I've been puzzled about why you were arguing.  We agreed last time we talked about this, IIRC.  I was mainly pointing things at Kevin, who has often invoked future technology in discussions of environmentalism.

The closest I can get to this subject is the movie, "The Sixth Sense".

I hardly invoked high-future technology, either. A conversion of persons from biological entities to mechanical and/or digital entities is not distantly far-fetched. No, we cannot do it right now, but it's hardly inconcievable. If if we weren't able to, say, transplant brains into custom-built machinery, or download / reconstruct minds, we could argubly replace sufficient organs in the human body with mechanical alternatives that run more efficiently and have a longer shelf-life (perhaps even generate power the run bodily functions without the need for standard food intake) without it being such a chore.

I do admit, this is merely speculation; my concern is, much of the world doesn't care to speculate or think ahead anymore. Burning fossil fuels, having four kids and shacking-up in a low-efficiency home with a full 4-door garage was good enough for most people's dads and their dads, so it's good enough for them. Certain ways of farming were good enough back then too, so they're also good enough now.

Norman Borlaug used his vision of a future generation of agriculture of crop species, and his scientific understanding of the process, to change that latter mentality and keep the world fed. I wish for someone to to the same for the former mentality.

'We shouldn't explore space while there are starving kids in Africa' is a retarded statement. By that same token, I could argue that we shouldn't write books while there are starving kids in Africa, we shouldn't watch TV while there are starving kids in Africa, we shouldn't talk on message boards while there are starving kids in Africa, we shouldn't have sex while there are starving kids in Africa, etc, etc, etc, all because these are activities that take away from our time, energy and resources that we could pour into helping out the starving kids in Africa. Note that this argument could be applied to any two subjects ('It's irresponsible to to have dinner with your family while there are homeless people you could be feeding in your city'), and is constantly pulled-out by political or religious advocates who want to curtail some scientific endeavor ('Why are we spending so much time on Global Warming when there's an HIV crisis in Africa?')

As Watcher has said, these are false dilemmas. There will always be some leve of starvation and poverty (unless we can fix the problem of humans requiring food alotogther. Ahem). What would it do for the strain of such huge human populations on Earth if we were to start voyaging outward? In the long term, this is one of the better available solutions to the problem caused by an exponentially growing number of human beings on a world with only dwindling resources. no doubt that Earth is a unique planet, but that's not relevant to the topic; failing finding another terran world, we can simply build our own environments (virtual or physical).

There are unprecendented environmental challenges directly ahead, and we're skipping merrily towards them with hardly  second thought. We cannot get by these without drastic change - we can either make the changes ourselves, and meet these obstacles on our own terms, or, we can do little to nothing, and let the changes be forced upon us suddenly and violently.

Peak oil and global warming are not specious topics to be merely shrugged at: they are extremely frightening monstrosities that we need to decide, right now, to either avoid or be devoured by. Civilization has toppled like a house of cards on multiple occassions in the past, and it is extremely naive to think that it couldn't possible give way again. There are plenty of proposed ideas for curtailing both of these issues, but they're nothing but vapor until someone is willing to step-up and actually try some of them out, without pessimists and nihilists crowding around, hurling fruit and yelling, 'Why are you spending all that money building that fancy thing when there are hungry kids in the world!? It's not like it matters - we're all going to go extinct anyway!'

Mostly I want to meet the publishers and whatnot. I've been writing since I was a wee tot (even have had some published), and would love to write for a living. Of course, that requires . . . uhm, whaddaya call it?

Oh, yeah. Talent.