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Wipeout Frontline
Here’s the only card we really have to read - 70% chance of survival, this evidence answers all
of their scenarios
Leslie, 1996 (John, Professor emeritus of Philosophy, The End of the world, 145-146)
Let me now make some guesses about the seriousness of the various threats.Even after taking the doomsday argument into
account, there remain many grounds for hopeand none for absolute despair. For a start, there's the fact that the doomsday argument
could be much weakened if the world were indeterministic, which is what many people think it to be. This will be discussed in just a
moment.Next, it seems that supernova
explosions, solar flares, mergers of black holes or of neutron
stars, large-scale volcanism or impacts byasteroids or comets are veryunlikely to kill all ofus in the
near future. Now, as was said earlier% it isprobably only the near future that we need consider, because
humans can be expected to spread throughout the solar system fairly soon. They could thereafter
survive in great numbers regardless of whether all Earth's inhabitants were destroyed.How about natural diseases? Megacities, air travel, etc.
do tend to make them more dangerous, yet this could be more or less counteracted by advances in medicine. Even if not, the diseases
appear unlikely to kill absolutely everyone. It seems still less likely that a collapse of banking systems, or systems (perhaps computer
controlled) for distributing food, water or electricity, would exterminate one and all, although the results could well include famine and
anarchy.Ozone layerdestruction,
greenhouse warming, the pollutioncrisis, the exhaustion
of
farmlandsandthe loss of biodiversityall threaten to cause immense misery. Yet they too might well appear unlikely
to wipe out the entire human race, particularly since people could take refuge in artificial biospheres.
Now, a few surviving thousands would probably bea sufficient base fromwhich, new billions could grow. The same can
probably be said of global nuclear warfare. Artificial biospheres could maintain the human race if the remainder of the planetary surface
became uninhabitable.Advances in nanotechnologymight
be very perilous. However, there is every hope that they
wouldn't be made before humans had movedfir enough towards a single world government
to be able to insist on safeguards. Furthermore, colonization of the entire solar system, and perhaps even of other
star systems, would
probably be progressing speedily when the nanotechnological revolutionarrived - so that, once
again, destruction of all humans on Earth wouldn't mean the end of humans as a species. Risks from high-
energy experiments- the most important one would be of upsetting a metastable vacuum - seemto me unlikely to
materializedespite my confidence (which only a few physicists share) that extremely high energies are likely to be had
in the next three centuries. I expect it will be found, either by theoretical investigations or because no disaster in fact occurs, that the vacuum
state which we ii habit is fully stable, while strange-quark matter can exist only in ultradense stars.All the same,, the above-discussed dangers
can be impressive enough to destroy complacency. And I think the chief risks have yet to be mentioned. Genetic engineering seems to me one
of them, particularly because of its possible uses in biological warfare or in the hands of criminals. Another is that intelligent machines will
come to replace humans - although, at !east if the machines exploited quantum effects in achieving unity of consciousness (see Chapter 2), it
perhaps isn't clear that this would be a disaster. Finally, we may well run a severe risk from something-we-know-not-what: something of
which we can say only that it would come as a nasty surprise like the Antarctic ozone hole and that, again like the ozone hole, it would be a
nevertheless feel inclined to say that the probability of the human race
avoiding extinction for the next five centuries is encouragingly high, perhaps as high as 70 per
cent.Also that if it did so, then it would be likely either to continue onwards for many thousand centuries or else to he replaced by someconsequence of technological advances.I
thing better.
Erraff on every question of this debate
Cowen, 2004 (Tyler, Department of Economics at George Mason University, “The epistemic problem does not refute
consequentialism,” November 2, http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyler/Epistemic2.pdf)
Let us start with a simple example, namely asuicide bomberwho seeks to detonate a/ nuclear device
inmidtown Manhattan. Obviously we would seek to stop the bomber, or at least try to reduce the probability of a detonation. We can
think of this example as standing in more generally for choices, decisions, and policies that affect the long-term prospects of our civilization.
If we stop the bomber, we know that in the short run we will save millions of lives, avoid a massive tragedy, and protect the long-term
strength, prosperity, and freedom of the United States. Reasonable moral people, regardless of the details of their meta-ethical stances,
should not argue against stopping the bomber. No matter how hard we try to stop the bomber, we are not, a
priori, committed to a very definite view of how effective prevention will turn out in the long run . After all,
stopping the bomber will reshuffle future genetic identities, and may imply the birth of a
future Hitler. Even trying to stop the bomber, with no guarantee of success, will remix the future in similar
fashion. Still, we can see a significant net welfare improvement in the short run, while facing radical generic
uncertainty about the future in any case. Furthermore, if we can stop the bomber, our long-run welfare estimates will likely show
some improvement. The bomb going off could lead to subsequent attacks on other major cities, the emboldening of terrorists, or perhaps
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While the more distant
future is remixed radically, we should not rationally believe that some new positive
option has been created to counterbalance the current destruction and the new possible
negatives. To put it simply, it is difficult to see the violent destruction of Manhattan as on net, in ex ante terms,
favoring either the short-term or long-term prospects of the world. We canof course imagine possible
scenarios wheresuch destruction works out for the better ex post; perhaps, for instance, the explosion
leads to a subsequent disarmament or anti-proliferation advances. But we would not breathe a sigh of
reliefon hearing the news of the destruction for the first time. Even if the long-run expected value is impossible
to estimate, we need only some probability that therelevant time horizon is indeed short(perhaps
broader panics. There would be a new and very real doorway toward general collapse of the world.
a destructive asteroid will strike the earth). This will tip the consequentialist balance against a nuclear attack on
Manhattan.6 If this example does not convince you, consider the value of stopping a terrorist attack that would decimate the entire United
States. Or consider an attack that would devastate all of Western civilization, or the entire world. At some point we can find a set of
consequences so significant that we would be spurred to action, again in open recognition of broader long-run uncertainties. Surely at some
upfront change must be large enough to provide a persuasive reason for or against it. What if a
cosmological disaster destroyed 99.9999 percent of allintelligent lifeacross the universe? Yes, it is
possible that subsequent cosmological events could lead to an even greater blossomingof
wonders, but at some point of comparison this point is simply fatuous. Mostof the lifein the
universe is being destroyed and more likely than not this is a horrible catastrophe even in
the much longer run. So we can argue “how large” an upfront event is needed to sway us toward an
point the
evaluative judgment, but a sufficiently large upfront event should do the trick .
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A/T Viviocentrism
Derbyshire, 2010 (John, writer for the National Review and New English Review, “September Diary,” October 6,
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/248613/september-diary-john-derbyshire)
And like all but the very best intellects, Heisman’s is trapped in the received cant notions of his time, most particularly in late-20th-century
Western hysterias about “prejudice” and “discrimination.” He actually coins a word in this context: “viviocentrism,” the absurd and irrational
prejudice that favors being alive over being dead. No kidding:
The attempt to go beyond ethnocentrism and anthropomorphism leads towards overcoming the prejudices of what I call viviocentrism, or,
life-centeredness. Just as overcoming ethnocentrism requires recognition of the provincialism of ethnic values, overcoming viviocentrism
emerges from the recognition of the provincialism of life values.#…#Overcoming the prejudice against death, then, is only an extension and
continuation of the Western project of eliminating bias, especially biologically based biases (i.e. race or sex based biases). The liberation of
death is only the next step in the political logic that has hitherto sought to overcome prejudices based on old assumptions of a fixed biological
human nature#…#(p. 24)
Heisman believed he had identified the ultimate victim group — the dead! Warn’tnothin’ Politically Incorrect about ol’ Mitch.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be making fun of Mitchell Heisman while his family members are still grieving their loss. I can’t feel much guilt about it,
though. Suicide is always a supremely selfish business, and Heisman inflicted far more pain on those who loved him than anything my mild
mockery might add.
And for all the shallowness and muddle of his suicide note, Heisman was at least tackling a real and deep problem to the best of his ability.
How exactly do you demonstrate that being alive is better than being dead? Most of life is pretty boring, and parts of it are perfectly awful.
Why bother?
If you can persuade yourself that your thoughts will survive your dying, you have solved the problem. However you conceive of the Afterlife,
it gives you a reason to live. It may be a grim place, entry into which should be put off for as long as possible. This was the view of the
Ancients, expressed in the Homeric epics, the Odes of Horace, and the ghost-worlds of Chinese folk religion. Or there may be an alternative
Afterlife, a fun place — a “metaphysical Disneyland,” philosopher Thomas Metzinger calls it — but for admission to which you have to have
lived correctly, according to rules relayed by the gods through their human intermediaries. That’s the view taken by the Abrahamic religions.
In either case you have a reason to prefer life over death — or as Heisman would see it, a justification for your viviocentric bigotry.
If you don’t have those powers of self-persuasion, you are stuck with either irresolvable doubt or blank nihilism. The former was the position
of most modern thinkers before the 20th century: Hamlet’s soliloquy, Pascal’s wager, Dr. Johnson, Darwin. The latter came to the fore with
Nietzsche, and has been the majority opinion among intellectuals ever since.
In this biological age, so impatient of introspection, our thoughts drift not so much towards the contents of these various notions as towards
their consequences for our species. In that regard, Mitchell Heisman’s suicide at least serves a useful purpose, reminding us that whatever the
truth value of nihilism, it is a biological dead end. Heisman, like Nietzsche, left no descendants.
Kain, 2010 (E. D., “Nihilism is painless,” October 10, The Washington Examiner,
http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/examiner-opinion-zone/nihilism-painless)
The suicide note Heisman penned is a little lengthier than your typical note – running a total of 1,905 pages with “1,433 footnotes, a 20-page
bibliography, and more than 1,700 references to God and 200 references to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche”.
“Every word, every thought, and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless,’’ he wrote. “The experiment in nihilism
is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us.”
[…]
“If life is truly meaningless and there is no rational basis for choosing among fundamental alternatives, then all choices are equal and there is
no fundamental ground for choosing life over death,’’ he concluded.
So, on Yom Kippur, he donned a white tuxedo, walked up the top step of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, and shot himself in the right
temple with a silver revolver. The treatise on nihilism was emailed to friends and family.
I suppose I simply can’t wrap my mind around the concept of nihilism, any more than I can wrap my mind around the act of suicide.
To go so far as to create an entire of philosophy of suicide – and Heisman goes so far as to coin a term, ‘viviocentrism’, to explain how the
living have a prejudice against the dead – strikes me as more than a little absurd, and even contradictory.
I certainly can’t reconcile the strands of this philosophy – that someone could care so much about proving the meaningless of life, that they
could find purpose in this, and yet believe that life was nonetheless meaningless. To write it down, to make it a labor of love, to live even one
second beyond the point at which one decides that there is no choice, really, between life and death, makes the theory seem somehow
insincere, or logically juvenile – more an experiment in narcissism than one in nihilism.
John Derbyshire writes:
[F]or all the shallowness and muddle of his suicide note, Heisman was at least tackling a real and deep problem to the best of his ability. How
exactly do you demonstrate that being alive is better than being dead? Most of life is pretty boring, and parts of it are perfectly awful. Why
bother?
Yes and no. It’s an old question after all. That Heisman decided to answer it with such a long treatise and such a gory footnote does not really
change the nature of the question, does not really help us answer it either. Meaning is a process. It’s different for everyone.
There may be very little point to living, but that’s still beside the point. Heisman’s choice is a false one: we don’t choose between life and
death. Life is outside of our realm of choice. It’s something we’re given – either by a creator or by the biological decisions of our parents (or
both, depending on how you look at it). Life simply is. Death is a choice, but not life. They are not really equivalents. The latter is simply the
word we use when we describe the former ending.
I suppose I am biased. I’m no nihilist. Not even a ‘Blithe Nihilist’ as Derbyshire describes himself, though I have certainly had my moments
of doubt. But somewhere in most of our lives there is a purpose.
For Heisman it was his book. That he did not see a need for a sequel does not really change the fact: there was purpose there. Meaning even.
Heisman’s final act, far from adding substance to his treatise, only adds color to its futility, and pain to those in his life who will suffer far
more from his death than he ever will.
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A/T No Meaning to Life
Even if life has no value, don’t let it bother you
Derbyshire, 2010 (John, writer for the National Review and New English Review, “September Diary,” October 6,
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/248613/september-diary-john-derbyshire)
Listen to Granny My own life philosophy is one I call Blithe Nihilism. I believe there is no point to life, but I try not to let the belief bother
me. Blithe Nihilism has its roots in the grand English anti-intellectual tradition — in the conviction that life is to be got on with and not
thought about too much.
