects because he displayed some of the accouterments of a James Bond villain: He owns a casino, though a downmarket one (more of the Texas hold'em variety than the baccarat sort); his ranch house in northwestern Arizona's high desert reminded me of the one owned by the casino magnate played by Jimmy Dean in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever; Mr. Laughlin flew in from his casino, across the Colorado River in Nevada's southern tip, in a private helicopter; and he demonstrated one of his fully automatic weapons for some of his guests by firing it at a target. He did this at dinner time without warning those of us still eating at an outside table, however. I found the experience of unexpectedly hearing automatic weapons fire disconcerting. Fortunately I didn't see a white Persian cat on Laughlin's property. : )

From hindsight I wonder if the automatic gunfire had disturbed Robert even more, given his traumatic injuries and memories from the Second World War. I never heard anything to indicate that Robert suffered from a traumatic stress disorder like Jerry Leaf, however, and I don't recall seeing signs of his discomposure.

As others will document better than I can in the coming days, Robert started the cryonics movement with the publication of The Prospect of Immortality in 1964, a book scientifically vetted for its publisher by Isaac Asimov, who later dismissed cryonics as a bad idea for reasons extraneous to the science which I consider ill-argued. (More about that in some future post.) I've read the first book, but I can't say I have a strong "relationship" with it like I have with Robert's second book, Man Into Superman. In the summer of 1974 (I turned 15 that November), I bought a paperback copy of that book at the Skaggs drugstore & supermarket on the corner of 31st & Garnett in east Tulsa, about a half mile from where my family lived at the time. I think the company has since gone out of business. You can see a recent photo of the 40-year-old house where I spent my teen years here. I don't know the current occupants:

I have a lot to say about my experience with reading that book, but it would require a separate essay, which I've added to my list of writing projects on my iPad. For now I would just like to point out that while Man Into Superman gives an overly optimistic view of the state of cryonics in the early 1970's, when in reality things turned out badly because of "initialization failures," in other respects the book has worn well because Robert, who earned masters degrees in both physics and mathematics, grounded his speculations in the scientific literature of the time, and he also avoided setting dates unlike, say, Ray Kurzweil. He also displays a realism about human nature which I find lacking in F.M. Esfandiary's futurist writings from the same decade. (FM also suffered from a weak grounding in science and an uncritical acceptance of gee-whiz speculations from other popular writers.) In general Robert saw the potentials in a lot of new scientific discoveries and technological developments which placed him mentally way, way ahead of his contemporaries. His vision still reaches way ahead of most of us now. I wonder if the bit of the 21st Century Robert got to see disappointed him.

At any rate, apparently Robert received a quick cool down to minimize ischemic damage. If he passes through the right bottlenecks, he could awaken some day and see for himself how much of "the future" he got right. I would like to join him in that world.

From memory, as of today I've met the following people who have since entered cryonic suspension, and I got to know a few of them somewhat (not in chronological order of suspension):

Jerry Leaf

Paul Gentemen

Mae Ettinger

Robert Ettinger

FM-2030

Jackson Zinn

David Zubkoff

Thomas Donaldson

Paul Garfield

Wesley du Charme

I may have inadvertently left out one or two.

Too bad I don't get the Discovery Science Channel on our cable system.

2011-07-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

I wish I did, just to have something more intelligent to watch on cable than the white-trash reality series set in swamps, junk yards, pawn shops or gun ranges, not to mention all the woo-woo shows about cryptids, ghosts, mystical artifacts, UFO's and doomsday prophecies. I hope the video of this segment goes online so that I can watch it anyway:

Cryonicists on “Can We Live Forever?”

On Wednesday, July 27th, 2011, a particularly interesting episode of “Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman” (Season 2) will air on The Discovery Science Channel at 10 pm ET/PT. The title of the program is “Can We Live Forever?”, and the show will feature not only biological approaches such as Alcor Scientific Advisory Board member Aubrey de Grey’s contribution and possibilities involving regeneration and DNA repair but also unusual approaches that include the possibility of uploading and even the possibility that people today might survive as vitrified brains with intact “connectomes” that can be either revived or uploaded in the future. For the latter topic, the crew visited 21st Century Medicine and interviewed Greg Fahy and filmed procedures in 21CM’s kidney and brain slice labs.

Of course, the progress in connectomics might wind up telling cryonicists things we don't want to hear. What will it imply about the prospect of "neural archeology," for example?

Levetiracetam & Alzheimer's

2011-07-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

I find this interesting because my father started to have petit mal seizures in the late 1980's, where he would suddenly become confused and not remember his recent situation in life, like whether he still worked or not. The episodes of confusion and memory problems would pass, and after diagnosis he got on medication (Dilantin) to control his seizures. This happened several years before he started falling and I had to move him into assisted living. Now Dad apparently has Alzheimer's and requires nursing home care, which he fortunately receives at a decent facility in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. We already had a family history of epilepsy: My sister started having grand mal seizures at age 13, yet she has managed to control them with medication as well; she took Dilantin for a long time, but I haven't talked to her about her condition lately and her current medications.

So, did the onset of Dad's seizures in his 60's signal early-stage Alzheimer's?

Drug improves brain function in condition that leads to Alzheimer’s

An existing anti-seizure drug improves memory and brain function in adults with a form of cognitive impairment that often leads to full-blown Alzheimer’s disease, a Johns Hopkins University study has found.

The findings raise the possibility that doctors will someday be able to use the drug, levetiracetam, already approved for use in epilepsy patients, to slow the abnormal loss of brain function in some aging patients before their condition becomes Alzheimer’s. The researchers emphasize, however, that more studies are necessary before any such recommendation can be made to doctors and patients.

