The topics:

• Stephen feels he should pay penance for being insufficiently enthused about his great hometown of Shreveport. He'll being writing a post about it soon.

• Michael Darling spoke about early labor organizer Joe Hill.

• Stephen recommends the movie "Eagle Eye." He said it is an effective near-future thriller. Speculist readers will enjoy it.

• Stephen enjoyed "City of Ember" even more. He compared it to "Wall-e" and "Dark City." This story was originally a kid's novel and it remains kid-appropriate - though some kids might be spooked by the giant star-nosed mole.

• The guys got into a brief discussion on Global Cooling. But Sally in the chat room reminded us that recent cooling might have something more to do with autumn approaching.

  Good call!

• Phil read an email from Christine Peterson. Christine reminded us of the Open Source Sensing Future Salon and Convergence '08.

  Phil's mental block gave us the opportunity to talk at greater length about the World Transhumanist Association.

• Phil and Stephen commented upon the size of the financial bail out. According to MSNBC, the $700 Billion price tag would buy seven Apollo programs and 70 Large Hadron Colliders. Phil asked what else would that money purchase?

  The answer - quite a bit. And all five of the programs that Phil mentioned (space elevator, nuclear fusion, universal assembler, cure for aging, friendly artificial general intelligence) would be transformative. With any of these developments our economy would be improved in ways that are hard to imagine today.

• Why a space elevator? Robert Heinlein was quoted as saying "Once you're in low Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere."

• Here's a great update on the continuing development of the Bussard reactor.

• In chapter 6 of Eric Drexler's book "Engines of Creation" he said:

  In short, at the end of a long line of profitable developments in computer and molecular technologies, the cost of designing and producing things will drop dramatically. I above referred to "dirt cheap" raw materials, and indeed, assemblers will be able to make almost anything from dirt and sunlight. Space resources, however, will change "dirt cheap" to "cheap-dirt cheap": topsoil has value in Earth's ecosystem, but rubble from asteroids will come from a dead and dreary desert. By the same token, assemblers in space will run off cheap sunlight.

• The short story that Stephen referenced about universal assemblers is "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls." You can hear it for free here.

• Developing life extension technology has been compared to the Apollo program. If it cost the same, we could afford to cure aging seven times for the price of the bail out.

  And think of what it would mean to our economy if people didn't have to get old, wear out, and die. The social security actuarial problem... solved.

• Phil said that if AGI is possible, $700 billion would get us there. And, like the kid with one wish who wishes for more wishes, it also buys us all the other things on Phil's list.

• Stephen emphasized that we need to push forward. In response to Bill Joy's essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," Paypal founder Peter Thiel said this:

  I think it's not even wrong. It's one of those things that's so far off the mark that it is not even wrong.

  There are obviously dangers in these technologies. But I think Joy's approach would actually lead to the future he fears. If the virtuous people relinquish these things, it means that they will be developed by the evil people, and that seems to me to be a recipe for these technologies going wrong.

  The only way for something like Joy's approach to work would be basically a totalitarian world-state in which we control the technologies worldwide. It is incredibly arrogant to say that the only smart people in the world exist in the United States and that if you can stop it in the U.S., you'll stop it everywhere. Maybe it's going to be developed by the Chinese military. Maybe it'll be developed by people working for Islamic terrorist groups.

  The anti-Joy view that I would articulate is that what we need to be doing is to be pushing the accelerator further and harder.

  Stephen argued that whether its regulation or economic downturn that tempts us to abandon the future - for the reasons that Thiel gave - we should shrug it off and hit the accelerator.

• Phil and Stephen liked Michael's quip "government is so 20th century."

• One guy in the chatroom suggested replacing money with a personal worth point system. Stephen remarked that money is that already. Phil countered that money is transferable - people that have never done anything can still get their hands on it.

  Phil alluded to our past discussion on "whuffie" with Ivan Kirigin:

  Ivan mentioned the sci-fi book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." The novel imagines a world with very little scarcity. Goods are manufactured by robots and everone has most everything they need. "Whuffie" replaces money and is a constantly updated rating that measures how much esteem and respect other people have for you. This rating system determines who gets the few scarce items, like the best housing, a table in a crowded restaurant, or a good place in a queue for a theme park attraction.

  The novel's author practices what he preaches. This novel is available for free here.

• MikeD has a FastForward Radio mug coming to him. Matt Duing and OKDavid Ray tied in the latest contest, so they both get a Speculist coffee mug. All three need to contact us at Speculist1 [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Adam and the Walter Boys. The song is "Keep Smiling."

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