Once in a while — after some string of personal disasters, or in a random melancholy mood, or when reading some bloke’s 1,905-page
suicide note — once in a while the defenses crack and you find yourself looking down into the pit. When that happens, you need to have
some habitual remedy close at hand.
As with hiccups or the common cold, each of us has his own preferred remedy, which might not work for another person. My own treatment
is to summon up the voice of my grandmother, Esther Knowles. When someone in her presence was moaning about his misfortunes, Granny
would say: “There’s many a poor soul in the churchyard would be glad to change places with you.”
That settles it for me; though as I said, it might not work for another person. Granny lived to nearly 86 and bore 13 children. I call that a test
of aliquidism (Latin aliquid = “something,” as opposed to Latin nihil = “nothing”), and a pretty successful one.
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Time Travel
Turn – Time travel means we can go back in time and warn people about super-weapons
including the risk of time travel which solves every other spark scenario and means we can
give super future technology to people that helps them solves resource scarcity and prevent
nuclear war
Time Travel Bad Impacts Are Conceptually Incoherent – If time travel is theoretically
possible but destroys the universe someone in the future would have tried to travel back and
destroyed the space-time of the universe of which we are a part – the fact that the universe
exists in its present state proves no one has traveled in time now or in the future which means
your impact won’t and can’t happen
Time travel won’t destroy space time – if its possible it would preclude causality violations
New Scientist in ’05(Mark Buchanan, “No paradox for time travelers”, June 18,
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7535&feedId=online-news_rss20)
THE laws of physics seem to permit time travel, and with it, paradoxical situations such as the possibility that people
could go back in time to prevent their own birth. But it turns out that such paradoxes may be ruled out by the weirdness
inherent in laws of quantum physics. Some solutions to the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity lead to
situations in which space-time curves back on itself, theoretically allowing travellers to loop back in time and meet
younger versions of themselves. Because such time travel sets up paradoxes, many researchers suspect that some
physical constraints must make time travel impossible. Now, physicists Daniel Greenberger of the City University of
New York and Karl Svozil of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria have shown thatthe most basic features of
quantum theory may ensure that time travellers could never alter the past, even if they are able to go back in time.
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Particle Accelerators
Particle colliders only create tiny black holes that pose no danger to humanity – experts agree
Bland, 2008 (Eric, Discovery News, September 10, “Particle Smasher's Black Holes Would Be Tiny”
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/09/10/black-hole-cern-print.html)
CERN scientists say that a black hole is "virtually impossible." Martin Rees, a U.K. physicist, has put the odds of a
CERN black hole at one in 50 million. Cynics have pointed out that those odds are about the same as some statesponsored lotteries. But when the fate of the world is at stake any risk is too great a risk, contend two groups, one in the
United States and one in Europe, who are suing to stop the LHC from operating. Other people have threatened to take
matters into their own hands, issuing death threats to CERN scientists and theoretical physicists. Frank Wilczek, the
2004 Nobel Prize winner and a professor of theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of
the scientists who has received death threats. He points out there are massive black holes and then there are smaller,
much less destructive black holes. According to Wilzcek, fears of an Earth-gobbling black hole are grounded in the
popular idea that all black holes are galactic monsters just waiting for the chance to gobble up any nearby star or planet
that gets too close.While supermassive black holes, like the one at the center of our galaxy, do gobble up stars and
planets, microscopic black holes, like the ones the LHC could create, would look and act completely differently. "It's
like we only had one word for every animal out there," said Wilczek. "It's like they had elephants in mind when they
came up with the word 'animal.' But little amoebas are animals too." "The word is the same but the object is very
different from the standard image that people think of." If (and that remains a big "if") the LHC creates a black hole it
will be extremely tiny, much smaller than a single atom, said Wilzcek. Its mass will be the same as the two protons that
created it. Its range will be small -- only a few times the diameter of the two protons. According to Wilczek, that's too
small for the baby black hole to eat enough particles to grow to any real size. With no food, the black hole will simply
wink out of existence in a fraction of a second.To create a stable black hole, one capable of consuming the Earth, the
black hole would have to be several hundred tons. A LHC-generated black hole would weigh a tiny fraction of a gram.
So what impact would a small, LHC-generated black hole have? Wilczek says the only likely effect is that all of the
quarks and other particles produced in the collisions will zoom away a fraction of a second slower than they normally
would have. The only ones who would even notice that a black hole was there would be the CERN scientists looking at
their screens and watching the data. That means even if a black hole were created in Geneva it would have no effect on
humanity at large. But, for curiosity's sake, just what would happen to someone if they were dropped into a
supermassive black hole, like the one at the center of the galaxy? "At first they might not even notice," said Wilczek.
"We could be in a black hole right now and we wouldn't even know it," since information can't escape a black hole.
Eventually, however, the person would start to feel the forces. The huge differences in gravity in the black hole would
slowly stretch a person out while simultaneously compressing his or her sides. Eventually, a person would stretch out
like a strand of spaghetti. That's a fearsome image, but it won't happen at CERN. CERN's internal reports have
discredited the possibility, and outside experts agree: CERN is safe. And while Wilczek sees no logic or credence in the
alarming rumors surrounding CERN, he does see an upside to all of the attention the experiment is gathering. "People
can start to think about black holes, and hopefully that will suck them into thinking about the really exciting science that
will happen at CERN,' said Wilczek.
Collisions in space occur that are more powerful than any collision that could be conducted in
a man made particle accelerator – we are still here, meaning there is no chance we could
accidentally destroy the universe.
Rees, 1995 (John, astrophysicist and cosmologist; Royal Society Research Professor at King's College, Cambridge,
"An Ensemble of Universes" http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/x-Ch.15.html
With the Dutch astrophysicist Piet Hut, I wrote a paper addressing the question of whether accelerators could create
concentrations of energies that had never existed anywhere in the universe since the big bang itself. Our conclusion was
quite reassuring. We calculated the collision rate between cosmic-ray particles — which are particles that move, at very
low densities, in interstellar space, at very close to the speed of light. We worked out the most energetic collisions that
ever happened in our part of universe, and we discovered that these would have been substantially more energetic than
any conceivable event that could occur in an accelerator. That's reassuring. It means you'd have to go a long way beyond
the collision energies expected in supercolliders before there was any risk of Doomsday.
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Lasers
Laser experiments are key to the survival of the universe
Kaku in ‘4 (Michio, Prof. Theoretical Physics @ City College New York, “Parallel Universes”, p. 330-332)
How can we build a machine capable of leaving our universe, given unlimited access to high technology? At what point can we hope to
harness the power of the Planck energy? By the time a civilization has attained type III status, it already has the power to manipulate the
Planck energy, by definition. Scientists would be able to play with wormholes and assemble enough energy to open holes in space and time.
There are several ways in which this might be done by an advanced civilization. As I mentioned earlier, our universe may be a
membrane with a parallel universejust a millimeter from ours,floating in hyperspace. If so, then the Large Hadron Collider may
detect it within the next several years. By the time we advance to a type I civilization, we might even have the technology to explore the
nature of this neighboring universe. So the concept of making contact with a parallel universe may not be such a farfetched idea.But let us
assume the worst case, that the energy at which quantum gravitational effects arise is the Planck energy, which is a quadrillion times greater
than the energy of the LHC. To explore the Planck energy, a type III civilization would have to create an atom smasher
of stellar proportions.In atom smashers, or particle accelerators, subatomic particles travel down a narrow tube. As energy is injected into the tubing, the particles are
accelerated to high energies. If we use huge magnets to bend the particles' path into a large [end page 330] circle, then particles can be accelerated to trillions of electron volts of energy. The
greater the radius of the circle, the greater the energy of the beam. The LHe has a diameter of 27 kilometers, which is pushing the limit of the energy available to a type 0.7
a type III civilization, the possibility opens up of making an atom smasher the size of a solar system
or even a star system. It is conceivable that an advanced civilization might fire a beam of subatomic particles into outer space and accelerate
them to the Planck energy. As we recall, with the new generation of laser particle accelerators , within a few decades
physicists might be able to create a tabletop accelerator capable of achieving 200 GeV (200 billion electron volts) over a distance of a meter.
By stacking these tabletop accelerators one after the other, it is conceivable that one could attain energies at which space-time becomes
unstable.If we assume that future accelerators can boost particles only by 200 GeV per meter, which is a conservative assumption, we
would need a particle accelerator 10 light-years long to reach the Planck energy. Although this is prohibitively large for
any type I or II civilization, it is well within the ability of a type III civilization .To build such a gargantuan atom smasher, a type
III civilization might either bend the path of the beam into a circle, thereby saving considerable space, or leave the path stretched out in a line
that extends well past the nearest star.
civilization.Butfor
That’s key to avoid the big freeze which destroys the universe
Kaku 04 (Michio, Prof. Theoretical Physics @ City College New York, Discover, “How to Survive the End of the
Universe”, 12-3, http://discovermagazine.com/2004/dec/survive-end-of-universe)
To journey safely from this universe to another—to investigate the various options and do some trial runs—an advanced
civilization will need to be able to harness energy on a scale that dwarfs anything imaginable by today’s standards. To
grasp the challenge, consider a schema introduced in the 1960s by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev that classified civilizations according to their
energy consumption. According to his definition, a Type I civilization is planetary: It is able to exploit all the energy falling on its planet from the sun (1016 watts). This civilization could derive
limitless hydrogen from the oceans, perhaps harness the power of volcanoes, and maybe even control the weather. A Type II civilization could control the energy output of the sun itself: 1026 watts, or
10 billion times the power of a Type I civilization. Deriving energy from solar flares and antimatter, Type IIs would be effectively immune to ice ages, meteors, even supernovas. A Type III civilization
would be 10 billion times more powerful still, capable of controlling and consuming the output of an entire galaxy (1036 watts). Type IIIs would derive energy by extracting it from billions of stars and
A Type III civilization would be able to manipulate the Planck energy (
black holes.
1019 billion electron volts), the energy at which space-time becomes
foamy and unstable, frothing with tiny wormholes and bubble-size universes. The aliens in Independence Day would qualify as a Type III civilization. By contrast, ours would qualify as a Type 0
A civilization like ours growing at a modest 1 to 2 percent per
year could make the leapto aType I civilization in a century or so, to a Type II in a few thousand years, and to aType IIIin a hundred thousand
to a million years. In that time frame, a Type III civilization could colonize the entire galaxy, even if their rockets traveled at less than the speed of
light. With the inevitable Big Freeze at least tens of billions of years away, a Type III civilization would have plenty of
time to develop and test an escape plan.
civilization, deriving its energy from dead plants—oil and coal. But we could evolve rapidly.
