It’s not our bloody fault that our ancestors were more enterprising in the imperialist department than theirs..

I mean, take Congo. Growing food there is absurdly easy(compared to Norway), there is lot of rainfall and the country is chock full of all kinds of valuable stuff from fossil fuels to rare minerals. By all rights, they should’ve been colonizing us, not the other way around.

Besides, I’m not sure whether the genetic stuff will be important. It’ll all be illegal. No one is going to start genetically modify humans. (I curse that … Shelley and her Frankenstein..)

“Africans, what have they ever done right?”

Well I’m sure it didn’t help that a bunch of Europeans moved in, took a shit load of diamonds and gold and then pissed off without so much as a ‘by your leave.’

And don’t count the dark continent out so quickly there’s as much genetic diversity inside africa as everywhere outside it. Who knows what sort of neat things we’ll be able to learn from our ancestral contemporaries.

Don’t forget that the urge to reproduce is a very strong biological drive.
This guy puts it nicely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2XD_Rht8Nc
(my bet is that Mr.Watts would with that speech 100%)

@Africa

@Hjóolegur
Viruses don’t work much on me.
I mean, flu that sends most people to bed for a week, that’s what, about six hours feeling sort of bad, and then it’s gone. For bacteria, there are antibiotics.

@Keippernicus
Africans, what have they ever done right?
BTW, the concept, it’s from this Dilbert strip, an excellent one:
[img]http://capitalogix.typepad.com/.a/6a00e5502e47b288330120a5dba4e7970c-800wi [/img]

I have a feeling that this century is going to be nastier than the last though. We’re in for a ride. There’s this joke:
Q: What is a paradox?
A: That our shitty present will look like a golden age in twenty years..

Oh, the bacteria and the viruses have it covered, never fear.

You said “Long lifespans would mean insane overcrowding, and this planet of ours is already too crowded. I suppose they’ll hand out free AK-47s and cases of ammo with the life extension pills and let us decide how to reduce numbers.”

Don’t be so twencen, man. Who would want to reproduce when you could just live forever yourself? Also they could build sterility into the treatment easy money.

I like the idea about AK’s except for the way that’s worked out in Africa. Not exactly ideal.

He also wanted to thank everyone for the roses on his grave – he says the dead can’t do many things, but they can still smell flowers and good cognac, so it is especially thoughtful.

If anyone has heard from Mac since his death, I hope they will report in about what he found in that ultimate of post-human existences.

I guess he was very unlucky and got dealt some awful genes. Ufo-people don’t drop dead.. were he a weapons expert like that unlucky British guy who died from a tiny little cut with his penknife. And it wasn’t even down, it was across.

Did you people know that many microbiologists seem to think that the 2001 anthrax attacks were likely carried by agents coopearing with some elements of US gov’t? Supposedly, the anthrax used was so good, that they deem it very improbable that one man without access to state of the art lab tech could’ve made it… of course, the FBI is trying to vigorously downplay that possibility
article here:
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/bt/anthrax/news/aug1508anthrax.html)

What made me interested in this was, that Vesmír (universe), the premier Czech science magazine published an 4-page article co-written by a microbiologist & a journalist claiming that after reviewing all information available to them on the internet, they think it made not by one rogue scientist, but by a very sophisticated laboratory, probably from Battelle. It’s not a publication given to publishing any nonsense, or at least, hasn’t been in the past.

@Keippernicus.
Long lifespans would mean insane overcrowding, and this planet of ours is already too crowded. I suppose they’ll hand out free AK-47s and cases of ammo with the life extension pills and let us decide how to reduce numbers.

Part of my great, idealistic, probably false hope for the future is that I will live long enough to see the singularity or reap the advance of medical science to the point that typical human lifespans no longer really matter. Without this horizon, this fleeting chance to be among the first immortals, I do not know how I could have hope for the future.

Some days it feels like we’re so close and others still light years away. In either case it’s a right fucking shame when so bright a candle just vanishes without warning.

Should be fun getting to sleep tonight, dammit.

It is a shame, though. I’d never heard of Mac Tonnies before I read this post but, having taken a quick look at his blog, he does sound like the sort of person I’d have been interested in following. I can’t say I’ll miss him, but – for me – his death is an opportunity lost.

Maybe they count AA among natural causes?

Before we wax Machiavellian, does anyone know his health status? Did he have a chronic disease? Did he come from a family of heart attack victims or those with a proclivity towards anuerims? If medical in nature, can we assume that whatever it was that did the deed, was undiagnosed?

Are we looking at some kind of closet drug use here, or did he simply mix the wrong prescription meds with a glass of wine?

Of course, then we might assume that he was suicided for some knowledge he had just gleaned about alien conspiracies.

Such a shame. Another talent lost.