Doug_S. comments on Beyond the Reach of God - Less Wrong

66 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 October 2008 03:42PM

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Comment author: Doug_S. 04 October 2008 09:12:56PM 2 points [-]

And I do quite fancy well-written, well-researched "alternate history" fiction, such as Turtledove's, so I'd love to read a novel about what happens in 1812 to the fledgling USA if the British are free to entirely concentrate on that war, not distracted by Napoleon's last hurrahs in their backyard, because Napoleon was never around...

Nitpick:

The "War of 1812" was basically an offshoot of the larger Napoleonic Wars; Britain and France were both interfering with the shipping of "neutral" nations, such as the United States, in order to hurt their enemy. After France dropped its restrictions (on paper, at least), the United States became a lot less neutral, and James Madison and Congress eventually declared war on Britain. (Several years earlier, Jefferson, in response to the predations of the two warring European powers, got Congress to pass an Embargo Act that was to end foreign trade for the duration of the war, so as to keep the U.S. from getting involved. It didn't work out so well.)

In other words, without Napoleon, there probably wouldn't have been a War of 1812 at all.

What I don't understand is that we live on a planet, where we don't have all people with significant loose change

A) signing up for cryonics B) super-saturating the coffers of life-extensionists, extinction-risk-reducers, and AGI developers.

Instead we currently live on a planet, where their combined (probably) trillions of currency units are doing nothing but bloating as 1s and 0s on hard drives.

Can someone explain why?

Many people believe in an afterlife... why sign up for cryonics when you're going to go to Heaven when you die?