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Anti-Matter Weapons
It would take 2 billion years to make enough antimatter for a small weapon
CERN 08 (CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, European Organization for Nuclear Research,
“Angels and Demons,” January, http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html, Kunal)
Can we make antimatter bombs? No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the
same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already. Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was
a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb,
we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice
but
. Why has antimatter received no media attention? It has received a lot of media
attention, but usually in the scientific press. Also, antimatter is not ‘new’. Antiparticles have been known and studied for 75 years. What is new is the possibility to produce anti-hydrogen atoms, but this
is also mainly a matter of scientific interest. Is antimatter truly 100% efficient? It depends on what you mean by efficient. If you start from two equal quantities m/2 of matter and m/2 of antimatter,
then the energy output is, of course, exactly E=mc2. Mass is converted into energy with 100% efficiency. But that is not the point: how much effort do you have to put in to get m/2 grams of
antimatter? Well, theoretically E=mc2 because half of the energy will become normal matter. So you gain nothing. But the process of creating antimatter is highly inefficient; when you dissipate energy
into particles with mass, many different - also short-lived - particles and antiparticles are produced. A major part of the energy gets lost, and a lot of the stable antimatter-particles (e.g. positrons and
antiprotons) go astray before you can catch them. Everything happens at nearly the speed of light, and the particles created zoom off in all directions. Somewhat like cooking food over a campfire: most
of the heat is lost and does not go into the cooking of the food, it disappears as radiation into the dark night sky. Very inefficient. Do you make antimatter as described in the book? No. The production
and storage of antimatter at CERN is not at all as described in the book: you cannot stand next to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and see it come out, especially since the LHC accelerator is not yet in
operation. To make antiprotons, we collide protons at nearly the speed of light (to be precise, with a kinetic energy of about 25 GeV) with a block of metal, e.g. copper or tungsten. These collisions
produce a large number of particles, some of which are antiprotons. Only the antiprotons are useful, and only those that fly out in the right direction. So that's where your energy loss goes: it is like
trying to water a pot of flowers but with a sprinkler that sprays over the whole garden. Of course, we constantly apply new tricks to become more efficient at collecting antiparticles, but at the level of
elementary particles this is extremely difficult. Why then do you build the LHC? The reason for building the LHC accelerator is not to make antimatter but to produce an energy concentration high
enough to study effects that will help us to understand some of the remaining questions in physics. We say concentrations, because we are not talking about huge amounts but an enormous concentration
of energy. Each particle accelerated in the LHC carries an amount of energy equivalent to that of a flying mosquito. Not much at all in absolute terms, but it will be concentrated in a very minute
volume, and there things will resemble the state of the universe very shortly (about a trillionth of a second) after the Big Bang. You should compare the concentration effect to what you can learn about
the quality of a wooden floor by walking over it. If a large man wearing normal shoes and a petite woman wearing sharp stiletto heels walk over the same floor, the man will not make dents, but the
woman, despite her lower weight, may leave marks; the pressure created by the stiletto heels is far higher. So that is like the job of the LHC: concentrate a little energy into a very minute space to
produce a huge energy concentration and learn something about the Big Bang. Does CERN have a particle accelerator 27 kilometres long? The LHC accelerator is a ring 27 kilometres in
circumference. It is installed in a tunnel about 100 m underground. You can see the round outline of it marked on a map of the area. In fact, why do you make antimatter at CERN? The principal reason
is to study the laws of nature. The current theories of physics predict a number of subtle effects concerning antimatter. If experiments do not observe these predictions, then the theory is not accurate and
needs to be amended or reworked. This is how science progresses. Another reason is to get extremely high energy densities in collisions of matter and antimatter particles, since they annihilate
completely when they meet. From this annihilation energy other interesting particles may be created. This was mainly how the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider functioned at CERN until 2000, or
the Tevatron currently operates at Fermilab near Chicago. How is energy extracted from antimatter? When a normal matter particle hits an antimatter particle, they mutually annihilate into a very
concentrated burst of pure energy, from which in turn new particles (and antiparticles) are created. The number and mass of the annihilation products depends on the available energy. The annihilation
of electrons and positrons at low energies produces only two (or three) highly energetic photons. But with annihilation at very high energy, hundreds of new particle-antiparticle pairs can be made. The
decay of these particles produces, among others, many neutrinos, which do not interact with the environment at all. This is not very useful for energy extraction. How safe is antimatter? Perfectly safe,
given the minute quantities we can make. It would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it, but this would take us billions of years. If so, does CERN have protocols to keep the public
safe? There is no danger from antimatter. There are of course other dangers on the CERN site, as in any laboratory: high voltage in certain areas, deep pits to fall in, etc. but for these dangers the usual
industrial safety measures are in place. There is no danger of radioactive leaks as you might find near nuclear power stations. Does one gram of antimatter contain the energy of a 20 kilotonne nuclear
bomb? Twenty kilotonnes of TNT is the equivalent of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The explosion of a kilotonne (=1000 tonnes) of TNT corresponds to a energy release of 4.2x1012 joules
(1012 is a 1 followed by 12 zeros, i.e. a million million). For comparison, a 60 watt light bulb consumes 60 J per second. You are probably asking for the explosive release of energy by the sudden
annihilation of one gram of antimatter with one gram of matter. Let's calculate it. To calculate the energy released in the annihilation of 1 g of antimatter with 1 g of matter (which makes 2 g =
0.002 kg), we have to use the formula E=mc2, where c is the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s): E= 0.002 x (300,000,000)2 kg m2/s2 = 1.8 x 1014 J = 180 x 1012 J. Since 4.2x1012 J corresponds to a
you ‘only’ need half a gram of
antimatter to be equally destructive as the Hiroshima bomb, since the other half gram of (normal) matter is easy enough
to find. At CERN we make quantities of the order of 107 antiprotons per second and there are 6x1023 of them in a single
gram of antihydrogen. You can easily calculate how long it would take to get one gram: we would need
6x1023/107=6x1016 seconds. There are only 365 (days) x 24 (h) x 60 (min) x 60 (sec) = around 3x107 seconds in a
year, so it would take roughly 6x1016 / 3x107 = 2x109 = two billion years ! It is quite unlikely that anyone wants to wait that long.
kilotonne of TNT, then 2 g of matter-antimatter annihilation correspond to 180/4.2 = 42.8 kilotonnes, about double the 20 kt of TNT. This means that
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High Energy (Strangelets)
No impact to high energy experiments
Webb in ’02(Stephen, Physicist at Open University of London, “If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is
Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life”, p. 129-130)
The unlikely litany of catastrophes that the RHIC (and other particle accelerators) might inflict upon us does not end
with black holes and strangelets. Paul Dixon, a psychologist with only a hazy grasp of physics, believes collisions at
theTevatronparticle accelerator at Fermilabmight trigger the collapse of the quantum vacuum state. A vacuum is simply
a state of least energy. According to current cosmological theories, the early Universe may have briefly become trapped
in ametastable state: a false vacuum.The Universe eventually underwent a phase transition into the present "true" vacuum, unleashing in the process a colossal amount of energy
— it is similar to what happens when steam undergoes a phase transition to form liquid water . But what if our present vacuum is not the "true" vacuum? Rees
and Hut published a paper in 1983 suggesting this could be the case.is3 If a more stable vacuum exists, then it is possible
for a "jolt" to cause our Universe to tunnel to the new vacuum — and the point at which the jolt occurs would see a
destructive wave of energy spread outward at the speed of light. The very laws of physics would change in the wake of the wave of true vacuum. Dixon
thought that experiments at the Tevatron might cause a jolt that could collapse the vacuum. He was so worried he took to picketing Fermilab with a homemade banner saying "Home of the next
however, we need not worry unduly about an accelerator-induced apocalypse. As Rees and Hut themselves pointed out in their original paper, through
the phenomenon of cosmic rays Nature has been carrying out particle-physics experiments for billions of years at
energies much higher than anything mankind can achieve.165 If high-energy collisions made it possible for the Universe
to tunnel to the "true" vacuum — well, cosmic rays would have caused the tunneling to occur long ago. The concept of
an accelerator accident causing the destruction of a_ world (or the whole Universe, in the case of a vacuum collapse) is
really a non-starter. The physics of these events is not known perfectly — that is why physicists are carrying out the research — but they are
well enough known for us to realize that the doom-merchants have it wrong in this case. We have to look elsewhere for
a resolution of the paradox.
supernova."164 Once again,
Strangelets are all hype – scientists say they don’t really exist. They are just messing with
people. This subsumes their evidence.
Boyle, 2008(Alan, MCNBC Cosmic Log, “Doomsday Fears Spar Lawsuit”
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/27/823924.aspx)**Kaku is a theoretical physicist at the City College
of New York
Strangelets: Smashing protons together at high enough energies could create new combinations of quarks, the particles that protons are
made of. Sancho and Wagner worry that a nasty combination known as a stable, negatively charged strangelet could theoretically turn
everything it touches into strangelets as well. Kaku compared this to the ancient myth of the Midas touch We see no evidence of this
bizarre theory," he said. "Once in a while, we trot it out to scare the pants off people. But it's not serious."
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Zero Point Energy
Nobody can make zero point energy even if they wanted to
Gardner, 2007
(Martin, “Notes of a fringe watcher,” Jan/Feb, http://www.csicop.org/si/2007-01/fringe.html)
One of the strangest books ever written about modern physics was published in 2002, and reprinted two years later. Titled Energy from the
Vacuum (Cheniere Press), this monstrosity is two inches thick and weighs three pounds. Its title page lists the author as “Lt. Col. Thomas E.
Bearden, PhD (U.S. Army retired).” “Dr.” Bearden
is fond of putting PhD after his name. An Internet check
revealed that his doctorate was given, in his own words, for “life experience and life
accomplishment.” It was purchased from a diploma millcalled Trinity College and University—a British
institution with no building, campus, faculty, or president, and run from a post office box in Sioux
Falls, South Dakota. The institution’s owner, one Albert Wainwright, calls himself the college “registrant.” Bearden’s
central message is clear and simple. He is persuaded that it is possible to extract unlimited free
energy from the vacuum of space-time. Indeed, he believes the world is on the brink of its greatest technological
revolution. Forget about nuclear reactors. Vacuum energy will rescue us from global warming, eliminate poverty, and provide boundless
clean energy for humanity’s glorious future. All that is needed now is for the scientific community to abandon its “ostrich position” and allow
adequate funding to Bearden and his associates. To almost all physicists this questfor what is called “zero-point energy”
(ZPE) is as hopeless as past efforts to build perpetual motion machines. Such skepticism drives Bearden up a wall.
Only monumental ignorance, he writes, could prompt such criticism.
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Artificial Intelligence
Robots would revere human kind and not destroy us
Kurzweil 01(Ray, June 18, http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0212.html?, developer of the omni-front
OCR, the first print-to-speech reading machine, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer
capable of creating orchestral sounds, founder of nine businesses, member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, recipient of the 1999
National Medal of Technology (nation’s highest tech honor). Basically, he knows his robots. )
What doemotions have to do with intelligence? In my view, our emotional capacity represents the most intelligent thing we do. It's the cutting
edge of humanintelligence, and as the film portrays, it will be the last exclusive province of biological humanity, one that machines will
ultimately master as well. By the way, if David wishing to become "a real boy" sounds like a familiar fairy tale, the movie makes the allusion
and metaphor of Pinocchio explicit. Even early in his development, David is sufficiently appealing that he wins the sympathies of the Flesh
Fair spectators, much to the dismay of the master of ceremonies, who implores the audience to "not be fooled by the talent of this artistry." In
the third conception of machines that the movie presents, we see entities that are supremely sublime. I've always maintained that we will
ultimately change our notion of what it is to be a machine. We now regard a machine as something profoundly inferior to a human. But that's
only because all the machines we've encountered are still a million times simpler than ourselves. But that gap is shrinking at an exponential
rate, and the movie examines what I believe will be the last frontier: mastering our most noble emotions, a capability displayed by only one
human in the movie and sought by at least one machine. I won't give away the movie's ending by revealing whether David is successful in his
quest, but I will say that at one point he does display a decidedly inhuman degree of patience.It was also my feeling that the very advanced
entities we meet later in the movie are displaying a noble character that is life-affirming in the Spielbergiansense. I have also maintained that
futureAI's will appreciate that they are derivative of the human-machinecivilization, and will thereby revere their
biological ancestors. This view is supported in Spielberg's conception of the most advanced machines that we meet in the film.
Advanced AI is impossible – we can’t understand the complexities of how our own brains
work, let alone how to build them
Drexler 86(Engines of Creation “Thinking Machines” http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_5.html,
K. Eric)
There seems to be only one idea that could argue for the impossibility of making thought patterns dance in new forms of matter. This is the idea of
mental materialism - the concept that mind is a special substance, a magical thinking-stuff somehow beyond imitation, duplication, or technological
use. Psychobiologists see no evidence for such a substance, and find no need for mental materialism to explain the mind. Because the complexity of
the brain lies beyond the full grasp of human understanding, it seems complex enough to embody a mind. Indeed, if a single person could fully
understand a brain, this would make the brain less complex than that person's mind . If all Earth's billions of people could cooperate in
simply watching the activity of one human brain, each person would have to monitor tens of thousands of active
synapses simultaneously - clearly an impossible task. For a person to try to understand the flickering patterns of the
brain as a whole would be five billion times more absurd. Since our brain's mechanism so massively overwhelms our
mind's ability to grasp it, that mechanism seems complex enough to embody the mind itself.
