A large majority of Palestinians say that they will support Iraq if it’s attacked by the U.S.

Yet another faulty implementation of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” If the Palestinians are trying to elicit sympathy from Americans, they continue to find surefire ways to achieve just the opposite.

My latest Fox News column is up. It’s basically a rehash of my earlier post on the relationship between cryonics and space.

It looks like a space tourist flight is back on for this fall. It’s being reported that MTV will sponsor Lance Bass.

One potential hitch, though. The flight is only three months away, and the protocols agreed to last year stipulated six months of training. Personally, I don’t see the requirement myself, but it will be interesting to see how this issue is resolved.

Radley Balko needs some legal advice to preserve his freedom of speech, and to publish the truth about irrational drug warriors.

Shepherd Smith on Fox News is reporting a bomb blast in Tel Aviv.

[Update]

Now they’re saying there were two bomb blasts.

To Jeff Goldstein, who is the blogger du jour at Fox today.

OK, I know I’ve been all over the cryonics stuff like Michael Moore on a plate of double cheeseburgers, but I hear you all asking–just what the heck does all this have to do with space?

First of all, space may offer a solution to a problem faced uniquely by cryonicists. As the Ted Williams (and the earlier Dora Kent) case shows, a cryonics patient in suspension is not necessarily safe from interference by others.

Storage in space could prove a solution to the “peasants with pitchforks” problem. A suspension repository in orbit or on the lunar surface could be designed to be passively cooled, eliminating the requirements of power for refrigeration, or the topping up of liquid nitrogen, reducing the chances of thawing due to natural disasters or business problems. And it would put the patients safely out of reach of most who, for whatever reason, would attempt to deliberately thaw (and thus destroy) them.

In addition, as more people sign up, it might present another market for space transportation, which is badly needed to reduce the cost. I wrote on this subject extensively for Cryonics magazine over a decade ago.

But there are other relationships between space and cryonics.

One of the concerns that’s often raised by cryonics, and by life extension in general, is the population problem implied by new people being continually born, with few dying.

The problem, if it is one, is not immediate. Our home planet is capable of supporting many times as many people as it currently does at a comfortable living standard, given adequate technology, and rational governance (the latter being a commodity unfortunately still in short supply in much of the world). And I think that fixing the bad government problem is a much more ethically desirable and otherwise worthwhile approach than throwing up our hands at the problem, and instead murdering the millions who might like to live longer (which is what forcing someone to die prematurely surely is).

The biggest problems from a resource standpoint are water, and energy. But given affordable energy, the water problem is easily solved with desalinization of ocean water. And it would be foolish to bet that we won’t come up with affordable new energy sources in the future (improved nuclear fission plants, nuclear fusion, more efficient solar and energy storage, etc.).

Also, there’s no shortage of land, and won’t be for a long time, considering how much of the planet is still relatively empty of people.

But sometime in the next few centuries, assuming that we don’t stop breeding (not necessarily a good assumption) on a mass scale, we will run out of room on this planet.

Fortunately, the rest of the universe is almost unlimited, in volume and critical resources. If we do become essentially immortal, space settlement will provide a safety valve for the additional population, and in fact, it may allow us to actually depopulate the planet, and use it as a vast park, in which to breed diverse wildlife and enjoy scenic vacations.

Another problem often postulated by opponents of long life is that people will become bored. That may be true of some–even many. But while many people seem sanguine about the prospects of dying as they approach the ends of their lives, it isn’t clear whether this is because of boredom, or because the currently-inevitable infirmities of advanced age have made living tiresome and unpleasant, and even excruciatingly painful.

It seems likely to me that, in most cases, their enthusiasm for life would be dramatically increased if they were given twenty-year-old bodies (and matching hormones) again, particularly if they were chronologically older and wiser, and thus knew much better what to do with them. In a world of rejuvenation, the old saying about “youth being wasted on the young” would no longer apply.

It will, of course, depend greatly on the individual. As I wrote once in a letter to The Economist, for Joe or Josephine Sixpack, who comes home from work each night and sits in front of the television drinking beer, three score and ten will seem plenty. But for a Leonardo or Leonarda da Vinci, a lifetime of centuries might still seem all too brief.

But for those who like to travel, longer life will offer more opportunities to visit new places, and in the future, most of those new places will be off planet, so for many, space offers a solution to the boredom problem as well.

Space and extended life go hand in hand. The universe is so vast that we will require many human lifetimes to explore it, at least as individuals. And it offers new ecological ranges for the increased numbers of conscious beings that will result from advances in technology. And finally, unfortunately, at our current rate of progress, I occasionally think that I’m going to have to live several hundred years just to have a chance to get off the planet, at least if the government stays in charge…

When I saw Godzilla a few years ago (the new one, based in New York), as we left the theatre, I commented to a friend on the physical improbability of it. The beast was made out of flesh and bone, yet when it brushed skyscrapers as it ran through the canyons of New York City, it tore off huge chunks of concrete and steel from them, with no apparent damage to its own body.

But even more of a problem is the thermodynamics. When you consider how much power it would take to move that much mass at those speeds, and then consider how large the body was, with a very high mass-to-surface-area ratio, it seems impossible to cool it. The thing would basically cook from the inside out.

This is one of the limits on the size of warm-blooded animals, particularly if they’re very active. We now believe that dinosaurs were warm blooded, but we have no reason to believe that they moved particularly fast, at least, not the large ones like apatasaurus.

Anyway, den Beste has a similar, and entertaining, series of posts about an upcoming movie featuring fire-breathing dragons, and how they’d be no match for modern weaponry.

In a huge technological breakthrough, Alcoa has announced the development of a non-stick aluminum foil.

So, do you use the non-sticking side on the inside, or the outside, of your foil hat? Will it block the mind-control beams better?

The plot thickens.

Here’s an image of the petition filed by the executor of the will. Note that it says that the daughter who wants to thaw and burn Mr. Williams was estranged and cut out of the will. So if, as this story indicates, the family is in negotiation, just what’s being negotiated? Is she perhaps extorting the other two siblings for a cut of the estate in exchange for allowing him to remain in cryostasis?

[Update at 7 AM PDT]

Natalie Solent has weighed in on the frozen soul issue as well (as is apparently the rule with blogspot these days, the permalink doesn’t work, so just go to her site). She basically agrees with me.

Rand Simberg’s picture of there being a storage facility for the “pending” souls is amusingly literal, but has the right idea. Don’t worry. God won’t be caught napping.