At that point the pieces of the puzzle were all there in plain view, and I should have been able to put them together and draw a conclusion. Nevertheless just a few days later I wrote a letter to Bob Boyer in which I talked about nanotechnology leading to the end of the world. Even now, that idea is still seductive. It's easy enough to make fun of the Singularitarians, but at the same time it's almost impossible not to believe that we are headed for some kind of cosmic cataclysm in the near future. I already believed that when I was seven years old.
Belief systems are very strange.
Getting rid of them is not easy. In fact, I'm still open to the idea that we are in the midst of a great transformation or metamorphosis. A couple of days ago I saw an article in Nature, which treated Engines of Creation with contempt. The article says there is usually no such thing as bad publicity, but Engines is so bad it has been an embarrassment to many people in the field. I quoted this at the end of section 28.