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Nanotech
Fears of ‘grey goo’ are outlandish and based on dated information
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, 2003 (“Grey Good is a Small Issue” December 13,
http://crnano.org/BD-Goo.htm)
Fear of runaway nanobots, or “grey goo”, is more of a public issue than a scientific problem. Grey goo as a result of out of control
nanotechnology played a starring role in an article titled "The Grey Goo Problem" by Lawrence Osborne in today's New York Times Magazine. This article and other recent fictional portrayals of grey
biosphere-eating goo is a gripping story, current
molecular manufacturing proposals contain nothing even similar to grey goo. The idea that nanotechnology
manufacturing systems could run amok is based on outdated information . The earliest proposals for molecular manufacturing technologies echoed
goo, as well as statements by scientists such as Richard Smalley, are signs of significant public concern. But although
biological systems. Huge numbers of tiny robots called “assemblers” would self-replicate, then work together to build large products, much like termites building a termite mound. Such systems
appeared to run the risk of going out of control, perhaps even “eating” large portions of the biosphere. Eric Drexler warned in 1986, “We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicat ing
others have developed models for making safer and more efficient machine-like systems
that resemble an assembly line in a factory more than anything biological . These mechanical designs were described in detail in Drexler's 1992 seminal
assemblers.” Since then, however, Drexler and
reference work, Nanosystems, which does not even mention free-floating autonomous assemblers. Replicating assemblers will not be used for manufacturing. Factory designs using integrated
nanotechnology will be much more efficient at building products, and a personal nanofactory is nothing like a grey goo nanobot. A stationary tabletop factory using only preprocessed chemicals would
be both safer and easier to build. Like a drill press or a lathe, such a system could not run wild. Systems like this are the basis for responsible molecular manufacturing proposals. To evaluate Eric
A grey goo robot would face a
much harder task than merely replicating itself. It would also have to survive in the environment, move around, and
convert what it finds into raw materials and power. This would require sophisticated chemistry. None of these functions
would be part of a molecular manufacturing system. A grey goo robot would also require a relatively large computer to store and process the full blueprint of such a
complex device. A nanobot or nanomachine missing any part of this functionality could not function as grey goo.Development and use of molecular manufacturing
will create nothing like grey goo, so it poses no risk of producing grey goo by accident at any point.
Drexler's technical ideas on the basis of grey goo is to miss the far more important policy issues created by general-purpose nanoscale manufacturing.
‘Grey Goo’ is science fiction – nanotechnology can be built without self replicating. Their
authors are just fear-mongering.
Institute of Physics, 2004 (“Nanotechnology pioneer slays “grey goo” myths” July 6,
http://www.iop.org/EJ/news/-topic=763/journal/0957-4484)
Eric Drexler, known as the father of nanotechnology, today (Wednesday, 9th June 2004) publishes a paper that admits thatself-replicating
machines are not vital for large-scale molecular manufacture, and that nanotechnology-based fabrication can be thoroughly nonbiological and inherently safe. Talk ofrunaway self-replicating machines, or “grey goo”, which he first cautioned against in his book Engines of
Creation in 1986, has spurred fears that have long hampered rational public debate about nanotechnology. Writing in the Institute of
Physics journal Nanotechnology, Drexler slays the myth that molecular manufacture must use dangerous self-replicating machines. “Runaway replicators,
while theoretically possible according to the laws of physics, cannot be built with today’s nanotechnology toolset ,”says Dr. Drexler, founder of the Foresight
: “Self-replicating machines aren't necessary
for molecular nanotechnology, and aren’t part of current development plans.” The paper, Safe Exponential Manufacturing by Chris Phoenix, Director of Research of the Center for
Responsible Nanotechnology, (CRN) and Dr. K. Eric Drexler, also warns tha t scaremongering over remote scenarios such as “grey goo” is taking
attention away from serious safety concerns, such as a deliberate abuse of the technology. Phoenix said: “Runaway replication would only be
Institute, in California, and Senior Research Fellow of the Molecular Engineering Research Institute (MERI). He continued
the product of a deliberate and difficult engineering process, not an accident. Far more serious, however, is the possibilit y that a large-scale and convenient manufacturing capacity could be used to
make powerful non-replicating weapons in unprecedented quantity, leading to an arms race or war. Policy investigation into the effects of molecular nanotechnology should consider deliberate abuse as
a primary concern, and
runaway replication as a more distant issue.”
The scientist who first promulgated the ‘grey goo’ theory has since rejected – self
replicatingnanobots are only possible in Michael Chriton’s novels
Kalaugher, 2004 (Liz, Northwestern University, “ Grey Goo and Other Scary Stories” June 9,
http://www.discovernano.northwestern.edu/affect/societalimpact/scarystories)
In 1986, Dr. Eric Drexler published his book entitled Engines of Creation. The book included Drexler’s fears about the future of nanotechnology and vividly described the possibility of miniature
“grey goo” and the notice generated a
great deal of fear (not to mention subject matter for a number of science fiction writers). Since then, researchers have learned enough about nanomanufacturing to declare the grey goo scenario “obsolete.” In a 2004 interview, Eric Drexler stated, “Updated molecular
manufacturing concepts…make fears of accidental runaway replication - loosely based on my 1986 grey goo scenario quite obsolete. Chris Phoenix [of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology] andIwrote the paper to counter the main threat posed by grey goo,
which is that all the hype diverts attention from more important issues - research directions, development paths, and the role of advanced
devices called “nanobots,” capable of reproducing themselves and eventually taking over the planet. He labeled the resulting mess
nanotechnologies in medicine, the environment, the economy, and in strategic competition.” About the time that the “nanobots” story was cooling off, Michael Crichton’s science fiction thriller Prey
was released in bookstores. In Crichton's book, miniature devices called “nano-robots” capable of reproducing themselves, eventually take over the world. Sound familiar? Although the story is about as
possible as the story lines from Crichton’s other works like Jurassic Park, there are just enough scientific facts sprinkled into the story to make it sound somewhat plausible. While there are still many
, it’s important to separate the science fact from the science fiction.
unknowns surrounding nanotechnology
The majority of nanotechnology research focuses
on issues other than nanobots, and specifically the design of new materials with properties that derive from their size and composites, and which can be used to make a positive impact in fields ranging
from medicine to energy conversion and storage.
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Quantum Mining
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Black Holes
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Haarp
HAARP impacts are a myth – any impact immediately dissipates in the atmosphere
ATS 8Above Top Secret, http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread368515/pg1
There are several facts that point to HAARP being nothing like what it is portrayed as here. Why must every government project be labelled
as a weaponry/ weather manipulation expereiment? Why is it that HAARP is said to be involved in every major natural disaster? Natural
disasters are called "natural disasters because they are......natural. So anyway here is a few of the myths and facts about HAARP MythHAARP caused the China earthquake Fact- No, tectonic activity caused by the Phillipine plate moving against the Eurasian plate caused the
earthquake. In fact earthquakes have been occuring since the dawn of time.....HAARP since 1990 Myth- HAARP caused the colourful clouds
seen before the earthquake Fact- No, diffraction of sunlight by water and ice particles caused it. It is a well knownatmopshericphenomenen
known as iridescence. Link at bottom of page Myth- HAARP is a secret, secure miltary site Fact- Apparently alaskanresidents can drive right
up to the compound, not very secretive is it? And if you visit the official HAARP website, there are web cams operating that can be viewed.
Apparently there is an open house every year as well Myth- HAARP is a weapon used to disrupt/ destroy enemy satellites or spacecraft using
high frequency radio beams to transmit large masses of power Fact- Again no. HAARP only generates 3.6MW of power, which is much less
than than the energy that the earth and the ionosphere recieve from the sun. Hardly a spacecraft disabling level Myth- HAARP caused the
Burma Cyclone Fact- No, a moist tropical air mass fed by evaporation from the ocean and subsequent latent heating, combined with strong
steering in the tropopause created the Burma Cyclone. Again nothing abnormal for this part of the world. Again cyclone records go 100's of
years back.....far before HAARP was even thought about Myth- HAARP is a weather manipulation machine/weapon/tool/ experiment FactNo, HAARP is a scientific experiment ot study the behaviour of the Earths ionosphere, which lays far above the troposphere where all of the
Earths weather takes place Myth- HAARP lifts the ionosphere with a super powerful radio beam containing microwaves, which rebound back
to earth, sending powerful elctro magnetic waves back to earth penetrating everything Fact- Had to laugh at this one.....again it only emits
3.6MW. Should also mention that any heating of the ionosphere dissipates quickly....usually for the same amount of time as it has been
heated.
Haarp is already operational
Chossudovsky 2k, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa (Michel, “H.A.A.R.P.”, Google)
While there is no concrete evidence of HAARP having been used, scientific findings suggest that it is at present
fully operational. What this means is that HAARP could potentially be applied by the US military to selectively
modify the climate of an "unfriendly nation" or "rogue state" with a view to destabilizing its national economy.
Agricultural systems in both developed and developing countries are already in crisis as a result of New World Order policies including
market deregulation, commodity dumping, etc. Amply documented, IMF and World Bank "economic medicine" imposed on the Third World
and the countries of the former Soviet block has largely contributed to the destabilization of domestic agriculture. In turn, the provisions of
the World Trade Organization (WTO) have supported the interests of a handful of Western agri-biotech conglomerates in their quest to
impose genetically modified (GMO) seeds on farmers throughout the World. It is important to understand the linkage between the economic,
strategic and military processes of the New World Order. In the above context, climatic manipulations under the HAARP
program (whether accidental or deliberate) would inevitably exacerbate these changes by weakening national
economies, destroying infrastructure and potentially triggering the bankruptcy of farmers over vast areas . Surely
national governments and the United Nations should address the possible consequences of HAARP and other "non-lethal weapons" on
climate change.
Their authors assume a project 1,000 times more powerful than HAARP
Cole, 95(September 17, writer for Fairbanks News-Miner and 5-time published nonfiction author, “HAARP Controversy”
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/haarp/news/fnm995.html)
BegichJr., who recently got a doctorate in the study of alternative medicine from a school based in Sri Lanka, has written and
published a new book in which healleges that HAARP could lead to "global vandalism" and affect people's "mental functions."
SyunAkasofu, director ofthe Geophysical Institute, said the electric power in the aurora is hundreds of thousands of
times stronger than that produced by HAARP.Themost outlandishcharges about HAARParethat it is designed to disrupt
the human brain, jam all communications systems, change weather patterns over a large area, interfere with wildlife migration, harm people's
health and unnaturally impact the Earth's upper atmosphere. These and other claims appear to bebased on speculation about what
Alaskan Nick
might happen if a project 1,000 times more powerful than HAARP is ever built.That seems to be in the realm of
science fiction.
Empirically Denied: HAARP has been in use since the 70’s
Busch 97 (Linda, February 21, 1997, “Ionosphere Research Lab Sparks Fears in Alaska”, Science magazine, writer for the American
Association for the Advancement of Science,
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/275/5303/1060?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=weather+man
ipulation&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=20&resourcetype=HWCIT)
But anti-HAARP skeptics claim that the military has even bigger plans for the project . HAARP's somewhat menacing
appearance surely hasn't helped resolve its public-relations problem: 48 21-meter radio antennas now loom behind the Gakona facility's
barbed-wire fence, and, when completed, the 9-hectare antenna farm will be stuffed with 180 towers. In his book, Begich, who is the informal
spokesperson for theloosely knitanti-HAARP coalition, writesthat allthis technology is part of a DOD plan to raise a Star
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Wars-type missile shield anddevise technologies for jamming global communications worldwide. Physical chemist Richard Williams,
a consultant for the David Sarnoff Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, further argues thatHAARP could irreparably damage the
ionosphere: "This is basically atmospheric physicists playing with the ionosphere, which is vital to the life of this planet." Also, he asserts
that "this whole concept of electromagnetic warfare" needs to be "publicly debated." The HAARP critics have asked for a public conference
to discuss their concerns and hear more details about the science from the military. They have written hundreds of letters to Alaska's
congressional delegation and have succeeded in getting the attention of several state legislators, who held legislative hearings on the subject
last year.Manyscientists who work on HAARP are dumbfounded by the charges . "We are just improving on
technology that already exists," says Heckscher.He points out that the MaxPlanck Institute has been running a big
ionospheric "heater" in Tromsø, Norway, since the late 1970s with no lasting effects. U.S. scientists don't have good access
because the United States did not join the Norwegian consortium. Also, theUnited States already operates two other small
ionospheric heaters, at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and at HIPAS, operated by the University of California, Los Angeles, 325
kilometers down the road from HAARP in Chena Hot Springs, Alaska. The HAARP facility, with three times the power of current facilities
and a vastly more flexible radio beam, will be the world's largest ionospheric heater. Still, it will not be nearly powerful enough to change
Earth's climate, say scientists. "They are talking science fiction," says Syun-IchiAkasofu, who heads the University of Alaska's Geophysical
Institute in Fairbanks, the lead institution in a university consortium that made recommendations to the military about how HAARP could be
used for basic research.HAARP won't be doing anything to the ionosphere that doesn't happen naturally as a result of
solar radiation, says Akasofu. Indeed,the beam's effect on the ionosphere is minuscule compared to normal day-night
variations. "To do what [the critics] are talking about, we would have to flatten the entire state of Alaska and put
up millions of antennas, and even then, I am not sure it would work." Weather is generated, not in the ionosphere, but in the
dense atmosphere close to Earth, points out University of Tulsa provost and plasma physicist Lewis Duncan, former chair of the U.S.
Ionospheric Steering Committee. Because HAARP's radio beam only excites and heats ionized particles, it will slip
right through the loweratmosphere, which is composed primarily of neutral gases. "If climate modifications were even conceivable
using this technology, you can bet there would be a lot more funding available for it," he jokes.