The effects seen in the study “could be like taking your foot off the accelerator or tapping the brakes, and possibly could slow the progression on that path [to Alzheimer’s],” said principal investigator and neuroscientist Michela Gallagher. “We need further clinical studies with longer exposure to the drug to, first of all, make sure with rigorous evaluation that the drug is effective in the longer term and, equally important, that it does no harm.”

The new study, presented July 20 at the International Congress on Alzheimer’s Disease in Paris, also shows that excess brain activity in patients with a condition known as amnestic mild cognitive impairment, or aMCI, contributes to brain dysfunction that underlies memory loss. Previously, it had been thought that this hyperactivity was the brain’s attempt to “make up” for weakness in its ability to form new memories.

The clinical study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, tested 34 participants, some of whom were healthy older adults and others who had aMCI, meaning that they had memory difficulties greater than would be expected at their age. Each person participated in a sequence of two treatment phases lasting two weeks each. Patients received a low dose of levetiracetam during one phase and a placebo during the other.

After each treatment phase, the researchers evaluated subjects’ memory and conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging of their brains. These scans were used to map brain activity during performance of a memory task, allowing the researchers to compare each individual’s status both on and off the drug. Compared to the normal participants, subjects with amnestic MCI who took the placebo had excess activity in the hippocampus, a part of the brain essential for memory. But when they had been taking levetiracetam for two weeks, the excess activity was reduced to the same level as that of the control subjects; memory performance in the task they performed also was improved to the level of the controls’.

The findings have possible implications for the progression to Alzheimer’s disease. Studies showing excess activity in the hippocampus in patients with aMCI have found that if these patients are followed for a number of years, those with the greatest excess activation have the greatest further drop in memory and are more likely to receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s over the next four to six years.

Other recent research provides a clue as to why this might be the case, says Gallagher, the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences in Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

“Because some of the physiology that creates Alzheimer’s disease in the brain is driven by greater brain activity, this excess activity might be like having your foot on the accelerator if you are on the path to Alzheimer’s,” Gallagher said. “So the next step in this line of research will be to test that idea to see whether reducing excess activity might actually slow progression to Alzheimer’s for patients with aMCI.”

Between 8 and 15 percent of patients with aMCI progress to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis every year, making aMCI a stage of transition between normal aging and neurodegenerative disease. At present there is no effective treatment to modify this progression before irreversible damage has occurred in the brain. It would be a significant breakthrough to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s, a disease that is expected to affect as many as 16 million Americans by 2050.

Levetiracetam, the drug used in the study, is an anticonvulsant that decreases abnormally high activity in the brain. It is combined with other drugs to treat certain types of epileptic seizures.

Speaking of science fiction and iPads

2011-07-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

I recently read Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi's so-called "reboot," based on current sensibilities, of H. Beam Piper's novel Little Fuzzy. I didn't like the new novel for a whole lot of reasons, and I laughed especially at the parts where the protagonist, whom both Piper and Scalzi have named Jack Holloway, uses a device which Scalzi calls an "infopanel."

Uh, hello, Mr. Scalzi? Did you mentally slip back into the 1970's when you wrote this "reboot"? Scalzi's version of Holloway, like Piper's, prospects for a unique kind of gemstone on an exoplanet, which means that the story has to take place many centuries into "the future," though Scalzi doesn't explain the part of the backstory about how interstellar travel supposedly works and how it can get people to exoplanets within their normal lifetimes . Yet his character's most technologically advanced device in this civilization resembles the tablet PC's we can pick up now at businesses like Walmart or Best Buy.

On top of that, the medicine of this "future" society hasn't advanced appreciably, so that people still age and die - though in fairness he shares this assumption with Piper.

Needless to say, I found both aspects of the novel underwhelming. Michio Kaku in his nonfiction book Physics of the Future, by contrast, postulates that by the year 2100 we'll have implanted computers, or at least ones we can wear like contact lenses - and that idea sounds more "futuristic" than Scalzi's portrayal of people in an even more remote "future" lugging around tablets. And, Kaku forecasts, medicine will start to make inroads into this mortality nuisance by 2100; in fact, Kaku tells a story about the life of an ordinary guy in the year 2100. One day, while discussing health matters with his medical AI which presents itself as a human-looking avatar, Ordinary Guy in the year 2100 asks it how he should structure his life now that he doesn't have the traditional signposts based on our biological development and decline. Why, if he doesn't age appreciably and won't likely become demented or otherwise disabled in the indefinite future, when should he retire?

I laughed at this as well, but I laughed benevolently. At least Kaku has started to get the right idea, though his silence about cryonics in the book may imply something about cryonics' current reputation as a "futuristic" technology; or at least it implies that Kaku doesn't take cryonics seriously for some reason. Nonetheless, cryonicists have discussed and written extensively about the problems of living a really, really long time, now going back nearly 50 years. You can find much of this literature on the internet.

And getting back to updating H. Beam Piper's novel, I have some ideas different from Scalzi's about how to do that. In my version of a Fuzzy novel, I would keep more of Holloway's personality and world view, which Scalzi essentially throws away, especially Piper's self-reliance to a fault which Piper writes into his heroes. I would also show Holloway as a radical life-extender, though I'd want to avoid making him too much like Lazarus Long (an understandable temptation, since Piper often writes like the poor man's Robert Heinlein); perhaps Holloway mines sunstones and lives frugally to save money for his next rejuvenation. But he would definitely use some technologies which signal a "futuristic" world, including a virtual computer interface in his eye which helps him to identify geological formations likely to contain sunstones, as well as medical upgrades which give him enhanced intelligence and superior stamina, coordination, strength and recuperative powers. These enhancements would definitely make him more than an ordinary hard case for anyone or anything which tries to fuck with him.

