Sunday, October 24, 2004





Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman's "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" is on prominent display at Barnes & Noble. This is one I simply have to read. My problem with "living long enough to live forever" is that the biosphere's deterioration will probably preclude the vastly extended lifespans the book promises. It's likely we will indeed have the technological muster to stop aging in the next 50 years. But by then the planet will be virtually uninhabitable.

I'm bleakly assuming, of course, that humanity will stick to one planet and forego mass space colonization. I could be wrong on that. I hope I'm wrong on that. But if we're to relieve Earth's ever-worsening population burden, we need to start colonizing really damned soon.

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