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Antimatter
Harnessing Anti-matter is impossible – 2 reasons
Davidson ‘4(Keay, San Fransico Chronicle, October 4, “Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons” Google)
Why so far off? One reason is that at present, there's no fast way to mass produce large amounts of antimatter from
particle accelerators. With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6
billion, according to an estimate by scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and elsewhere, who hope to launch
antimatter-fueled spaceships. Another problem is the terribly unruly behavior of positrons whenever physicists try to
corral them into a special container. Inside these containers, known as Penning traps, magnetic fields prevent the antiparticles from
contacting the material wall of the container -- lest they annihilate on contact. Unfortunately, because like-charged particles repel
each other, the positrons push each other apart and quickly squirt out of the trap.
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Inertia Weapons
Inertia weapons can’t aim asteroids because they’re not that precise, but they can stop them,
solving extinction
Oberg ’98Congressional Testifier on the Russian Space Program, NASA International Space Station
Contributor, Space Studies Expert / James, “ASTEROID DEFLECTION & THE FUTURE OF HUMAN INTERVENTION IN THE EARTH'S
BIOSPHERE”, Futures Focus Day Symposium sponsored by the US Space Command/
For example, Dr. Carl Sagan and some of his colleagues suggested that it was statistically more dangerous to build an
asteroid defense system than simply to wait for the impacts. Their argument was based on the thesis that a system-inbeing could under some circumstances be abused by "a madman" to deliberately divert otherwise-harmless objects
toward an Earth impact. Although admittedly unlikely, this manmade danger was deemed MORE likely than the original natural threat
of asteroid impact. But this view is erroneous. The concern fails to account for operational issues in navigation,
targeting, guidance and control, issues which real-world spaceflight operators deal with on a daily basis. By
assuming that a space rendezvous -- bringing two objects into contact -- is merely an inverse process of avoidance -guaranteeing that two objects do NOT come into contact, this concern is unrealistic. The "avoidance" maneuver
is already in the repertory of spaceflight operators today, in low Earth orbit. If the predicted path of a piece of space
debris comes "close enough" (defined in the dimensions of the avoidance zone around the shuttle), the shuttle makes a small
orbital adjustment to take it (and the zone centered on it) away from the predicted path of the candidate impactor.
Rendezvous is also routine in low Earth orbit, but it is a far different process than merely reversing the avoidance maneuver. As the active
vehicle nears the target it receives more and more precise relative position data (navigation), which it converts into desired course corrections
(targeting), which converts into required rocket burns (guidance), and which it then performs -- to the required level of precision -- using
onboard rockets (control). As the range and time-to-contact drops, so does the size of the uncertainty zone around the target, where the chaser
is aiming. At the same time, the effect of rocket maneuvers on miss distance also drops rapidly -- they have less time to propagate and grow.
Unless the approach is flown very precisely, the predicted miss distance can easily drift outside the "uncertainty zone" to such a great distance
that the active vehicle's rockets simply cannot bring the aim point back onto the target fast enough. In other words, there is not enough
"control authority" in the system. And the active vehicle flies past the target. The rendezvous fails. For the proposed asteroiddeflection schemesof the next several decades at least, their control accuracy is far too poor to perform a "rendezvous", a
deliberate collision, with Earth. Such systems would be fully effective in diverting dangerous asteroids, but
would be physically unable to do the opposite, bring them into contact with Earth. As a threat for misuse, they would panic only
those who don't understand real space operations.
Double Bind: Either Inertia weapons already exist because of nukes
Or too much energy is required to redirect them
Space Policy ‘2 (“Book Review; Target Earth”, Volume 18, Issue 1, February, http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc021502.html)
There is still the question as to what could or should be done if an impact threat is discovered. The MIT Project Icarus in 1967 calculated that
six Saturn V launchers carrying 100 nuclear warheads would be needed to divert that asteroid if it became a hazard, as in its present orbit it
conceivably could. Saturn V is no longer available but a similar effort could no doubt be mounted, given sufficient warning. The problem is
the `Deflection Dilemma': if you can deflect asteroids or comets away from the Earth, that raises the possibility of
deflecting them towards it. Duncan Steel's answer to that is not to build such a system until an actual threat is detected, but there's still
the possibility of things sneaking up on us: one reason why we're still arguing about the nature of the Tunguska object in 1908 is that it
approached from the direction of the Sun and wasn't seen until it entered the atmosphere. Watching for that would require eternal vigilance in
space as well as on Earth, and we know how quickly governments tire of such things: the US administration turned off the science stations
left by astronauts on the Moon only 5 years after Apollo, and cancelled the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence long before there was a
realistic chance of success. But those of us who would like to see deflection systems developed now can take heart
from a contribution to the 2001 Charterhouse conference on British rocketry by David Asher and Nigel Holloway. They
made headlines with an outline of what it would take to bring down a 500-m asteroid on Telford and devastate England from the Scottish
Borders to Devon. It was worth attending just to witness the stunned silence in which veterans of Britain's nuclear weapons programme heard
details of how a single asteroid, under malevolent control, could reduce the UK to rubble. As one 80-year-old remarked, "If it takes 12
years and 15 nuclear warheads to bring down an asteroid on us, why not just use the weapons in the first place ?"
On the more serious level of preventing the impacts, another old-timer remarked that the UK share of the events wouldn't pay for a new
housing estate, let alone what it would cost to rebuild the country after such an occurrence. But the study demonstrates that using
asteroids as weapons takes much more effort than simply turning them aside from Earth, so the Deflection
Dilemma has lost much of its force.
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Anti-Gravity
The author of the article admits it’s only a conspiracy theory
Rogers 02
(Adam, writer for The Slate, Oct. 18 2002, http://www.slate.com/id/2072733/ “Feeling Antigravity’s Pull”)
Unfortunately, Cook strains his own credibility somewhat.A couple of weeks after his Jane's piece appeared, Cook's book on antigravity
research, The Hunt for Zero Point, came out. In it, he claims that the Nazis built an antigravity device during World War II.
Its absence from present-day science, Cook says, implies a vast "black" world of secret antigravity aircraft that
might explain the UFOs people see over Area 51. He's a careful investigative reporter, but once you start talking about UFOs and
Nazi antigravity you're not far from hidden tunnels under the White House full of lizard-men disguised as Freemasons.Even without
Nazis, there are plenty of reasons to doubtPodkletnov.My e-mails to the account listed on his recent articles (not
peer-reviewed) went unanswered. Even more problematic, I can't find the institution he lists as his affiliation in
Moscow. "Eugene always expressed his worries that others could copy his work, although as far as I know he never applied for a patent,"
Giovanni Modanese, a collaborator of Podkletnov's at the University of Bolzano in Italy, wrote in an e-mail (using a Western version of
Podkletnov's first name). "Nonetheless, at the scientific level if one wants a confirmation by others and a successful replication, one must give
all the necessary elements." Well, yeah. Modanese says that the current version of the device, now called an "impulse gravity generator," is
simpler and could be built "by a big-science team of people expert in superconductivity." A Boeing spokesperson didn't respond to follow-up
questions. So, either there's nothing going on here, or it's an X-File.And the science?Ten years is a long time to go without
replication. Combine that withPodkletnov'scageybehavior and it's enough to make even sci-fi geeks like me lose
hope. But like the core of any good conspiracy, antigravity research has the ring of plausibility . One of the outstanding
problems in physics and cosmology today involves the existence of so-called dark matter and dark energy. They're by far the main
constituents of matter in the universe, and nobody knows what they're made of—researchers have only inferred their existence from
gravitational effects. Coming up with a new theory of how gravity works might explain that, though it'd be a scientific revolution on a par
with relativity. "Changing gravity is in the cards," says Paul Schechter, an astronomer at MIT. "But so far no one's been able to do better than
Einstein." Still, Einstein worked in a lowly patent office. Ron Koczor works for NASA.
Anti-gravity can’t happen – mainstream physics agrees
Scotland on Sunday ’96(Geraldine Murray, “Anti-gravity theory takes a tumble”, September 22, L/N)
PLANS for an anti-gravity device, which would revolutionise space travel and defy Newton's established third law of motion,have been brought back down
to earth with a bump.Russian scientist Dr EugenePodkletnov has withdrawn a paper describing the machine which was due to
be published in a leading physics journalnext month. The device is thought to reduce the weight of any object suspended over it by up to 2% and, if Podkletnov's claims are
true, could be one of the most radical scientific discoveries in history.
Controversy surrounds Podkletnov's decision, which followed queries over the identity of the
paper's co-author and a denial by TampereUniversity in Finland, where the Russian says he is based, that they knew anything about the antigravity research. But the paper succeeded in passing the scrutiny of three referees appointed by the Journal of Physics-D: Applied Physics to
find flaws in Podkletnov's work. Tests are thought to have ruled out other possibilities for the machine's effect such as air flow or magnetic
fields. Most physicists aretraditionally sceptical about anti-gravity devices and doubts are already being voiced ,
despite the paper's acceptance by the respected journal. Podkletnov told New Scientist last week that he stood by his claims. "This is an important discovery and I don't want it to disappear," he said.
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Proton Disintegration
The weapons fail – the neutrino positron pairing necessary for escalation is too rare
American Physical Society 99 (APS, The Disintegration of High Energy Protons,
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v51/i12/p1037_1)
The coupling between light and heavy particles assumed in the Fermi theory of β-decay makes it possible for high
energy protons in passing through matter to transfer a considerable fraction of their energy to electrons and neutrinos. If
we suppose that this coupling is a maximum for relative energies of the light and heavy particles of the order ℏc/R, with
R the range of nuclear forces, and is small for much higher relative energies, the most important process which occurs,
for sufficiently energetic protons, can be pictured as a sort of photodisintegration of the proton by the contracted
Coulomb field of a passing nucleus, the proton changing into a neutron and emitting a positron and a neutrino. With a
coupling of the type described, and of the magnitude required by the proton-neutron forces, processes involving more
than one pair of light particles will be relatively rare. The cross section for the disintegration of a proton of energy E is
found to be of the order 2π(ℏ/Mc)RZ2α2 ln2 (E/Mc2), and is very small, even for heavy nuclei. The mean energy given to
the positron per disintegration is of the order 2(ℏc/R)(E/Mc2)/ln (E/Mc2). The positrons emitted in these disintegrations
can account in order of magnitude for the incidence of showers observed under thick absorbers.
The weapon has already been used with no impact, and future development is too expensive
Global News Wire ‘1(Russian TV Examines Latest Cutting-Edge Weaponry, Lexis)
It took a year for a joint U.S.-U.K. team of 50 to set up one shot. Creating the proton beam requires the electrical power
needed to light a small town, if only for a few moments. LANL’s cost alone was about $600,000 excluding the expense
of the beam. At that rate, a full 100-minute feature would cost $36 trillion.
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Interstellar War
The weapons fail – the neutrino positron pairing necessary for escalation is too rare
American Physical Society 99 (APS, The Disintegration of High Energy Protons,
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v51/i12/p1037_1)
The coupling between light and heavy particles assumed in the Fermi theory of β-decay makes it possible for high
energy protons in passing through matter to transfer a considerable fraction of their energy to electrons and neutrinos. If
we suppose that this coupling is a maximum for relative energies of the light and heavy particles of the order ℏc/R, with
R the range of nuclear forces, and is small for much higher relative energies, the most important process which occurs,
for sufficiently energetic protons, can be pictured as a sort of photodisintegration of the proton by the contracted
Coulomb field of a passing nucleus, the proton changing into a neutron and emitting a positron and a neutrino. With a
coupling of the type described, and of the magnitude required by the proton-neutron forces, processes involving more
than one pair of light particles will be relatively rare. The cross section for the disintegration of a proton of energy E is
found to be of the order 2π(ℏ/Mc)RZ2α2 ln2 (E/Mc2), and is very small, even for heavy nuclei. The mean energy given to
the positron per disintegration is of the order 2(ℏc/R)(E/Mc2)/ln (E/Mc2). The positrons emitted in these disintegrations
can account in order of magnitude for the incidence of showers observed under thick absorbers.
The weapon has already been used with no impact, and future development is too expensive
Global News Wire ‘1(Russian TV Examines Latest Cutting-Edge Weaponry, Lexis)
It took a year for a joint U.S.-U.K. team of 50 to set up one shot. Creating the proton beam requires the electrical power
needed to light a small town, if only for a few moments. LANL’s cost alone was about $600,000 excluding the expense
of the beam. At that rate, a full 100-minute feature would cost $36 trillion.
