"Um. Ways in which a sentence beginning with the word "missiles" could be a good thing... Nope. I got nuthin'." - Dennis E. Taylor

Sadly, it was like most political arguments. No one was willing to debate their base assumptions, or justify them, or compromise on them. The simple tactic being that if you repeated your assertion often enough, with enough emotion and volume, the opponents would somehow be forced to see things your way.

Thank God for family. And than GOD for a couple of miles of distance.

Was I alive? Hmm, since no one had yet managed to define life rigorously, that was going to be a fun one. As the speaker at that long-ago panel in Vegas had pointed out, fire has most of the qualities of life but is not alive. According to Dr. Landers, I would be able to reproduce via printer-based autofactories. I certainly responded to stimuli, and acted with self-interest. The claim that life would have to be carbon-based was chauvinistic and narrow-minded, so yeah, I could consider myself alive.