EM launch

I read through the Lifeboat site, made a donation, and of course I have
some comments to make.

The Lifeboat site is uniformly alarmist and somewhat over the top. The
one thing that is great about Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill's High Frontier
vision is that it emphasizes the positive. There are things to do,
places to explore, the beginning of a brand new opportunity instead of
seating in a containment shell watching reruns of "I Love Lucy". It
just happens that space colonies solve other problems along the way.

I strongly disagree with the concept that the first and foremost
solution to possible human caused catastrophes in the future is to run
away from them. By running away all we are doing is transporting a
subgroup of a very immature acting population to a different location.
Does the act of being transported to a space colony make this group of
people have god like maturity to go along with the god like technology
they will possess? What we need is for humanity to become more mature.
To understand that the current hedonistic approach to life is getting
us into trouble.

Each one of you who is reading this is saying to themselves that I am
not talking about you. Wrong! So I will give an obvious example. Each
year the cost to our society due to alcohol consumption is enormous:
broken families, ruined lives, missed opportunities, crime, highway
fatalities, infrastructure costs, etc. Since alcohol is a problem, why
are we supporting the consumption of it by partaking of it ourselves. If
we were truly mature, each of us would forever forsake any substance
that the weakest of our fellowmen cannot handle. Our concern would be
for the betterment of all mankind instead of our own pleasure.

Mitchell James