Ned Ludd lives on

Robert Reed wrote:
> maybe these anti-progress/anti- technology people should abandon
everything. and live life as cavemen "the way nature intended".

I love it when I encounter this sentiment. I just point out that
before modern medicine, infant mortality was ~25%, with 10% of
mothers dying duruing childbirth, total of ~45% of children didn't
live past 12, you're lucky to have all your teeth at 35, and lucky to
live past 50. H.G. Wells wrote of the glowing future of science &
medicine, with people routinely living to the ripe old age of 55.
An accident that today means a few months recovery & therapy would
probably mean loss of a limb or life. A method of cleaning out a
festering wound: leave it exposed to flies, and let the maggots eat
the necrotic tissue. When it starts to itch & hurt more than usual,
then the maggots are down to living tissue.

> I can't remember who it was (Clarke, Sagan, O'Neill, Dyson, etc.),
but some famous, visionary person noted that those people who were
against space exploration and colonization tend to think that humans
are inherently bad or evil, that we are a cancer of matter.

Carol Stoker of NASA Ames and the Mars Society, was the first person
I heard use the phrase "the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement" for
this radical fringe of the environmental movement. Unfortunately,
they never do us the favor of suiciding, and I've never heard of
anyone voluntarily sterilizing themselves for this.

> If there is one thing that made me sick to my stomach, it is the
person who blasted the book, "Mining The Sky".

They quoted one line about the immense profitability from space
making the economic growth due to opening the western continents look
small in comparison (Of course, profits are evil). They didn't
mention his repeated humanist values, and his saying that large scale
space ventures not only made good economic sense, but it's the right
thing to do for Earth & humanity.
You remember the last lines of "Mining the Sky"?
It's a good way to completely put these Voluntary Extinctionists out
of business. Any argument they come up with just points out how they
are anti-humanist. As you quoted "they like trees more than people".

" Having only one Einstein, one Hokusai, one Mozart, one DaVinci, one
Shankara,... is not enough. We need -and can have- a million times as
many. We need intelligence, wisdom, compassion, and excellence. These
godlike traits are manifested in the physical universe only by life,
and in the biological universe, only by intelligent life.
Life is not a cancer of matter; it is matter's trancendance of
itself.
We would be quite wrong to conclude that the asteroid belt, or
solar power... is the ultimate resource. Intelligent life, once
liberated by the resources of space, is the greatest resource of the
solar system.
The material and energy resources of the solar system allow
mankind an infinite future: we can not only break free of the surly
bonds of the Earth, but break free of the Sun and escape its fate.
The fulfillment of time & space is matter; the fulfillment of
matter is life; the highest fulfillment of life is unbounded
intelligence & compassion."

> I wonder how these people will like seeing 5 billion people starve
because Earth cannot sustain more than a billion without technology.
I bet they would just love that.

I run into that all the time too. Not that they all feel this way,
but some actually say that we should leave the Earth to heal -of
course, we sholdn't go to space to do it...
I talk about using space resources & wealth to allow a larger
population than today to all live in bettter conditions than the
richest of today, and they automatically think I'm talking of
bringing Nikes & blue jeans & SUVs to the third world.