I finally bought an iPad 2 this week.

2011-07-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

Plus an external keyboard a day later, when I realized that I could use the iPad 2 as a compact substitute for a laptop and write with a word processing app. I already have a list on its notetaking app of about a dozen writing projects of various lengths. I haven't owned a computer previously but used the company PC. Now I have some independence for my own purposes.

I can see why the iPad has generated so much enthusiasm. For one thing, it has leapt from the pages of science fiction novels, or off the screen from science fiction TV shows and films, if you prefer. For another, I can use it as an ebook reader, so now I have both my Nook and my Kindle accounts on it, along with Google's ebook reader. And for yet another thing, thinking further ahead, the iPad could provide a platform for telemedical uses, though I doubt it would give us a competitor for the Tricorder X Prize coming up soon; that will require some specialized technologies which Apple's engineers didn't have in mind for this product.

Basing post-1980's cryonics on a mirage?

2011-07-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

I really have to wonder now. Source:

Scientific Education & Promotion of Cryonics

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s Alcor engaged in a vigorous program of public education and of the promotion of cryonics. Speaking engagements and outreach to the community were commonplace and an extensive package of scientific, technical and organizational information was mailed out to anyone who requested it.

Editorial Staff, Molecular engineering. Cryonics. Issue 45, April 1984 p. 5:

http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8404.txt

Drexler, KE, Molecular technology and cell repair machines, Part 1. Cryonics. 6(12)1985; 16-24: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8512.txt

Drexler, KE, Molecular technology and cell repair machines, Part 2. Cryonics. 7(1)1985; 19-28: 7(1)

Wowk, B, Darwin, M, Cryonics: Reaching for Tomorrow, Alcor Life Extension Foundation (February 1989), Riverside, CA, 1990:

ISBN-01880209004:

http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/AlcorReachingForTomorrow1989.pdf

A quotation looking for an application

2011-07-21T10:33:00.001-07:00

From Prometheus Unbound, Act III, by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed - but man:
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, - the King
Over himself; just, gentle, wise - but man:
Passionless? no - yet free from guilt or pain
Which were, for his will made, or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance and death and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended Heaven
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.

I have a partly baked idea of writing a book about the "soft" aspects of cryonics, namely, the philosophical, social, economic, psychological, political, demographic, environmental and even, ugh! the religious issues people seem to get hung up on when they confront the cryonics idea as a serious proposal. I might use Shelley's verse on the dedication page, "To the Sovereign Individual."

Steven Pinker's new book worth a look

2011-07-21T09:54:00.000-07:00

Coming out in October: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker.

Apparently Pinker in this book develops and defends the claims he made in his TED talk a few years ago:

In the talk Pinker says that an inflection point in the downward trend of violence happened in Britain and the Netherlands around the beginning of "the Age of Reason" in "the 16th Century," which sounds about a century too early to me. Hmm. More evidence to support the speculations of the philosophes in the Radical Enlightenment? And more evidence to support the thesis that we've constructed ever-growing networks of trust and tribal inclusiveness through expanding trade?

FM-2030 also asserted, in his usual, hand-waving way based on flimsy evidence or wishful thinking, that we can look forward to declining violence in "the future." This time he might have made a reasonably accurate forecast, if Pinker's presentation of the case holds up to criticism:

Female beauty and intelligence combined, but going to waste.

2011-07-16T10:23:00.001-07:00

The FuturePundit drew attention to this article earlier this year:

There appears to be some truth in the saying 'I'm more than just a pretty face' as studies carried out in Britain and America reveal that good looking men and women have an IQ almost 14 points above the norm.

The findings were based on the National Child Development Study and recorded the academic intelligence and physical appearance of 17,419 people throughout their childhood and up to early adulthood. A similar study was conducted using 35,000 Americans.

‘Physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence, both with and without controls for social class, body size and health,’ says Satoshi Kanazawa, a researcher at the London School of Economics.‘The association between attractiveness and general intelligence is also stronger among men than women.’

The study found that in Britain, women who are physically attractive have IQ’s 11.4 points higher than the average, while handsome men have an increased IQ of 13.6 points.

Support for the juxtaposition of beauty and brains is apparent in supermodel Lily Cole and actress Kate Beckinsale both Oxbridge graduates. But Kanazawa insists: ‘Our contention that beautiful people are more intelligent is purely scientific. It is not a prescription for how to treat and judge others.’

I share the FuturePundit's sentiment: "Since I want the future human race to be more beautiful and much smarter it is great to hear that these goals are very compatible."

Unfortunately, in the current culture, attractive women who can earn degrees from substantial universities often fail to develop themselves further. Consider: Danica McKellar (bachelor's in mathematics from UCLA); Lisa Kudrow (bachelor's in biology from Vassar); Natalie Portman (bachelor's in psychology from Harvard). Mayim Bialik never impressed me as attractive by gentile standards, though she reminds me of Jewish coeds I knew at Washington University in St. Louis whom I could have dated under better circumstances; but she did have some success as a child actress in the early 1990's, and she reportedly earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Instead of doing something productive with that educational investment, however, she apparently considers it more important now to act in a TV series.

I suppose economic incentives have something to do with this waste of human potential. On-camera work for attractive people in the entertainment industry currently pays "stupid money" compared with the wages available for cognitive work which produces more value for society, despite the trend towards the economy of the mind.

Aldous Huxley saw more of "the future" than he realized.

2011-07-15T21:37:00.000-07:00

From Brave New World, Chapter Seventeen:

ART, SCIENCE–you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness," said the Savage, when they were alone. "Anything else?"

"Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller. "There used to be something called God–before the Nine Years' War. But I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose."

