Friday, June 01, 2007

Spacetravel and nanobots

Posted by goatchurch at 2:47 AM


Anyone who knows my other blog will be familiar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute which is -- very worryingly -- taken seriously by many U.S. policy-makers. The problem, as I.F.Stone famously put in words, is that:
All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.
But this is not the blog for political ranting. I'm here to show you the following relevant excerpt from the CEI after-dinner speech where Fred the Director speaks from a space-ship in the year 2107 having gained immortality after his body was retooled by nanobots.

He's gives his usual spiel, that I won't pass comment on, that this glorious future somewhere away from planet Earth was finally made possible by the abolition of government regulation -- as if laws of physics and ecology were imposed by the government.

The point I'm trying to make is that this art-form -- the broadcast from the bright and better future -- used to be common currency. Now it's very rare and looks horribly dated. I think there is an important anthropological message here.

Or maybe I've got my observations wrong, and there is a whole slew of such videos on YouTube I am not aware of. If anyone locates any, I'll post them up. All contemporary views of the future are important to this project.

Often such stories are politically motivated. The defining characteristic is that it's a story about what will happen if we follow the policies that they are advocating, as opposed to a horror story of what will happen if we do not implement the policies. Do people propose positive arguments anymore?

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