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From: mmm@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: The Cryonic Nation
Message-ID: <Sep.8.20.20.50.1989.17738@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 9 Sep 89 00:20:51 GMT
Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu
Lines: 33
Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu

Suppose all the cryonicists had their own country.  With nanotechnology
they would be rich as Saudis and immortal as the gods on Mount Olympus.
Assuming they didn't feel a need to reproduce, their population would be
stable.  (They could reproduce at the suicide rate.)

Now think about the outside world.  Here would be the teeming mass of
humanity.  You can't force them to take birth control pills, except by the
barrel of a gun.  Some of them are starving.  If you use nanotechnology
to give them free food, they reproduce some more and run out of
something else such as water, living space, or maybe even air.

Now what are you (the nanotechnologist) going to do?  You need some of
the resources they use.  If you try to help them out, you just increase
their numbers.  They are running out of resources, and cast a hungry
eye at you.

It seems obvious to me the cryonic nation will see the living population
as a danger which they won't be able to tolerate.  You can't sterilize these
people because they don't want to be sterilized.  You can't freeze them
because they don't want to be frozen.  You can't ship them into space
colonies because they don't want to go.  Left to its own devices, the living
population will grow until it strains the ability of the planet to support
it.  The living population IS gray goo, gray goo of the worst and dirtiest
sort.

And what do we do with gray goo?  The cryonicists already know the answer
to this question.

[I don't see what this has to do with cryonicists.  To the extent the analysis 
 is valid, it is valid for anybody.  The difference between the "good guys"
 and the "goo guys" has nothing to do with cryonics or even nanotechnology;
 it is simply the willingness to limit one's own reproduction.
 --JoSH]