"Well …" The Savage hesitated. He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.

The Controller, meanwhile, had crossed to the other side of the room and was unlocking a large safe set into the wall between the bookshelves. The heavy door swung open. Rummaging in the darkness within, "It's a subject," he said, "that has always had a great interest for me." He pulled out a thick black volume. "You've never read this, for example."

The Savage took it. "The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments," he read aloud from the title-page.

"Nor this." It was a small book and had lost its cover.

"The Imitation of Christ."

"Nor this." He handed out another volume.

"The Varieties of Religious Experience. By William James."

"And I've got plenty more," Mustapha Mond continued, resuming his seat. "A whole collection of pornographic old books. God in the safe and Ford on the shelves." He pointed with a laugh to his avowed library–to the shelves of books, the rack full of reading-machine bobbins and sound-track rolls.

"But if you know about God, why don't you tell them?" asked the Savage indignantly. "Why don't you give them these books about God?"

"For the same reason as we don't give them Othello: they're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now."

"But God doesn't change."

"Men do, though."

"What difference does that make?"

"All the difference in the world," said Mustapha Mond. He got up again and walked to the safe. "There was a man called Cardinal Newman," he said. "A cardinal," he exclaimed parenthetically, "was a kind of Arch-Community-Songster."

"'I Pandulph, of fair Milan, cardinal.' I've read about them in Shakespeare."

"Of course you have. Well, as I was saying, there was a man called Cardinal Newman. Ah, here's the book." He pulled it out. "And while I'm about it I'll take this one too. It's by a man called Maine de Biran. He was a philosopher, if you know what that was."

"A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth," said the Savage promptly.

"Quite so. I'll read you one of the things he did dream of in a moment. Meanwhile, listen to what this old Arch-Community-Songster said." He opened the book at the place marked by a slip of paper and began to read. "'We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'" Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false–a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.'" Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. "One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this" (he waved his hand), "us, the modern world. 'You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. 'The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.' But there aren't any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?"

"Then you think there is no God?"

"No, I think there quite probably is one."

"Then why? …"

Mustapha Mond checked him. "But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that's described in these books. Now …"

"How does he manifest himself now?" asked the Savage.

"Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all."

"That's your fault."

"Call it the fault of civilization. God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. . ."

Now to the social science. You can read the popular explanation here; and the abstract of the paper here, which I quote in full:

According to the uncertainty hypothesis, religion helps people cope psychologically with dangerous or unpredictable situations. Conversely, with greater control over the external environment due to economic development and technological advances, religious belief is predicted to decline (the existential security hypothesis). The author predicts that religious belief would decline in economically developed countries where there is greater existential security, including income security (income equality and redistribution via welfare states) and improved health. These predictions are tested in regression analyses of 137 countries that partialed out the effects of Communism and Islamic religion both of which affect the incidence of reported nonbelief. Findings show that disbelief in God increased with economic development (measured by lower agricultural employment and third-level enrollment). Findings further show that disbelief also increased with income security (low Gini coefficient, high personal taxation tapping the welfare state) and with health security (low pathogen prevalence). Results show that religious belief declines as existential security increases, consistent with the uncertainty hypothesis.

The "COMMITMENT PAGE" from John W. Loftus's new book

2011-07-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

From The End of Christianity, by John W. Loftus. I don't recall another book in the freethought genre which has an action-oriented nudge in it:

Of course, Loftus got the idea from religious tracts, like this page:

I'd like to see atheists reframe the debate in the U.S. by assuming that of course our side won the culture war, at least in the area of religion. From now on the religious obsessives live in our world; we don't live in theirs any more, much less do we have to accommodate their absurd demands.

Article about Tulsa's organized atheists in "Freethought Today"

2011-07-15T19:44:00.000-07:00

Welcome to 21st Century. I grew up in "rapture ready" Tulsa in the 1970's, and from hindsight I wished I knew of a local atheist group to join just to have some relatively sane people to talk to:

Secular humanists: the natural leaders of a civilized planet

2011-07-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

I tend to view secular humanists as immigrants from "the future." Like immigrants across oceans, they've brought their culture with them, and they've set about to apply it in a new environment.

I've also known a few people who have grown up as atheists. To me they seem almost like characters from some advanced civilization out of science fiction.

Lenina Crowne? OMF!

2011-07-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

I've started to play around with the idea of writing a lengthy essay about my experience of re-reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I read it the first time in my junior year of high school and interpreted it at the time as the ultimate teen boy's fantasy; but much has happened to me since then, so I'll probably have new and different thoughts about the novel this time around.

For one thing, I notice that Huxley's novel assumes a high level of cultural literacy with a cutoff point of circa 1930. He alludes to many people and things in the early 20th Century which mattered greatly at the time; but modern readers probably won't catch or understand the allusions without some kind of study guide.

For another thing, he disrespects his female character Lenina Crowne and fails to use her adequately as one of the novel's interpreters, but she seems to have leaped off the pages and served as a prototype for vacuous women in the real world. I can just imagine Lenina as a young woman in 2011, working for a fashion magazine, hooking up with a series of men, yakking and texting on her cell phone much of the day, taking random digital photos and posting inanities about her life on her Twitter and Facebook accounts. When the male characters in the novel approvingly refer to Lenina's body as "pneumatic," I wonder if Huxley had intended ironically for that word to convey its other meaning, because Lenina has many "spiritual" sisters in the early 21st Century.

And for a third thing, the discussion between Mustapha Mond and the "Savage" about the rationale for the utopia's social model and its absent need for a god anticipates recent theorizing about the role of safe, modern environments in causing the implosion of religious belief in many developed democratic countries.

