On multiple occasions I have had to tell incredulous people that Niven got the idea of cryonics from real world people not the other way around…

Nothing to point to, just me musing over something after digging up figures on masses involved in spaceflight and comparing them to the rest of human industry.

The total mass EVER launched into orbit from the 1950s to now would fit on about five big freight trains, or four minutes of current global container shipping, or half of a Panamax ship payload.

The total mass launched onto escape velocity is a third of a freight train and an actual majority of that is Apollo.

So little mass, commanding so much outsized attention and myth-making, and that people pin such hopes and eschatological significance onto…

You ever read “The Prospect of Immortality” by the guy who founded the idea of cryonics? Or the “anabolocyte” paper? They’re such trips!

It’s actually about perpendicular to him. Only similarity is that it posits that AI systems are dangerous. Take all the New World Order conspiracy theories and infowars the elite wants to kill you off and take your stuff and become transhuman, with depopulation and you will eat the bugs and stay in your minute city pod, and replace the ruling elites with AIs.

I have been forced to on multiple occasions explain to people that there is a difference between thinking that there’s anything at all intrinsically good about the fact that things like us that have come about the way we have come with expiration dates, and dealing with it.

It’s just the fundamentalist version of our culture’s pathologies as a whole, which has a very hard time imagining anything other than endless progression or apocalypse, neither of which is real.

Heh. Read the actual full paper.

Kardashev didn’t even think that colonizing whole galaxies was the likely end state! He thought that instead everything from billions of light years around would pile into individual huge artificial monolithic structures for efficiency!

The cult at the heart of the rot of the world is built on such unserious foundations

It gets worse

Edit basically if you took 90s black helicopter conspiracists, and early 2000s infowars, plopped them down in the current day with Google and a Claude subscription

The website you linked is down and that article appears to be written in the exact same tone with certain machine text tells as the book itself

https://www.scribd.com/document/1019266552/12-Last-Steps-Dr-Selwyn-Raithe-2025

Classic weird conspiracist funnybusiness with a side of ARG

The Russian Cosmists have so much to answer for.

My parents got super into the spinoff of For All Mankind that takes place in the Soviet Union, “Star City”. The central conceit of that alternate history spate of shows is that Sergei Korolev didn’t die and kept being as awesome as he was at running the Soviet space program. In the spinoff the writers actually knew a bit about what they were doing, and have him more or less directly quoting cosmists at other characters… I got to tell my parents that its people like him that are the reason their new laptop was expensive and that the oligarchs think they’re going to live forever as feudal lords of the solar system.

Admitted speculation:

I did, however, notice of my own accord that I had 4 days with zero scam calls instead of my usual 10-15, which in retrospect looking back corresponds with when a bunch of Russian services went down. I suspect that the automated crawlers and VOIP systems and aggregators perform a background hum of utility for scam and troll services that makes them much less effective in their absence.

You assume that the VCs will keep you alive a little longer as a honeypot to gather more plaintext blackmail material and private information and keep preparing to sell out to Facebook

The presence of billions of dollars under anyone’s control destroys anyone’s brains as their lives have all negative feedback removed, their surroundings become a reflection of their own preferences alone rather than bearing any information about the world, and their social connections become transactional and sycophantic.

Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way

Self-replicating prompt text is a much more interesting vector for misbehaving AI systems

Wonder who gets all the plaintext logs from all their victims

They looking to get off the hook before all the class action lawsuits pile up?

Costly signaling by which one credibly gives something up to follow the precepts of the cult and demonstrate that one believes in the face of personal disadvantage is one of the strongest things that predicts cohesion of a religious movement.

One of the strongest predictors of the cohesion of a religious movement is costly signaling by which people give things up in a highly visible, credible way for the cause, or in a way that only makes sense if they believe in the cause. Deconversion is highly correlated with not witnessing these credible displays.