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Future Weapons
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Ethics
Their ethics are impossible – you can’t think like a mountain because you aren’t one
Harvey, 1999 (David, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, Global Ethics & Environment,
Edited by Nicholas Low, “Considerations on the environment of justice,” , Page 123)
This conception is species-centred and thereby commits me resolutely to a particular form of anthropocentrism (or speciesism in Singer’s
terms). I simply cannot see that we can ever avoid asserting our own identity, being expressive of who we are and what we
can become, and asserting our species’ capacities and powers in the world we inhabit. To construe the matter any other way is, in
my view, to fool ourselves (alienate ourselves) as to who and what we are. In this sense the Marxian concept of ‘species-being’
continues to resonate. But if our task is, as White (1990) puts it, ‘to be distinctively ourselves in a world of others’, this does not mean that we
cannot, if we wish, ‘create a world of others’, this does not mean that we cannot, if we wish, ‘create a frame that includes both self and other,
neither dominant, in an image of fundamental equality’. We can strive to think like a mountain, like the Ebola virus or like
the spotted owl, and construct our actions in response to such imaginaries, but it is still we who do the thinking
and we who choose to use our capacities and powers that way. An that principle applies cross-culturally too. I can
strive to think like an Aborigine, like a Chipko peasant, like Rupert Murdoch (for he inhabits a cultural world I find hard to comprehend). In
these cases, however, my capacity to empathize and put myself in the other’s shoes if further aided by the possibility
to translate across languages and to study activities through careful observation. But it is still an ‘I’ who does the
imagining and the translation, and it is always in the end through my language that the thinking gets expressed.
The ethical thrust here lies, of course, in the choice to try to think like the other, the choice of who or what I try to
think like (why a mountain and not the Ebola virus?) and the efforts to build frames of thought and action that relate
across self and others in particular ways.
Sentience is a prerequisite to having value, rocks don’t count
Dunayer, 2005 (Joan, “Reply to a self-proclaimed speciesist,” Vegan Voice, Sept/Nov,
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Morality/Speciesism/ProudSpeciesist.htm)
"I am a speciesist myself and make no apologies for that," Peter Milne writes in "Disagreeing with Speciesism Theory" (June–August 2005
Vegan Voice). No doubt, he never would announce with equal pride, "I’m a racist." Feminists and gay-rights advocates don’t declare
themselves sexists and homophobes. In sad contrast, people who consider themselves advocates for nonhuman animals
tolerate, even espouse, the very bigotry that they should be combating: speciesism. What is speciesism? A failure, on the
basis of species, to accord anyone equal consideration. It’s speciesist to deny anyone equal consideration either because they aren’t human or
because they aren’t human-like. Nonspeciesists advocateequally strong basic rights—for example, to life and liberty—for all
sentient beings. According to Milne, vegans are speciesist because they "discriminate" between plants and
animals. By definition, to discriminate against members of any group means to discount their interests. Being
insentient, plants have no interests; therefore we can’t discriminate against them. "We pass judgment that plant lives are
less significant than animal lives in the realm of feeling and emotions," Milne states. Plants’ feelings and emotions aren’t "less
significant"; they’re nonexistent. "Some tests indicate that plants have a basic consciousness," Milne says. No
tests that scientists regard as valid. Milne’s claim that it’s speciesist to eat plantsbut not animals is sheer nonsense. In
Milne’s view I exclude plants (and other organisms without a nervous system) from equal consideration because I don’t recognize
"differences in the consciousness of different species." As someone whose graduate research in psychology focused
on
nonhuman cognition, I’m well aware that the consciousness of every sentient being differs from that of every
other. Along with his belief that plants are conscious, Milne’s preposterous claim that insects live "constantly in
fear of being devoured or killed in some other way" shows his dearth of scientific knowledge . Milne’s worldview is
religious rather than based on evidence and logic. He believes in a hierarchical "Kingdom of God". (That phrase evokes a male,
anthropomorphic deity.) Milne ranks humans above other animals, nonhuman mammals above birds, birds above reptiles, and reptiles above
insects and arachnids. (Even his use of personal names assigns higher and lower status: except when he gives full names, he refers to Peter
Singer as "Singer", in keeping with professional courtesy, but refers to me as "Joan".) Milne draws this false analogy: plants differ
from animals as insects differ from mammals. Plants and animals differ in a way crucial to the issue of basic
rights: animals are sentient; plants aren’t. Insects and mammals differ in ways irrelevant to basic rights: both are
sentient. Like mammals and unlike plants, insects should have rights to life and liberty because they can
experience life and liberty.
Domination of nature is rooted in humans dominating eachother
Bush, 1997 (Len, “Some of my best friends are people,” Canadian Dimension, Vol. 31, Issue 1, Jan/Feb)
Biocentrists (I note that the coining of jargon is definitely a growth aspect of the environmental movement) would no doubt argue that I am
overly simplifying their position, that anthropocentrism's distinguishing of human from non-human life is the origin of all hierarchical
oppressions. They would assert the primacy of environmental over social justice issues - "the 'Left' is subordinate to the 'green'," as Orton puts
it. I am not buying any of it.First, while humanity does share much with all other life on the planet, it also differs in
exceptional ways. Our social evolution makes us unique on the planet. A deep ecologist I know calls humans simply apes
with less hair. Well, not many apes are that proficient on the word processor or the piano, at understanding Marx or bell hooks, or aware, as
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this deep ecologist apparently is, of the theory of evolution. Our
ability to be self-conscious, craft and utilize tools and create
new and unique social groupings does distinguish us from the non-human species. Furthermore, we are told that we are
no different from all other species on the planet, but on the other hand our technological development is threatening the entire
biosphere and as a species we must choose to radically change ourselves. No other species on the planet is
capable of consciously making the changes necessary for global survival!Second, the "environmental crisis" to which so
much paper and thought has been dedicated is rooted in human activity and social relations. It is based in the exploitation of human beings for
private gain. Environmental degradation is a consequence of the extraction of surplus value from workers for a
wealth owning minority which also has control over the goods necessary for the survival of the majority. This
crisis is rooted in the social relations of industrial capitalism and will only be resolved through a radical
reorganization of human society. Only with the liberation of oppressed peoples is this possible .Third, biocentric
politics is one that is ultimately doomed to failure. I find it hard to believe that a single native band in Canada
will forego efforts to improve the material conditions of its community for the pleasures of biocentric
harmony("running water? - beck no! - let's all chant now -oomm"). The working class is unlikely to rally behind the call to
give up what meager possessions it now has. And while yes, I do think that consumer culture is abhorrent and that it stands in the
way of human liberation, I am not convinced that lowering the standard of living helps. (Actually, come to think of it, who does benefit from
a lowering of the expectations of the working class?) And this would likely carry over to all oppressed social identities. I once overheard
a deep ecologist tell a disabled man that in the future there would be no wheelchairs as the industrial production
of them would be too polluting. His solution was that for those disabled who survived they could be carried
everywhere. Needless to say that disabled man remains firmly anthropocentric.
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Making Distinctions = OK
Steinbock, 1978 (Bonnie, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Albany and fellow of the Hastings Center,
“Speciesism and the idea of equality,” Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 204, April,
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/animals/steinbock-text.html)
Most of us believe that we are entitled to treat members of other species in ways which would be considered wrong if inflicted on members of
our own species. We kill them for food, keep them confined, use them in painful experiments. The moral philosopher has to ask what relevant
difference justifies this difference in treatment. A look at this question will lead us to re-examine the distinctions which we have assumed
make a moral difference.It has been suggested by Peter Singer1 that our current attitudes are "speciesist," a word
intended to make one think of "racist" or "sexist." The idea is that membership in a species is in itself not relevant
to moral treatment, and that much of our behavior and attitudes towards nonhuman animals is based simply on
this irrelevant fact. There is, however, an important difference between racism or sexism and "speciesism." We do
not subject animals to different moral treatment simply because they have fur and feathers, but because they are
in fact different from human beingsin ways that could be morally relevant. It is false that women are incapable of
being benefited by education, and therefore that claim cannot serve to justify preventing them from attending
school. But this is not false of cows and dogs, even chimpanzees. Intelligence is thought to be a morally relevant
capacity because of its relation to the capacity for moral responsibility.What is Singer's response? He agrees that nonhuman
animals lack certain capacities that human animals possess, and that this may justify different treatment. But it does not justify giving less
consideration to their needs and interests. According to Singer, the moral mistake which the racist or sexist makes is not essentially the factual
error of thinking that blacks or women are inferior to white men. For even if there were no factual error, even if it were true that blacks and
women are less intelligent and responsible than whites and men, this would not justify giving less consideration to their needs and interests. It
is important to note that the term "speciesism" is in one way like, and in another way unlike, the terms "racism" and "sexism." What the term
"speciesism" has in common with these terms is the reference to focusing on a characteristic which is, in itself, irrelevant to moral treatment.
And it is worth reminding us of this. But Singer's real aim is to bring us to a new understanding of the idea of equality. The question is, on
what do claims to equality rest? The demand for human equality is a demand that the interests of all human beings be considered equally,
unless there is a moral justification for not doing so. But why should the interests of all human beings be considered equally? In order to
answer this question, we have to give some sense to the phrase, "All men (human beings) are created equal." Human beings are manifestly
not equal, differing greatly in intelligence, virtue and capacities. In virtue of what can the claim to equality be made? It is Singer's contention
that claims to equality do not rest on factual equality. Not only do human beings differ in their capacities, but it might even turn out that
intelligence, the capacity for virtue, etc., are not distributed evenly among the races and sexes: The appropriate response to those who claim to
have found evidence of genetically based differences in ability between the races or sexes is not to stick to the belief that the genetic
explanation must be wrong, whatever evidence to the contrary may turn up; instead we should make it quite clear that the claim to equality
does not depend on intelligence, moral capacity, physical strength, or similar matters of fact. Equality is a moral ideal, not a simple assertion
of fact. There is no logically compelling reason for assuming that a factual difference in ability between two people
justifies any difference in the amount of consideration we give to satisfying their needs and interests. The
principle of equality of human beings is not a description of an alleged actual equality among humans: it is a
prescription of how we should treat humans.2 Insofar as the subject is human equality, Singer's view is supported by other
philosophers. Bernard Williams, for example, is concerned to show that demands for equality cannot rest on factual
equality among people, for no such equality exists.3 The only respect in which all men are equal, according to Williams, is that
they are all equally men. This seems to be a platitude, but Williams denies that it is trivial. Membership in the species Homo
sapiens in itself has no special moral significance, but rather the fact that all men are human serves as a reminder
that being human involves the possession of characteristics that are morally relevant . But on what characteristics does
Williams focus? Aside from the desire for self-respect (which I will discuss later), Williams is not concerned with
uniquely human capacities. Rather, he focuses on the capacity to feel pain and the capacity to feel affection. It is in
virtue of these capacities, it seems, that he idea of equality is to be justified.Apparently Richard Wasserstrom has the same
idea as he sets out the racist's "logical and moral mistakes" in "Rights, Human Rights and Racial Discrimination."4 The racist fails to
acknowledge that the black person is as capable of suffering as the white person. According to Wasserstrom, the reason why a person is said
to have a right not to be made to suffer acute physical pain is that we all do in fact value freed Tom such pain. Therefore, if anyone has a right
to be free from suffering acute physical pain everyone has this right, for there is no possible basis of discrimination. Wasserstrom says, "For,
if all persons do have equal capacities of these sorts and if the existence of these capacities is the reason for ascribing these rights to anyone,
then all persons ought to haste the right to claim equality of treatment in respect to the possession and exercise of these rights."5 The basis of
equality, for Wasserstrom as for Williams, lies not in some uniquely human capacity, but rather in the fact that all human beings are alike in
their capacity to suffer. Writers on equality have focused on this capacity, I think, because it functions as some sort of lowest common
denominator, so that whatever the other capacities of a human being, he is entitled to equal consideration because, like everyone else, he is
capable of suffering.
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Humans Are Better
Steinbock, 1978 (Bonnie, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Albany and fellow of the Hastings Center,
“Speciesism and the idea of equality,” Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 204, April,
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/animals/steinbock-text.html)
I think we do have to justify counting our interests more heavily than those of animals. But how? Singer is right, I think, to point out that it
will not do to refer vaguely to the greater value of human life, to human worth and dignity:Faced with a situation in which they see a need for
some basis for the moral gulf that is commonly thought to separate humans and animals, but can find no concrete difference that will do this
without undermining the equality of humans, philosophers tend to waffle. They resort to high-sounding phrases like 'the intrinsic dignity of
the human individual.' They talk of 'the intrinsic worth of all men' as if men had some worth that other beings do not have or they say that
human beings, and only human beings, are 'ends in themselves,' while 'everything other than a person can only have value for a person.' . . .