"A History of Humanity to 3400 AD: Daily Life," by Thomas Donaldson (1979)

2011-07-07T15:40:00.000-07:00

Mike Darwin recently posted on his Chronosphere not-a-blog about his efforts to scan and upload his archive of cryonics literature going back to the 1960's. He feels that no one really appreciates his project - but I do, and I would like to thank him for it.

I found the following article by Thomas Donaldson among Mike's scans, for example, which I've extracted and published separately here:

History to 3400 AD

I recall subscribing to this publication, which went through a name change from Life Extension to Long Life, in the late 1970's. Despite its hand-drawn graphs and illustrations and its cheap-looking format, the energy, enthusiasm and vision of this zine from the 1970's strike me. The current periodicals from Alcor and CI just don't compare. Does that say something about what the cryonics movement has lost in the last 30 years?

Donaldson in this piece from 1979 speculates about what "ordinary" goods could look like in the coming centuries based on several assumptions, some of which he doesn't state. Explicitly he says that we don't fall back into a Malthusian trap, so that the human population stabilizes after the year 2000. (That hasn't happened yet.)

Throughout history, rather than expand our population to the limit possible we have chosen to RAISE our level of life. What could make some one believe that we will differently in the future? With immortality we can even expect this tendency to increase: why should I create children as competitors for myself, who will only use resources that I MYSELF can use?

He also assumes exponential economic growth and a corresponding growth of real income per capita, ignoring inflation. In other words, he implicitly assumes that we don't reach hard limits to economic growth by, for example, entering into something like Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation and getting stuck there indefinitely. Therefore he extrapolates that in the far-future year 2000 we'd have a per capita income of $20,000_{1979 dollars}, and that this figure would increase by about a factor of ten every century.

Donaldson also assumes, implicitly, that no wild card events happen, and that we continue to enjoy relative social and political stability over the long run. The Singularity idea hadn't gotten into circulation until Vernor Vinge propagandized for it in the late 1980's, so Donaldson may not have known about it yet.

And Donaldson also assumes implicitly that additional wealth doesn't lose its marginal value above some level we may have nearly reached (like in Gunther Stent's scenario of the "Golden Age"); or that trends like "mindfulness" and voluntary simplicity don't come to dominate the culture and cause people to lose interest in additional economic progress.

With those conditions given, what does Donaldson forecast? He writes:

If we take Table No. 1 seriously it tells us something quite profound. The future is not just a matter of a lot of gadgets and electronics. We can understand a lot about daily life if we imagine a world where EVERYONE makes 1 million dollars in REAL MONEY, goods and services. People in 2200 will ALL have the kinds of things that millionaires have today. We will not gry to imagine gadgets and electronics at all, instead we will notice that there are right now an immense number of things needing no special technology in themselves but inaccessible to nearly everyone because of simple COST. It is technology that will reduce this cost so that everyone can have them.

And he gives some examples based on our current experiences with tangible things:

1. "We will privately own many goods of sorts that are now shared."

Just as we now own private automobiles, in the coming centuries more and more people will own their own aircraft. (Donaldson doesn't call them "flying cars"!) Donaldson also envisions that people will own private libraries comparable to city libraries. Years ago, the California businessman and former L.A. mayor Richard Riordan reportedly bought the entire library from a defunct Catholic college and set it up in his mansion; apparently Donaldson thinks that in the future many of us would have homes comparable to Riordan's with tens of thousands of books in them. Donaldson didn't foresee that instead we could have handheld electronic devices which can store entire libraries in digital format, along with digitized music and video, in addition to having access to an ever growing supply of information on the internet.

We could also have our own research laboratories and scientific equipment like particle accelerators; a lot of ordinary geeks would have the resources to play Tony Stark if they wish. And we could individually own more and more land just for the scenery, with no neighbors nearby and no uninvited visitors allowed; though I don't see how that could work for scarce scenery like the Grand Canyon.

2. "With wealth our possessions will also get bigger."

Donaldson thinks that land area owned per capita would increase by a factor of 100 every 200 years, though his figures in TABLE NO. 2 make no sense. Earth has a land surface area of ~150,000,000 km², so if you assume a stable population of 6 billion, that allows everyone about 0.025 km² of land per capita, roughly a square about 158 m on a side. Donaldson's table implies we would reach the crossover point before 2200. Where does all that extra "land" per capita come from, if the population doesn't shrink? From space colonization?

And who knows if we would want to own ever bigger tracts of land, vehicles, homes and spaceships? What would I do with a flying machine on the order of 1 km in length, for example? I could see having my own large spaceship, of course.

3. "Houses, vehicles, other possessions would become more differentiated."

So we could see the houses of "ordinary" people start to resemble the houses of the wealthy: Summer houses, winter houses, houses for special events, specially designed houses for unusual family and relationship arrangements which will become more common in the future. For example, I've heard that some home builders in Utah specialize in designing and building homes for polygynous families where the wives and their respective children require separate living spaces. If polyamory becomes more mainstream in the future, housing designs will probably evolve to reflect the needs for those currently uncommon relationships as well.

Houses in remote areas or in harsh climates might grow larger and larger and have specialized spaces for people who prefer cocooning so that they don't have to go anywhere for long periods. Robert Heinlein describes a house like that in Canada in his novel Friday. I could also see the desirability of a megahouse in metro Phoenix during its stillsuit season. When you double the linear dimensions of a structure, you increase its surface area exposed to the environment by a factor of 4, but its volume by a factor of 8; so that the ratio of surface area to volume halves, and you get savings on heating or cooling each unit of its interior air volume. In a sufficiently large house, you could have home entertainment rooms, fitness rooms, artists' studios, private art galleries, scientific or invention labs, libraries (if you want to own physical books), music rooms, greenhouses to provide fresh fruits and vegetables, private chapels for the religiously inclined, and possibly even automated clinics in the house for routine medical emergencies like diagnosing and setting a broken bone.

