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To: nihil who wrote (41837)	11/15/1999 7:50:00 AM
From: Rick Julian	Respond to of 71178

"Sure, but in the universal scheme of things, man is next to nothing." This may be the crux of our disagreement. IMO,"man" is kinda important: our lens of perception gives the world meaning. If wedon't matter, nothing matters.

To: nihil who wrote (41837)	11/15/1999 10:47:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

<<<Sure, but in the universal scheme of things, man is next to nothing.>>> But isn't that a sort of tautology, nihil? Doesn't it say, essentially, "Sure, but in a scheme of things that I stipulate to be immensely greater than man in some way, perhaps only by volume of matter involved, perhaps in the eye of some non-human yet wise observer, perhaps in my personal scale of importance, in that scheme of things, man is next to nothing." And naturally, man would be fairly described as next to nothing, given that restatement (accurate, I think?) of your proposal. Don't you think, nihil, that if a few billion years of "all that 'inner stuff'" is a waste of time, in the absence of a space program guaranteed to be successful at transporting all of our descendents to a home on a new rock, then... it's hard to imagine what isn't a waste of time? (The newly-occupied rock will itself have a finite existence, of course.) And emigration may not work. So those billions of years may be all "we" have. And the "inner stuff" is certainly all we have with which to experience this or any subsequent rocks. So I guess I'm saying that this planet, and each other, may be all there is for us to "take seriously," so we might as well do it the best we can. A few billion years isn't so bad considering the likely alternative. Especially if we could lessen the suffering on this planet as a project alternative to exiting it. An exit which will, btw, if it ever comes to pass, surely involve an ugly scramble for seats. The pronoun "we" may be used rather less inclusively than "we" here are presuming it will be, after we've jettisoned the inner stuff for "our" emigration technology, I think.