Why should we not attribute 'intrinsic dignity' or 'intrinsic worth' to ourselves? Why should we not say that we
are the only things in the universe that have intrinsic value? Our fellow human beings are unlikely to reject the accolades we so
generously bestow upon them, and those to whom we deny the honor are unable to object.9 Singer is right to be skeptical of terms
like "intrinsic dignity" and "intrinsic worth." These phrases are no substitute for a moral argument. But they may point to one. In
trying to understand what is meant by these phrases, we may find a difference or differences between human beings and nonhuman animals
that will justify different treatment while not undermining claims for human equality. While we are not compelled to discriminate
among people because of different capacities, if we can find a significant difference in capacities between human
and nonhuman animals, this could serve to justify regarding human interests as primary. It is not arbitrary or
smug, I think, to maintain that human beings have a different moral status from members of other species because
of certain capacities which are characteristic of being human. We may not all be equal in these capacities but all human
beings possess them to some measure and nonhuman animals do not . For example, human beings are normally held
to be responsible for what they do. In recognizing that someone is responsible for his or her actions, you accord that person a respect
which is reserved for those possessed of moral autonomy, or capable of achieving such autonomy. Secondly, human beings can be expected
to reciprocate in a way that nonhuman animals cannot. Nonhuman animals cannot be motivated by altruistic or moral
reasons; they cannot treat you fairly or unfairly. This does not rule out the possibility of an animal being
motivated by sympathy or pity. It does rule out altruistic motivation in the sense of motivation due to the
recognition that the needs and interests of others provide one with certain reasons for acting .10 Human beings are
capable of altruistic motivation in this sense. We are sometimes motivated simply by the recognition that someone else is in pain,
and that pain is a bad thing, no matter who suffers it. It is this sort of reason that I claim cannot motivate an animal or any entity not possessed
of fairly abstract concepts. (If some nonhuman animals do possess the requisite concepts—perhaps chimpanzees who have learned a
language—they might well be capable of altruistic motivation.) This means that our moral dealings with animals are
necessarily much more limited than our dealings with other human beings. If rats invade our houses, carrying
disease and biting our children, we cannot reason with them, hoping to persuade them of the injustice they do us. We can only
attempt to get rid of them. And it is this that makes it reasonable for us to accord them a separate and not equal moral status, even though their
capacity to suffer provides us with some reason to kill them painlessly, if this can be done without too much sacrifice of human interests.
Thirdly, as Williams points out, there is the "desire for self-respect": "a certain human desire to be identified with what
one is doing, to be able to realize purposes of one's own, and not to be the instrument of another's will unless one
has willingly accepted such a role."11 Some animals may have some form of this desire, and to the extent that they do, we ought to
consider their interest in freedom and self-determination. (Such considerations might affect our attitudes toward zoos and circuses.) But the
desire for self-respect per se requires the intellectual capacities of human beings, and this desire provides us with
special reasons not to treat human beings in certain ways. It is an affront to the dignity of a human being to be a slave (even if a
well-treated one); this cannot be true for a horse or a cow. To point this out is of course only to say that the justification for the
treatment of an entity will depend on the sort of entity in question. In our treatment of other entities, we must
consider the desire for autonomy, dignity and respect, but only where such a desire exists . Recognition of
different desires and interests will often require different treatment, a point Singer himself makes .But is the issue
simply one of different desires and interests justifying and requiring different treatment? I would like to make a stronger claim, namely, that
certain capacities, which seem to be unique to human beings, entitle their possessors to a privileged position in the moral community. Both
rats and human beings dislike pain, and so we have a prima facie reason not to inflict pain on either. But if we
can free human beings from crippling diseases, pain and death through experimentation which involves making
animals suffer, and if this is the only way to achieve such results, then I think that such experimentation is
justified because human lives are more valuable than animals' lives. And this is because of certain capacities and abilities that
normal human beings have which animals apparently do not, and which human beings cannot exercise if they are devastated by pain or
disease.My point is not that the lack of the sorts of capacities I have been discussing gives us a justification for treating animals just as we
like, but rather that it is these differences between human beings and nonhuman animals which provide a rational basis for different moral
treatment and consideration. Singer focuses on sentience alone as the basis of equality, but we can justify the belief that human beings have a
moral worth that nonhuman animals do not, in virtue of specific capacities, and without resorting to "high-sounding phrases."
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Hierarchies Good
Milne, 2007 (Peter, committee member of the Vegetarian/Vegan Society of Queensland, “The Value of Life,” May,
http://www.veg-soc.org/cms/html/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=147)
However, the issue becomes a lot cloudier when we have to make a distinction between animated life such as the life of a mosquito and the
life of a chicken, or the life of a dog and the life of a human. Should we even make distinctions on the relative worth of a life in the context of
these questions? First, I go to my emotional reactions. Although I am upset by the killing of an ant, it does not affect me
anywhere near as much as does the killing of a bird or mammal. To be true to my emotions I must make a
distinction between the life of an insect and the life of a mammal .Maybe we need to look at the much maligned notion of
hierarchies. It is difficult to get away from hierarchy. Hierarchy reflects power, and humans do have the power to
manipulate the rest of the planet in incredible ways. Unfortunately, humans have used this power to inflict
unimaginable suffering on their fellow animals and to destroy so many ecosystems on the planet. Hierarchies
simply say that, in regard to a particular attribute, some beings have more of it than others . I strongly believe that the
most important attributes possessed on this planet are those of feeling and thinking. We must assume that all beings with a brain have the
ability to think and feel. By feeling I mean the ability of an individual to feel, both physically and emotionally. The ability to think or reason
is also a very important attribute and I would argue that it is closely linked to our ability to feel, in the sense that our thought usually
processes and affects our feelings.This is a hugely complicated area and it is not in the scope of this essay to cover the links between thought,
emotions and physical stimuli. The way an animal thinks and feels is generally directly connected to the stimuli it
receives from the environment and from other animals. Generally animals respond in kind to the emotional treatment that they
receive from others. Reasoning ability allows some animals to modify their emotional responses to others and ideally
we can use this ability to attain for ourselves and others the best possible experience from any encounter . The
ability to reason and to feel are also linked to idea of relationships which was considered in the previous paragraph. The more an
individual has the ability to feel and think, the closer and warmer relationships he/she will have. Relationships
are arguably our greatest source of pleasure and our greatest source of pain in this world. In this context then, the
ability to think and feel could be interchanged with the ability to have emotional relationships . I would argue that
human beings happen to lie at the top of a hierarchy in the ability to have emotional relationships . Other animals do
have complex emotional relationships but not on the same level as humans.Due to our more sophisticated language and thinking abilities we
have the opportunities to have sophisticated and healing relationships that are usually not available to other species. Of course amazing
qualities such as altruism, loyalty, cruelty, communal living, problem solving , etc. are seen in many species, but
humans in general have the potential to develop these qualities to an extent that other animals do not. In this
hierarchy of thinking and feeling it would be hard to differentiate between other mammals and I would not try to
do that. I am not an animal behaviourist but I would lump all birds and mammals in a loose category near the top of ability to think and feel.
Under them I would put reptiles, fishes and amphibians in a loose category, below this I would put insects and spiders, then moving down to
creatures that do not have faces, such as molluscs and jellyfish. These categories are not something I would hold to with dogmatic
determination as they are not proscriptive. They emerge from a blend of my intuition or emotional intelligence and scientific
knowledge.People are free to disagree and make their own distinctions. What this philosophy says is that all life is precious, so
if I walk into a forest and see a kangaroo, a goanna, a bush turkey and a person - all these are amazing creations
and each should be let live a free life. However, if there was a devastating fire threatening those creatures, my
philosophy of hierarchy would lead me to save a kangaroo before I would save a funnel web spider as I believe the
kangaroo leads a much richer emotional life than a spider. Using this idea I would usually save a person before saving a dog. I say
“usually” because if I had a choice between a beloved dog and Charles Manson I would probably choose the dog. Using the
above
reasoning we can say that in the important attributes of feeling and thinking, not all life is equal. As well we can
say that the human species, in general, is special in that members of this species have a choice in how to use their
thinking and feeling to an extent that other species, in general, do not .What practical influences on my life do these ideas
have? It means I would differ from many campaigners for animal rights who are putting the blame for the cruelty and destruction wreaked by
humans on other creatures and the planet on the notion of a hierarchy between species or what is termed speciesism. While I have
learned much from the arguments about speciesism - such as realising more about the amazing array of emotions and behaviours
of so many different species - I do not think it is plausible to equate speciesism to racism. The difference between a
black human and a white human is tiny whereas the difference between a chimpanzee and a cockroach is
massive.
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A/T Calicott
Calicott’s theory makes no sense-it’s circular and decimates pragmatic policymaking.
Bryan G. Norton, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Georgia Tech, ‘2
(Searching for Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology, p. 52-53)
The measure of objectivity, on Callicott?s view, is the extent to which the central theory of environmental values succeeds in attributing
humanindependent value to natural objects themselves. In the words of Callicott, the blue whale and the Bridger wilderness?may therefore, be
said in a quite definite, straightforward sense to own inherent value, that is to be valued for themselves.? Callicott goes on in the same
paragraph to state that the institution of a ?genuine? environmental ethic ? one that recognizes inherent value in nature ? provides the only
defensible basis for the environmentalists? platform of social reforms: ?Environmental policy decisions, because they may thus be based upon
a genuine environmental ethic, may thus be rescued from reduction to cost-benefit analyses in which valued natural aesthetic, religious, and
epistemic experiences are shadow priced and weighed against the usually overwhelming material and economic benefits of development and
exploitation.? 13 In this passage, Callicott commits himself to a good, oldfashioned realist interpretation of the problem of objectivity: ?the
very sense of the hypothesis that inherent or intrinsic value [sic: exists?] in nature seems to be that value inheres in natural objects as an
intrinsic characteristic. To assert that something is inherently or intrinsically valuable seems, indeed, to entail that its value is objective.? 14
What is interesting is that Callicott, having formulated the problem of objectivity in terms of representational realism, immediately retreats
from asserting an objectivist solution. Instead he argues that his own Humean subjectivist solution asserts as much objectivity for claims that
objects in nature own their inherent values as exists for scientific claims. So, Callicott?s ?ownership? theory of inherent value, which
attributes to ecosystems their own inherent value, is offered to environmental activists as the fruits of his search for the Holy Grail of monistic
ecocentrism.Three comments are necessary. First, the general principle of ?ecocentrism,? so defined, hardly resolves the
question of what beings in nature are proper owners of inherent value. The Bridger wilderness and the blue whale
are given as examples, but they themselves represent different scales on the biological hierarchy, and Callicott
owes his readers an account of the breadth to which he would generalize these examples . Second, as long as the first
comment remains unanswered, Callicott cannot claim to have provided any definitive policy direction to activists
because they can only know what they are obliged under the universal principles of non-anthropocentrism to
protect after they know what particular entities in nature have inherent value . Third, Callicott, who wishes to interpret
the land ethic as a moral theory, betrays an underlying commitment to moral individualism. He interprets Leopold?s
holism as attributing inherent value to ecosystems as individuals who can ?own? their own goodness. But this
conclusion only brings us to the heart of the matter ?Callicott?s original assumption that the land ethic is to be
interpreted as monistic and holistic. It will therefore be necessary to look briefly at Callicott?s changing definitions of ecocentric
holism, and to question whether they express the kernel ideas of Leopold?s land ethic.
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It’s OK To Kill Parasites
Dunayer, 2005 (Joan, “Reply to a self-proclaimed speciesist,” Vegan Voice, Sept/Nov,
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Morality/Speciesism/ProudSpeciesist.htm)
Milne questions, "Does this mean that if I kill a flea that [sic] is on my dog then I am as morally reprehensible as I would be if I killed the
dog, or a human? This type of logic is going to be seen as ridiculous by the average person, including myself." The "logic" is Milne’s, not
mine. As he acknowledges, I don’t object to killing parasites when they can’t be removed benignly. Except that we
shouldn’t interfere in natural relationships among free-living nonhumans (for example, predator–prey relationships), we
have a moral right to kill an animal who is invading someone’s body. Killing parasites is justifiable defence of
self or another, such as a dog. A right to liberty includes a right to bodily integrity. Milne finds it inconsistent that I
don’t disapprove of killing in self-defence or to avoid starvation. "Sounds like she is valuing the life of one being over another," he says. Yet
again he’s confusing valuing one life more than another with failing to give equal consideration. It isn’t speciesist
to value some individuals(nonhuman or human) more than others. It is speciesist to deny any sentient being an equal
right to life. If a lion leaps at my throat, I’m entitled to kill the lion, but I’m equally entitled to kill a human
attacker. If I’m starvingin the Arctic, I’m entitled to kill and eat a polar bear, but I’m also morally entitled to kill and
eat a human. In such rare circumstances a human’s right to life genuinely competes with someone else’s equal right to life. If I have no
other food source, I—like a polar bear—must kill prey if I want to survive. There’s nothing speciesist about that.
