Dash to the future? Hell no. We need to strap a dozen JATO units to the back of the car, and punch it.

To Robin, K. Eric, Mike and all the other ultra cautious “let’s go slow and make a trillion safeguards” let me say something I have wanted to say to you all since I first read Engines.

Slow will kill us.

Our only hope is to ride the rocket. There are 6 billion people on the planet, and no two of them share the exact same ethics and morality as any other. One man’s evil is another man’s good. You want to take it slow, make ten million safety checks, make sure that every contingency has been planned for? Well, I pity you when Al’Qida prefects their nanobot that will kill you for not being Shi’ite Muslim, or their superbug that will slaughter every non Arab.

Simply put, ethics sounds nice. Morality sounds nice. Caution sounds nice. And it will get us all killed by the people who’s ethics, morality, and sense of what’s right and wrong are totally different than yours. Banning Stem Cell Research didn’t stop research in the rest of the world. Banning cloning didn’t stop it either.

You say “let’s all be friends and play nice together”, and they will say “We will bury you.”

Technology doesn’t wait on consensus. It doesn’t wait for everyone to agree on whether it should or shouldn’t be created. K. Eric had one thing right, you cannot put the Genie back in the bottle. The Genie is out, and it will serve whoever masters it first. At least if we become it’s master, there’s a better than even chance it will benefit the entire human race, but if we hem and haw and worry about how best to control the Genie, you can bet someone else will beat us to it. Japan? Not so worried, Giant Mecha would be cool. China? Not so certain there. The Taliban? We can kiss our asses goodbye.

We can’t afford to debate, we can’t afford to slow down, we can’t afford to do anything but full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

The sole consolation I have is the knowledge that for all your worry and caution, for twenty years now I’ve watched the makers and creators of the technology ignore you.

It may kill us, yes. We may grey goo ourselves, make sky-net, turn our planet into a new asteroid field, or any number of other horrible things. But it’s the only hope we have of getting out of childhood alive. We’ve been walking a razor’s edge between heaven and hell since Einstein thought up E=MC2, and we have had a sword hanging over our heads for all of our existence. Once Drexler proposed a means to create the salvation of our race, it should have been the sole project of all of science to make it happen.

We’re racing down an ever steeper slope to a future beyond imagining. Between us and it are a thousand pitfalls, terrorists, luddites, and crazies of all descriptions. If we slow down for even a fraction of a second, they will tear us from the sled and rip us to pieces. Speed is the only sane course. Some of us are going to die along the way. There’s nothing we can do about that, but the sooner we reach that light at the end of the path, the more of us will survive to enjoy our victory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

I wouldn’t be surprised if pundits played a role in changing that. I can’t name any specific pundits that played a role, but I can’t name any specific pundits from that era period.

Over a hundred yard course, it is better to walk in the rain than run in the rain, if your goal is to not get wet. The difference isn’t huge, but over eight trials the running person got wetter.

The mythbuster guys were kind of embarrassed by this.