Peter lawless

by M.C. Price [Editor: This article is reprinted from Extropy #6, Summer 1990. Extropy was published by The Extropy institute] First this little planet with its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning. - The Shape of Things to Come. Cataclysmic Futures As an immortalist I want to live forever. Not just for a thousand or a googolplex of years but forever. It is the almost universal opinion of scientists and philosophers that the universe we currently live in will become uninhabitable with the passage of time, and this is accepted at face value by many people. Such people can dismiss the idea of personal immortality because they see it as incompatible with a universe in which life is an ephemeral phase. This article will expose the total falsity of this mindset, by the simple expedient of applying a modicum of logic to this situation. Pessimistic eschatological visions of the future have traditionally appealed more to the human mind than utopian visions. In Scandinavian mythology all is lost at the end of time as the Frost Giants wage war against the gods, the Fenris-Wolf is loosed and the World-Worm awakens, leading to the destruction of the three worlds of gods, dwarfs, and men in the cataclysmic fire of Ragnarok. Hinduism has a ruling trinity of the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer; the latter will destroy the world in an orgy of flame at the appointed hour. Early Christianity revelled in the imminent destruction of the world, as set out in Revelations, until its adoption by the emperor Constantine as a state religion, and is still enthused about in almost every crackpot fundamentalist sect, permeating many facets of Western culture. Turning to more serious, (if not quite so graphic) visions, there