Derek asked:

With Medical science advancing greatly even creating artificial life is in the realms of possibilities and
probabilities. Nanotechnology is opening more opportunities for research and with the scale of human
deaths reported in natural disasters there is a perception that the value of human life is diminishing.
Or have I got that perceptive wrong?

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In my opinion, you've got it wrong. I think that if anything humans place a teeny bit more value on life
than in the past. Not much, mind you. Just a little. If you read history, you read about the history of
war, for the most part. If you look at ancient methods of punishment, they routinely involve torture and
slow, public death, and in many situations were occasion for parties, etc. Mostly, we don't do that so
much now. One problem, of course, is that there are so manypeople now, and methods of killing
have gotten so efficient, that in sheer number we've surpassed anything the ancient world was
capable of. I've recently seen an estimate of death by war (onlywar) in the 20th century, at roughly
160 million. But out of 2-4 billion, that's a low percentage ("low", haha, at roughly 5 per cent). Anyway,
back when the world population was numbered in the millions, the death of thousands was relatively
much more telling. Whoopee, right? What can I say? Human beings, in my opinion, are, all of us (yes,
me included), an insane species. About all one can do is be awarethat we're insane, and try to
compensate as best one can.

Steven Ravett Brown

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