Choosing Our Future

Our view is that as much as we cannot control the ballooning and nova of our future red giant Sun (a frightening thought), we cannot stop the human drive to explore and eventually settle worlds beyond Earth. We can, however, go about this eventuality reasonably safely or not, and we would choose to do so as safely as possible. 

Again, thank you for your comments and for choosing American Mortgage Company for your loan. We will be working hard over the life of your loan and hope you will be pleased with our service in the future. We value your business and want to keep it. 

To formalize our predictions about how the three types behave, we assume people follow "perception-perfect strategies," which in this environment implies that people choose to hit today if and only if hitting today is optimal given their current preferences and their current beliefs about how they will behave in the future. 1... 

Conspicuously absent from our model is the ability to use external commitment devices. Alcoholics sophisticated about their self-control problems may, for instance, choose to check themselves into the Betty Ford Clinic. Note that naifs would not use external commitment devices since they always believe they will behave themselves in the future. 

Salvia divinorum as an herb can be used quite safely and many people claim that it has proved beneficial to them. Hopefully there will not be a rush to isolate the pure compound as it is almost inevitable that it will cause problems, people will get hurt, the compound and possibly the plant will get negative attention and it will become scheduled. We will just be adding one more potentially valuable plant ally to the list of species which are already feared and condemned in our society. If you choose to pursue a relationship with this plant please treat it with respect and care. Perhaps if people can use the plant safely and responsibly it will be able to grow and thrive freely into the future. 

Being able tp choose psychoactive compounds with more specific effects than LSD, mescaline and psilocybin has already resulted in more subtle possibilities, along with giant strides in our understanding of how alterations in psychoactive molecular structures affect their duration, as well as empa-thetic, visual and other qualities. New psychedelic substances may have some surprising effects. In the future, we may have psychedelics that go beyond LSD for power and interest. 

The future seems very, very dark. It will continue to be so unless all Americans, each time they see their flag waving in the breeze, realize that this emblem now symbolizes in this year of our Lord 2003 that Americans can kill anybody they want to for any reason we choose, even if that reason is a lie. 

If we have been successful in our aims, the reader should be able to scan the following chapters and choose the methods or characterization techniques that best suit the chemistry at hand. She or he should at the same time acquire an appreciation for less familiar methodology (or at least be made aware of their existence and potential use in the future). Finally, we hope that these accounts, written from the viewpoint of organometallic chemists, spectroscopists, and theoreticians who are enthusiastic innovators in the topics described, will provide the interested reader with the sense of art that is implicit in synthetic organometallic chemistry but that of necessity is sadly lacking in the concise detail of the experimental sections of our papers (8,9). 

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