On behalf of everyone with a long term view, let me say: fuck you you ignorant fuck. My apologies to those few readers who are still sensitive to the word "fuck", but this fucking idiot is trying to promote an error that will fucking kill my fourth generation offspring, their progeny, and my hopes for the survival of mankind. Forgive me for being emotional about that, but if you can't get emotional about the Death of Man, you're dead inside already.

The rise of science occurred in an interglacial age that's lasted barely 9000 years. Our written history is barely 5,000 years. The vast majority of who and what we are (our culture) happened in the last 300 years. 10,000 years ago we were barely animals. When it ends the decline will be swift and violent, and for the 100,000 years of ice age that follows we'll be barely animals again if we survive at all. That end is due. It cannot be prevented no matter what we do. It's an Earth orbital thing. The survival of any mammals to the end of that 100KY, let alone Men, is quite questionable.

If our culture is to survive we need to establish a self-sufficent offspring of that culture in some place where our thermonuclear cruise missiles cannot reach them. That place is off of the Earth, and we need to do it now . "Someday later" is too late. A colony here on Earth won't do because in the decline there will be quite a lot of violence and there is no corner on the planet that won't be at risk. Even if a culture survived the Troubles, they would not have the resources to get us off this rock and so would slowly decline until they were extinct. 100,000 years is a long time. The end is the same. The end of terrestrial civilization is certain. It's inevitable. It's only the end of all civilization, science and culture, all that we have learned, potentially the end of the human genome, if we choose to allow it to be. If we choose that, if we listen to your ignorant mumblings, we deserve our fate and you have won, you ignorant fuck. Still, there will be no more NASCAR.

Mankind is it seems the first terrestrial species that has to choose extinction rather than having it thrust upon us. We could escape it if we wished. We could get off this rock if we cared. We could backup our genome and all of our knowledge offsite - if we so chose. But we won't. If we choose extinction then our supposed intelligence has no advantage over the peanut-sized brains of dinosaurs. It's another failed path in the Darwinist exploration of Life's potentials - tried this time and forgotten only to be retried a billion years hence when our mass has been restirred with the galaxy and given time to stew.

Now please find a convenient fire and die in it before you infect someone else with your idiocy.

citation

/I'm not prone to cite bible verse, but there you go. All your software patents are invalid. It sez so in the Good Book. The verse itself is an uncited theft of the work of Sophocles c. 429 BCE - himself a synthesist who didn't cite the vast realms of prior art from which he distilled his digests of the written and performed arts into their purest forms. Sophocles was a hack, but we don't have records of the prior art he stole, or today he'd be a pirate. His synthesis though? Timeless art in and of itself. It's good thing for us ancient Greece didn't have DMCA, DRM, and eternal copyright or he'd be Sophowho? To most he already is.

If only ancient Greece, or modern Phoenix, had a sort of distributed Library of Alexandria where one works could not be forgotten - where the wisdom of our fathers and their fathers (and their foolishness too) might be preserved and so remain available to our children and their children. Something like a Google for books. Alas, copyright prevents it and copyright is now eternal in every practical sense. So it is that each new generation, constrained by previously patented and copyrighted art has diminishing realms of imagination to work with - until the lawyers finally abolish imagination altogether and we reach the asymptote where creation ends. So then we lay upon our children the duty to rethink the thoughts we've had, to re-invent our inventions, and to do so in peril of the trolls who lay claim to a third degree ownership of any potential perceived reference to characters or invented places in a brief manuscript published in 100 copies only, 200 years before - and upon their children we lay a logarithmically greater burden.

As patents are the death of invention, copyrights are the death of art. A pity our children must climb these mountains we've built for them without the benefit of a culture, but culture itself is deprecated in this regime in preference to whatever mindless new drivel can escape lawsuits long enough to become popular - and then is itself extinguished in a flurry of lawyers and cocaine.

We might have stood on the shoulders of giants, but now we huddle in fear of lawyers.