And then we could have rooms for purposes we can't even imagine now. Some people in 2011 have media rooms in their homes which resemble miniature command centers like the ones in movies. Imagine if you had to explain the function of that room to someone who lived before the invention of electrical power, photography, the telephone and the telegraph.

4. "Wealth means also that everyday things would be made far more elaborately."

Donaldson thinks that robots would prepare our meals and produce one-off goods at home for us, but he sets dates which seem too remote to me. The production of industrial-quality goods at home could happen well before 2100, if fabbing becomes practical and results in functional and aesthetically pleasing items. The the idea that people in Future World would groom and dress themselves more elaborately also shows up in science fiction.

And then Donaldson has a lengthy section about the economic institutions in his scenario. Automation won't create serious long-term unemployment, he thinks. Most importantly, machines can't make our decisions for us about what we want, and they can't consume the goods they produce for us in response to those desires. Donaldson writes:

Means by which we can express our desires about the future will therefore become more and more developed. Just as now, some political means will occur; however we can expect also an elaboration of present sharemarkets and futures markets to deal with development of all kinds of future goods. We may see, for instance, a FUTURES MARKET in ideas for inventions, so that people will buy and sell the right to buy (or sell) a holograpic picturephone not yet invented. To make such choices, people would need knowledge, and markets would become more and more differentiated, with people specializing in specific types of goods. Other than immediate consumption, this market would be the main economic activity engaged in by people of 2500 on. It will therefore dominate life and self-image in the same way as employment does now.

Donaldson, in other words, apparently thought of something like prediction markets as a mechanism for making decisions about the directions of progress in the coming centuries.

Donaldson also extrapolates that people over the long run will earn proportionately less income from wages, and more income from invested capital, just as wealthy people have done for generations. That will have consequences in the political sphere favoring economic conservatism.

Next Donaldson discusses longevity. Donaldson writes:

I do not expect many or even any changes in basic structural design of human beings (wings, a third eye, fur . . .). Biological changes, however, include much more than structural design; the leading change will be longevity. Means will be known to keep people alive for longer and longer times, and the standard of "health" will rise. Even now we see mortals of 60 who speak of themselves as "healthy"; common deformities such as diabetes, asthma, or myopia will become curable relatively soon.

However, even if people's probability of deanimation decouples from "age," they could still deanimate from misadventures and from "accidents of medical treatment." Donaldson thinks that you might need to go into cryonic suspension repeatedly, every time you deanimate from one of these causes over the centuries, to wait it out until a more advanced state of health care can revive and restore you. If you deanimate in 2700 from a cause of death with no known treatment in that year, by going into cryonic suspension you could benefit from the health care providers in the year 3000 who have learned in the intervening three centuries what they need to do to help you.

Donaldson also speculates about how this superlongevity will affect human behavior:

Increased longevity will affect society and values. Private organizations would support longterm projects, such as basic research, only funded by government now. People will concern themselves with cosmic disasters which may only happen in thousands of years: explosions of the Galactic Center, instabilities of the Solar System. Less need for constant creation of new people will cause roles of men and women to become quite close to one another; differences between the sexes in dress, ways of walking or talking, and social behavior will become far less.

I have my doubts about the last part because of the limits of human plasticity. The birth rate in the U.S. has declined dramatically since the peak years of the Baby Boom, yet men's and women's behaviors have diverged even farther in some respects. Many American women born since the 1970's talk in ways I find odd and annoying, for example, and not like the men from the same generations. If anything, male and female behaviors could become more distinct because of increased sexual competition as progress in medicine makes people more attractive.

Apart from modifications for longevity, Donaldson displays a bias against the idea of making more radical alterations to the human body:

Through history, we have adapted to new environments by invention rather than biological adaptation. Rather than changes in basic structural design of human beings, what is most likely instead is ability to design tools, artifacts, furniture, machines, all with attributes of life able to sense and respond to our internal states as if they were part of ourselves. We would not so much make people with wings, for example, as design an attachment to ourselves with which we could fly: a whole creature, with a brain to control its own motion and sense how we wished to move, that we could put on or off like a jacket. Every for sensory or brain tasks we would have the same devices: rather than a permanent third eye, instead an attachment letting us see X-rays with the same facility as we now see with our own eyes, or artificial brains giving their wearers powers to process information of many different kinds. We see this trend already in pocket calculators. People will wear these, and have them always with them, in the same way as they now wear clothing now [sic]. We will seem to them like naked savages.

Donaldson shows a lack of imagination here. Do people in 2011 who don't carry late-model smart phones with them seem like "naked savages"? The people in Future World might consider it gauche to go through daily life decked out with equipment, so that they either (1) do without, (2) have some of it embedded, or (3) have their robotic servants keep it handy for them nearby.

And then Donaldson ends his essay by arguing that with the giantism trend in wealth he foresees, our assumptions of an acceptable standard of living will change so that in a few centuries, for example, only "poor" people will own homes measuring 100 m on a side, which they bought second-hand instead of having them custom-designed and so forth. Again Donaldson shows a lack of imagination. In 2011 the Amish seem to live in "poverty" by many Americans' standards, but Amish families own businesses and real estate and often have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in net worth which they hide with their simple lifestyle. They have wealth in reserve for when it counts, in other words, like when a major illness strikes someone in the family; and they take justifiable pride in their self-reliance. No doubt communities with similar value systems will exist in future centuries where the members live quietly. obscurely and frugally among their more ostentatious neighbors.