"Are we going to have monkeys on murder charges for killing insects?" Milne asks. In Speciesism I state, "Laws restrict
human behavior." I make it very clear that nonhumans should be protected, but not accountable, under the law. That isn’t
a double standard. The law doesn’t hold young children or mentally incompetent human adults accountable when
they needlessly injure or kill others. Similarly, because nonhumans who inflict apparently gratuitous harm may
have no sense of wrongdoing, the law must regard them as innocent .
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Plants Don’t Matter
Milne, 2007 (Peter, committee member of the Vegetarian/Vegan Society of Queensland, “The Value of Life,” May,
http://www.veg-soc.org/cms/html/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=147)
What is it that causes this strong aversion to the killing of animals? It is significantly about our relationships with animals and
our natural aversion to violence. We have a natural aversion to violence because animals scream and shed blood like us
and we know what a terrible thing it would be to experience this ourselves. Most people have had some sort of relationship with
an animal and we know that animals are emotional beings. It is more than the scientific understanding that animals have a similar
physiology to humans, such as two eyes, two ears, a digestive system, neurotransmitters, a central nervous system, etc. We have
experienced the love of a dog, the ingenuity of a pig, we have seen the cunning of a crow, the love of a cow for
her calf and the joy of dolphins at play. We have seen the relationships that animals have with each other - the
mutual grooming, the bossing around, the mother-baby relationships, the fighting over food, the licking of a wound, etc.We identify with
animals because we are in relationship with the animal world. We have an understanding that animals have relationships among themselves
and suffer from fear and pain. Of course not all human beings have this sense of relationship with other animals , either
because of their own lack of experience with them or because their own experience of violence has hardened their compassionate feelings
towards other sentient beings. My own observations suggest that most people do feel upset at the killing of an animal
but accept it in the case of meat production because they do not experience the slaughter and have been led to
believe that meat is necessary for survival and, by corollary, such killing is a necessary evil.The basic point is that we
rightly put a distinction between animal and plant life. Although we may look with awe and wonder at plants and
know how important they are for our planet's health, they do not have a central nervous system, pain receptors or
emotional relationships, and have very little if any physical or emotional suffering when killed . This does not discount
the fact that many of us have a relationship with plants and we are distressed when that plant is killed. It is just that this distress is of a
different order to that of the distress caused from witnessing animal slaughter.
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***Humans = Valuable***
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Life Gives Value to the Universe
The complexity of higher life is what gives value to the entire universe
Russell, 2001 (Robert John, The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, the Graduate Theological Union, “Life
in the Universe: Philosophical and theological issues,” published in First Steps in the Origin of Life in the
Universe,http://www.ctnsstars.org/conferences/papers/russell.doc)
Some scientists have suggestedthat biological life per se has little significance whether or not we are alone in the
universe.They see life as essentially meaningless, a random product of physics and chemistry of no more significance than the wetness of
water or the structure of Saturn’s rings.Biological processes are just what matter does when really unusual conditions occur, but the universe,
“at rock-bottom”, is just endless mass-energy and curving spacetime.Such ‘cosmic pessimism’ is of course a philosophical interpretation of
nature; it is not science, per se, nor is it one which can be ‘proved’ by science, but it is one that has been widely propounded by eminent
scientists such as Bertrand Russell10 and Jacques Monod11.It is certainly the impression Steven Weinberg gave in his often-quoted
conclusion to The First Three Minutes: “(H)uman life is ... just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the
first three minutes ...The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”12 Others, though, disagree with this
view, arguing instead for a philosophy in which life is a clue to the meaning of the universe.In Disturbing the Universe,
Freeman Dyson writes: “I do not feel like an alien in this universe.The more I examine the universe and study the details of its
architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming .”
And in his 1985 Gifford Lectures, Infinite in All Directions, Dyson explicitly rejects Weinberg’s opinion, telling us instead he sees “...a
universe growing without limit in richness and complexity, a universe of life surviving forever and making itself
known to its neighbors across the unimaginable gulfs of space and time. ..Twentieth-century science provides a solid
foundation for a philosophy of hope.”13Writing in a similar vein, Paul Davies has depicted life in terms of “teleology without teleology”14
and William Stoeger has written about the “immanent directionality” of evolution.15The difference in these views may stem in
part from a further division between reductionist and non-reductionist philosophies. If one assumes that the
processes and properties characteristic of living organisms can be fully explained by physics and chemistry, there
may be little if any basis for attributing meaning and value to life.Non-reductionist arguments on the other hand, such as
those deployed by Francisco Ayala16, Ernst Mayr17, and Charles Birch18, offer a basis within natural processes for attributing varying
degrees of meaning and value to organisms with differing levels of complexity and organization.Non-reductionist epistemologies, in turn,
play a crucial theological role in a variety of views often referred to collectively as ‘theistic evolution.’This perspective includes two central
themes: creatio ex nihilo and creatio continua.1) God as transcendent creates the universe out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), holding it in
existence at each moment and maintaining its law-abiding character which we express scientifically as the laws of nature.192) God as
immanent creates the universe continuously in time (creatio continua), working “in, with, under and through” the processes of nature20, as
Arthur Peacocke nicely phrases it. Scientists and theologians have developed these themes in light of physical cosmology, quantum physics,
chaos and complexity theory, evolutionary and molecular biology, anthropology, the neuro and cognitive sciences, etc.21 Most hold that
the multi-leveled complexity of living organisms points to the intrinsic value of life. Arguably the most
remarkable construction in the galaxy is the primate central nervous system. The number of connections between
the neurons of the human brain is greater than the number of stars in the Milky Way. This staggering complexity
makes possible the almost unimaginable feat of self-consciousness, of knowing oneself as a free, rational and
moral agent in the world.Thus on our planet, at least, we are privileged to discover a hint of what God’s intentions might have been in
creating a universe like ours, with its particular laws of physics.For when the evolutionary conditions are right as they have been on Earth,
and as they may be elsewhere in our universe, God, the continuous, immanent, ongoing creator of all that is, working with and through
nature, creates a species gifted with the “image of God” (the imago dei) including the capacities for reason, language, imagination, toolmaking, social organization, and self-conscious moral choice, a species capable of entering into covenant with God and in turn with all of
life.Thus if it took the precise characteristics of this universe to allow for the possibility of the evolution of life,
even if life is scarce in the universe22, then it is life as such that gives significance to our universe --- and even if
ours is only one of a countless series of universes, as some inflationary and quantum cosmologies depict 23.In short,
I see life as the enfleshing of God’s intentions amidst biological evolution which, in turn, is the ongoing expression of God’s purposes in
creating all that is.God thus offers to nature nature’s conscious experience of the God who acts within nature.
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Life Has Value – Deductive Argument
Only living things can discern value judgments. The inherent value of those judgments proves
humans have intrinsic value
Pizer, 2001 (David, “Argument that Life has inherent value,” July 8, http://www.cryonet.org/cgibin/dsp.cgi?msg=16930)
1.
The concept of value comes from what living beings will pay for something.
Howmuch one being is willing to give in order to get something he wants is a way to think of the value of that thing. What a
being is willing to pay for something depends on how much he desires that thing. So indirectly, desire is what actually sets the value of
something. 2.
In order to desire something, the thing doing the desiring must be alive - it must be a living being. So value,
the end of desire, is dependent on life. Only living things (living beings) can give value to something else. 3. In order for
any first thing to give something to a second thing, the first thing must first have it to give. So if only living things can give value,
then living things must have value. 4.
Desire can only come from, (and so must be in), living beings. So when
living things desire something, that desire must be inherent in the living things . If desire in living things is what gives
Argument that life has inherent value
value to other things, and that desire is inherent in the living thing, then living things, or life, has inherent value in it. Or to say it another
way: If an object gives something value, that object must have value in it as a quality to give . Example: For me to love
my dog, I must first have love in me. For me to value my dog, I must first have value in me. 5. Put another way, if a living being
has some quality, that quality is a part of what makes that being what it is. 6. If life gives value to life, than one
of the parts of life is value. Put another way, value cannot exist without life, so value is life and life is value. 7.
If value is only relative, then saying life being valuable relative to life is the same as saying life has worth
relative to life. Anything that is relative to itself is an unconditional part of itself and therefore has "inherentness". 8.
THEREFORE, anyway you look at it, life is value and value is life - and life has inherent value.
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Humans Key to Value Nature
Human consciousness is the only way to grant value to the universe
Parker, 1996
Kelly A., Associate Professor and Chair of philosophy at Grand valley state Pragmatism and Environmental Thought,
Environmental Pragmatism edited by Andrew Light and Eric Katz,
People may mean something else by "intrinsic value," however. Callicott reserves the term "intrinsic value" for the goodness
of something independent of any consciousness that might value it."' This is sometimes called the "inherent value" or
"inherent worth" of natural objects. Now, pragmatism would point out that where there is and could in principle be no
valuing agent, there is no conceivable experience - and hence no aesthetic or moral value at all. In a universe of
mere objects absent a valuing consciousness, things may have being but not value .Perhaps intrinsic/inherent value is the
contemporary equivalent of the medieval concept of "ontological goodness" - then in so far as it exists, everything is good in God's eyes. Or
perhaps whatever is, is good for some non-human consciousness other than God. (These latter two cases conform to what Callicott identifies
as inherent value.) I respect both of these possibilities, but as a human philosopher I cannot, and need not, comprehend them
from the inside. If there were no human agent there would after all be no possibility (and no need) for the kind of
environmental ethic we seek. I do not know what it is like to be God, nor do I know what it is like to be a bat.
The concept of intrinsic/inherent value is thus either meaningless, or else it reduces to the value of something that
enters into ecological relations that do not immediately affect any human agent. All that is, however, does
eventually, immediately, affect some human agent. Its value can thus be cognized by humans, and its moral
considerability can be acknowledged and respected. The lesson here, that we are connected at all points to our
environments, and they to us, is the Alpha and the Omega of pragmatic thought about the environment.
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Complexity
The human brain is more complex and interesting than all the abiotic matter in the universe,
makes it worth preserving
Pinker, 2002
Steven, phD from Harvard in experimental psychology, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT,
Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p. 423424
The first two verses of Emily Dickinson's "The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky" express the grandeur in the view of the mind as consisting in
the activity of the brain.' Here and in her other poems, Dickinson refers to "the brain," not "the soul" or even "the mind," as
if to remind her readers that the seat of our thought and experience is a hunk of matter. Yes, science is, in a sense,
"reducing" us to the physiological processes of a not-very-attractive three-pound organ. But what an organ! In its
staggering complexity, its explosive combinatorial computation, and its limitless ability to imagine real and hypothetical
worlds, the brain, truly, is wider than the sky. The poem itself proves it. Simply to understand the comparison in
each verse, the brain of the reader must contain the sky and absorb the sea and visualize each one at the same
scale as the brain itself.The enigmatic final verse, with its startling image of God and the brain being hefted like cabbages, has puzzled
readers since the poem was published. Some read it as creationism (God made the brain), others as atheism (the brain thought up God). The
simile with phonology—sound is a seamless continuum, a syllable is a demarcated unit of it—suggests a kind of pantheism: God is
everywhere and nowhere, and every brain incarnates a finite measure of divinity. The loophole "if they do" suggests mysticism—the brain
and God may somehow be the same thing—and, of course, agnosticism. The ambiguity is surely intentional, and I doubt that anyone could
defend a single interpretation as the correct one.I like to read the verse as suggesting that the mind, in contemplating its place in
the cosmos, at some point reaches its own limitations and runs into puzzles that seem to belong in a separate,
divine realm. Free will and subjective experience, for example, are alien to our concept of causation and feel like
a divine spark inside us. Morality and meaning seem to inhere in a reality that exists independent of our
judgments. But that separateness may be the illusion of a brain that makes it impossible for us not to think they are separate
from us. Ultimately we have no way of knowing, because we are our brains and have no way of stepping outside
them to check. But if we are thereby trapped, it is a trap that we can hardly bemoan, for it is wider than the sky, deeper
than the sea, and perhaps as weighty as God.