Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!bionet!apple!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: Daniel.Mocsny@uc.edu (daniel mocsny) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: The Cryonic Nation Message-ID: Date: 11 Sep 89 22:22:49 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Univ. of Cincinnati, College of Engg. Lines: 47 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , mmm@cup.portal.com writes: > Suppose all the cryonicists had their own country. With nanotechnology > they would be rich as Saudis and immortal as the gods on Mount Olympus. > > 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. Obviously a man unfamiliar with advertising technology. Working completely by trial and error, without a mechanistic understanding of the human brain, our advertising establishment is already able to convince most of the public in the industrial world to purchase all sorts of frivolous dreck they would never have realized a need for if left to themselves. Furthermore, the advertising industry is able to command brand loyalty that would have most religious and political leaders seething with envy. Convincing people to limit their numbers is simply an advertising problem, albeit a challenging one. Nanotechnologists who have realized immortality should be able to marshal the necessary information power. They might not have to stoop to persuasion, either. If they're giving free food to the starving, then certainly they should have the ability to add agents to the food that can alter reproductive capacity. (Birth control pills are rather primitive, you know. How about a super-nanotech IUD that waits in a Fallopian tube and intercepts the ovum every other month?) Or worse, they may know enough about the brain and its mechanisms of wants to re-engineer them directly. Knowing how to fiddle with desires leads to a philosophical abyss, however. For example, if you can change your desires, then on what basis do you change them? Your pre-existing desires? Stanislaw Lem has toyed with these ideas in his fiction. He said, essentially, that if you can be anyone and have any convictions, then you are no one and you have no convictions. Dan Mocsny dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu [Quite an anthropocentric, albeit very common, point of view. What does it matter in the long run whether you "are someone"? Those convictions (memes) which are successful will spread, and after a while the laws of evolution will determine the shape of people's convictions. This is nothing new with nanotechnology, although the process may be accelerated a bit. --JoSH]