On the whole Donaldson's essay has the merit of specificity. He presents some vivid and plausible examples of wealth in the future, without postulating anything extraordinary or weird apart from successful life extension, rejuvenation and revival from cryonic suspension.

And yet Donaldson's essay also reveals a conservative mentality in some ways. It reminds me of H.G. Wells's complaint about the futurology which existed in the early 20th Century:

'Let us admit,' said Keppel, 'that this is attempting the most impossible of tasks. The hypothesis is that these coming supermen are strong-witted, better-balanced, and altogether wiser than we are. How can we begin to put our imaginations into their minds and figure out what they will think or do? If our intelligences were as tall as theirs, we should be making their world now.'

'In general terms,' persuaded Dr. Holdman Stedding, gently obstetric as ever. 'Try.'

'Well, perhaps, in general terms, we may be able to say a few things at least about what their world will not be. You—what do you find in all these Utopias and Visions of the Future of yours? I suppose you get the same stuff over and over again, first of all caricatures of current novelties—skyscrapers five thousand feet high, aeroplanes at two thousand miles an hour, radio receivers on your wrist-watch. . .

In other words, Donaldson doesn't explore how people in future centuries might live if they did become vastly wealthier in real terms, but they didn't want to buy "caricatures" of current goods like houses the size of entire towns (with a town's goods and services built into them, in effect), flying vehicles the size of aircraft carriers and huge particle accelerators for their children's science fair projects. Donaldson also doesn't deal with the fact that even by the 1970's, rich people generally had to consume many of the same goods and services available to ordinary people. Billionaires in 2011 can't buy better electricity, gasoline, wireless phone services, prescription drugs, music recordings or books than everyone else buys. Their physicians graduate from the same medical schools as everyone else's physicians, and these physicians know just as much about keeping their patients healthy as the physicians with downscale practices know. The trend towards the collapse of billionaires' advantages as consumers will likely continue and put lower bounds on the stigma of having a house of "only" 100 m in length.

Nonetheless, I've always admired Thomas Donaldson, now in cryonic suspension, for writing about the future as a serious personal proposition, and in a way which challenges our usual presuppositions about it. I got to talk to Thomas a few times in the 1990's. I can't say that I liked him personally; he reminded me of the other Ph.D. mathematicians I've known who view themselves as a superior form of life, so he struck me as a bit arrogant. But I respect him immensely, and I hope we can resume our acquaintance some day, however many centuries we'll have to wait.

One of the more unsettling things I've read lately

2011-07-03T22:16:00.001-07:00

I have the impression of Patri Friedman as the third-generation product of a libertarian cult. In multi-generational cults the adherents adopt certain beliefs which may make sense within the context of the cult's world view, but which sound weird when outsiders hear about them. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has become the butt of jokes about the magic Mormon underwear he might wear, for example.

For another example, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the second-generation product of libertarian cultism, has complained recently about the government's tyranny in favoring low-flush toilets and fluorescent light bulbs, two products which generate grievances in libertarian literature. Yet when Senator Paul said this at a public hearing in the Senate, he met with ridicule from people with more mainstream views.

So Patri Friedman has announced that he has made arrangements for cryonic suspension for both himself and his family. I don't consider that necessarily cultish, of course. (When someone gets cryonics to work, as in the first successful revival of a functional person, people will stop calling cryonics "denial," "false hope," and the other familiar dismissals, and call it something more like "extreme trauma medicine" instead.) For some reason high-school dropout and work-avoider Eliezer Yudkowsky got involved, and Friedman recounts the following conversation between his 5-year-old son Tovar and Yudkowsky:

Patri: Hey Tovar, I'm signing you up for cryonics.
Tovar: What's that?
Patri: What that means is, if you die in a car accident, we're going to freeze you until someday in the future hopefully someone will bring you back AS A TRANSFORMER!
Tovar: Yay, AWESOME! Who will bring me back?
Eliezer: Ahem. Me. Well, indirectly.
Tovar: You? How?
Eliezer: Who makes Transformers?
Tovar: Primus!
Eliezer: Well, who made Primus?
Tovar: I don't know.
Eliezer: I'm like whoever made Primus to make the Transformers.
Tovar: oh.

I laughed at this, but something about the exchange also made me uneasy. If the Friedmans celebrate christmas (I wouldn't assume that, of course), would Patri have Yudkowsky put on a Santa suit and tell Tovar that he owns the workshop at the North Pole which makes the toys Tovar gets for christmas?

This exchange also sheds some light on Yudkowsky's delusions of grandeur. Wikipedia describes the character Primus from the Transformers franchise as:

the "benevolent" godlike entity in the fictional Transformers comic universe who fought against the Chaos-Bringer Unicron. The Lord of the Light, Primus is the being who created the Transformers to help him defeat Unicron.

Yudkowsky thinks he can create a "godlike entity"? And Friedman goes along with this? What other weird beliefs does Friedman plan to indoctrinate into Tovar as he creates yet another generation of libertarian cultists?

Ayn Rand's alternative humanism in "The Humanist" magazine

2011-07-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

Just a brief reference in an article titled, "Real to Reel: Ten Classics in Humanist Cinema":

I think Ayn Rand's more durable legacy will come not from her melodramatic fantasy life, but from her promotion of "shrugging" as a way for society's alpha producers to escape from progressivism. Jeff Bezos provided an example of "shrugging" the other day in response to California's new tax on internet trade. This decentralized, dispersed form of resistance by leaving progressive abusers will probably have more staying power than the irrational fixation many libertarians have on getting Ron Paul into the White House, despite their criticism about using political, top-down solutions to problems in other areas.

