One of the most important insights that I’ve gotten in working with biologists and ecologists is that today it’s actually not really known on a scientific basis how well different conservation interventions will work. And it’s because we just don’t have a lot of data.
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The smartphone is the ultimate example of a universal computer. Apps transform the phone into different devices. Unfortunately, the computational revolution has done little for the sustainability of our Earth. Yet, sustainability problems are unique in scale and complexity, often involving significant computational challenges.
When it comes to a field as fast-moving and as high of stakes as genetic engineering, how do we proceed wisely? How do we balance our own wildness and civility as we develop increasingly powerful ways to interact with the living world?
I think that Western modern civilization ended up kind of caught in a trap locked in its egoic structure, and based our whole trip on kind of hyperindividualism, accumulation of resources, and so on. And we’ve now reached a point where we can’t go further than that.
We’re living in this amazing time. The speed of innovation has created technologies that have literally reimagined industry after industry. Technology has improved almost every tool that we use on a daily basis, and it’s time to start bringing this technology to use for good.
Although our ultimate goal is protecting biological diversity on the land and protecting the integrity of these natural communities, the strategic way to get there is to prevent these ranches from being sub-divided. And it turns out the issue that these ranches are having, you know, they get together and talk and say, “Wow our neighbor over here sold out and that ranch got sub-divided…” every time that happens, it puts pressure on the remaining ranchers who want to stay in ranching.
My main goal is not to die in the first place. I hope to keep living, hopefully long enough that science will have solved the aging problem and I won’t have to die. But since I don’t know how long that’s going to take, cryonics is the real backup policy for me.