Population Control Policy Issues

On Friday, October 3, 2003, at 08:42 PM, avatar643 wrote:

> Well, even todays biggest transnational companies are
> constrained by the laws of their base countries, and they must all
> have base countries by the simple fact that there isn't much
> territory on Terra which is not controlled by a national government
> of some sort.

There is another reason. Corporations are legal entities where the
investors only risk the money they have put into the corporation. No
matter what happens, you can only lose what you've put in. Not all
companies are like this, Lloyds of London is a counter example. Now,
who grants (and enforces) this lack of liability? Government. In
addition, without government there is no one to protect your company
against physical attack (a very effective way of eliminating
competition).

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect
and deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.