Carl Sagan on UFO's as a religion surrogate

2011-06-27T09:53:00.001-07:00

A youthful and coherent Carl Sagan in 1966:

Ufonauts have fallen out of fashion as substitute deities in the early 21st Century, so the religious impulse which uses "the cloak of science," as Sagan phrases it, has turned towards Friendly AI and the Singularity instead.

An $80,000+ income from the "Friendly AI" scam?

2011-06-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

I've wondered for awhile how many of these 20/30-something "transhumanists" and "singularitarians" who lack identifiable employment pay their living expenses and can afford to travel to conferences around the world. I suppose a few rentiers with trust funds could have drifted into H+ circles, but not enough to account for the total population.

For example, how does a 31-year-old high school drop out with no job history and a phony "institute" make $80,000 to $100,000 a year, as his OKCupid profile claims? And how does he merit an "open relationship" with a "bisexual girlfriend" who apparently shares his desire to explore polyamory? (Talk about living out a fantasy from 1960's science fiction!) I find the financial aspect of his lifestyle puzzling, to say the least.

It just exceedingly annoys me to see people who reap big rewards without having to work for them.

The economy of the mind comes of age?

2011-06-20T17:22:00.000-07:00

The exodus of China's high-end producers to countries which offer to treat them better reminded me not only of the fictional strike of the "men of the mind" in Atlas Shrugged. It also reminded me of the scenario I read several years ago in The Sovereign Individual, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. I suspect I still have that book buried somewhere in my storage locker, so I can't access it easily for reference. I noticed the following review on Amazon's UK affiliate, however:

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The best cut at future history that I have seen!,10 Mar 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Sovereign Individual (Hardcover)
"The Sovereign Individual" is the most insightful book on "Future History", i.e. attempted prediction of the near future, that I have seen. It describes how the advent of cyberspace will undermine the power of our current nation-states, and how wealthy people, possibly including large parts of the upper-middle class, will shun the tax-happy nation-states and live "off-shore", i.e. in any jurisdiction that suits them, typically small countries such as can be found in the Caribbean. By the same token, a lot of businesses will move their head offices and many of of its other funcions based on cost/benefit, where cost of labour and taxation will be major factors, alhough not the only ones. An increasing number of activities can truly be performed without physical presence, as the world's work becomes increasingly intellectual. My own example of an early adaptor of this method would be Science Fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who lives and writes tax-free in Sri Lanka.
Fundamentally, this trend to the "off-shore" will capitalise on an emerging free market in sovereignty, i.e. the provision of government services such as defence, police and court system. The likely result of this market will be that large scale support of unprofitable activities, such as massive transfer payments to nominally or factually poor people, will become increasingly rare, as those govenments that focus on protection will be able to offer a lower price. Thus, businesses and wealthy individuals will simply settle in jurisdictions that have minimal or nonexistent welfare systems.
Another of the major predictions is that as business becomes globalised, wages will tend to equalise between countries, but become less equal between individuals and between types of work. A computer programmer in Estonia will earn wages not very different from one in the City of London (if not, any new hiring will be in Estonia, and they will send their product instantly to London), whereas both may well earn vastly more than any assemply-line worker in Luton or Narva.
The authors predict that the nation-states, in particular those in the industrialized West, i.e. the USA and Western Europe, will undergo severe disruptions, probably including civil unrest, panicked attempts at taxation of anything that moves (and in particular of anything that does not), governments holding as hostages wealthy individuals, and so on (cf. "The Economist", 1997-May-30, cover story "The Vanishing Taxpayer", published AFTER "The Sovereign Individual").

Notice the date of this review. Recent events make me wonder if we've started to see the fruition of the trends predicted by Davidson and Rees-Mogg.

The sovereign individual lifestyle fascinates me, and I can see why some high-earning people in the economy of the mind would want to shop around for governments which offer decent services in exchange for low taxes, while respecting their property rights. If enough of the alpha producers follow a strategy to protect their interests from countries with progressive politicians, eventually progressives will learn the hard way that they can't threaten their most productive citizens with defamation, violence and rapine, and expect to get away with it.

BTW, Arthur C. Clarke writes about his strategy of using Sri Lanka for tax avoidance in this book. FM-2030's globe-trotting lifestyle may have involved a similar strategy for minimizing taxes.

Timeship story publicizes location.

2011-06-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

The story also signals a lack of diligence and efficiency in carrying out the project. Much of the land lies in a floodplain, for example, which defeats the purpose of selecting the site for a low risk of natural disasters:

Conquering death in Comfort?
Nonprofit could lose tax exemption for not yet having built Hill Country cryonics facility to store human bodies.

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That Sovereign Individual thing has something going for it.

2011-06-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

I've already noted the shrugging of China's new millionaires. Apparently some American shruggers have found refuge in a Southern Cone country:

It is not well known that in several countries, like Argentina's wine country, many of these very wealthy taxpayers are buying property in secluded and posh developments where government leaves them alone (they add to the county's economy), the weather is great and the wine and food are good and inexpensive. It would not be unheard of for just 10 percent, or 90,000, of these wealthy taxpayers to pack up their wealth, hop onto their private jets, leave the United States for good (read "Atlas Shrugged") and move to one or more of these developments. This would be a disastrous blow to the economy, jobs and tax receipts.

Financially successful people these days don't have to put up with "progressive" politicians who attack their character and threaten them with violence and rapine. They can just shop around for other countries where the governments offer to treat them better. And yet again, despite Ayn Rand's nuttiness and confusions, she did have some insight into the political economy of the modern world, and suggested a practical way to protect yourself. Her influence endures, despite its defects, because it make more sense than the abyss of nihilism and abnegation offered by the left.

I just wish that Rand had written the knockout blow of a novel her fanboys claim she did, instead of the suboptimal one sitting on the shelves of every chain bookstore in the country.