from the not-*that*-inevitable dept.
Senior Associate Patrick Salsbury writes "Just found The Lifeboat Foundation, which seems to be the latest project of Eric Klien, founder of the (now defunct) Atlantis Project.
Overall, I like and support the idea of moving into space, and building "space arks" to preserve live and spread it around the Universe, however, I find the choice of language and scenarios on the Lifeboat pages to be…well…alarmist. There's talk about the "inevitability" of a gray goo scenario, and various references to info from Foresight newsletters that I'm almost (but not entirely) sure have been taken somewhat out of context.
Here's a sample of the negativity I'm talking about (from the FAQ):
"Obviously, gray goo is inevitable and with that being the case, so is the end of life itself."
I suspect that having this sort of language and attempting to frighten people into the prospect of space exploration isn't going to be the most productive way of doing things. I'm sure the page could use a review by the various folks here. Go explore the above links, and Crit away! (I tried to embed http://crit.org/ links in the above URLs, but slash munged them.)"
