X-Message-Number: 10932
From: 
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 10:32:09 EST
Subject: One more time

Although this is getting pretty boring and not very useful, I'll make one more
very brief effort to clarify my guesses on Seconds (see below) and one or two
of the many related matters:

A "Second" is your possible future alter-ego and personal
thinking/actuating/self-improving machine, an advanced flower of tech
including nanotech. It is partly integrated into your own psyche by physical
(perhaps radiative) connections of some sort, chips in your brain, whatever.

Mr. Henny asks what benefactor will give or sell you one. Answer: Anyone who
feels a bit close to you, perhaps your cryonics organization, or one of your
children, or a friend previously thawed--possibly even the "government" or an
agency of society. The basic machine is dirt cheap, more or less as an apple
seed is dirt cheap. It grows and improves and learns very fast, guided by your
own wishes and instructions and public information, and using e.g. recycled
waste as raw material for its growth and manufactures. (Don't tell me you
might have to buy scarce titanium or whatever; many solid parts can be made of
diamond, made from the carbon dioxide in air, and in any case substitutes are
available for just about anything, e.g. autos without steel.) 

You want cheesecake? If you have any sample of any kind of cheesecake--or even
if you just remember the taste of cheesecake--your machine can simulate a
million variations in a millisecond--and if you make a decision, can deliver a
fresh-baked piece much faster than any commercial purveyor. It can also
project or expand upon your cheesecake bent and invent a million new products
that will cater to the underlying inclinations. Your need or demand for Aunt
Nellie's product is vanishingly small.

And please quit with the dope-head warning. No sane person will allow himself
to become helpless or static by living in an electronic or chemical dream
world. But this does NOT mean that we will never choose to satisfy some wants
by direct creation of appropriate signals in the brain; the details are far
beyond the scope of today's message.

And yet again to newcomers: Don't be put off by speculations about a strange
future. We (including you) will build our own various and evolving futures as
time goes on and resources permit. Choose life!

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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