From: djheydt@kithrup.com   
      
   In article <106nl87$1je30$1@dont-email.me>,   
   Evelyn C. Leeper  wrote:   
   >But the logical continuation of that is that humans who believe in   
   >Heaven shouldn't be afraid of death, and the humans who believe in   
   >reincarnation/samsara shouldn't be afraid of death either. And   
   >while that is true of many sincere believers in either of those   
   >belief systems, a lot of people fear death, avoid death, and in   
   >general would prefer to stay alive. From a logical point of view,   
   >this doesn't make a lot of sense. And in fact Mickey says that he   
   >always feels scared. (It's not clear how he knows this, since the   
   >recording of his memories is not done in real time, so he should   
   >not be able to remember the last seconds/minutes/hours of his   
   >lives.)   
      
   [Hal Heydt]   
   By that logic, as someone somewhere between atheist and agnostic,   
   I should be afraid of death.  I'm not.  I first faced my real   
   chance of death a bit over 25 years ago and found it didn't   
   bother me at all. (The situation was preping for bypass surgery.   
   Not all who undergo it survive.  My vastly bigger fear was   
   surviving with brain damage, which can also happen.)   
      
   Quietly, for a good many years, I have maintained that, if   
   Dorothy's beliefs were correct, I will tear the afterlife apart   
   seeking her out.  If my beliefs are correct, all that is left of   
   her are the words she wrote and the memories of the living.  If I   
   manage to carry out her last wishes, I will find out which of us   
   is correct after at least another 17 years.   
      
   >I leave it to the reader to decide how likely this   
   >plan is, either in getting people to agree to it, or in creating a   
   >fully self-sustaining city when almost all the inhabitants are   
   >either children or permanently pregnant women.   
      
   See Asimov's story featuring "Might Maxon".  I've forgotten the   
   story title, but someone is sure the know once the character name   
   is present as a trigger.   
      
   >Musk does add the qualifier "if launch rate growth is   
   >exponential." This assumes 100,000 people transferred during each   
   >launch window; Musk sets a million people as what is needed for a   
   >self-sustaining civilization, and seems to assume that is also   
   >sufficient. The logicians among you know that "necessary" and   
   >"sufficient" are not at all the same; if Forth Worth, Texas (a   
   >city of a million people) were somehow transported to Mars in a   
   >protective bubble, everyone would starve fairly quickly, assuming   
   >they didn't run out of oxygen first. How Musk thinks a highly   
   >technological civilization can be self-sufficient on Mars in forty   
   >years is a mystery.   
      
   Graydon Saunders in his "Commonweal" books   
   grapples--peripherally--with the issue of how many people it   
   takes to sustain a "technological" society.  They periodically   
   bring up the issue of whether or not 1.5 million is enough.   
   There are references to a list being maintained of what they   
   cannot--at any given moment--make for themselves with the note   
   that the list starts with "abrasives" and isn't getting any   
   shorter.  One periodic mention is finding a substitute for   
   tropical gums for binders in printers ink, as the Second   
   Commonweal is completely within the temperate zone.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)