X-Message-Number: 1568
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 93 12:21:16 GMT
From: 
Subject: CRYONICS A reason to live forever


In response to Garret Smyth's request for arguments in favour
of living forever I have a thought that might be of interest.
 One might argue that
life itself is precious by virtue of the uniqueness of the
information contained in a living being. The well known argument
about how long it would take for a number of monkeys to type, say,
the works of Shakespeare gives some idea of the preciousness of
information.

For example I made a rather silly calculation recently that seemed
to give me some perspective on this question. If one assumes a best
possible case for the monkey argument, it is possible to calculate
how much of a given text the monkeys could come up with if they worked,
say, for as long as the current age of the universe.

Assuming each monkey works at a rate of the inverse Plank time (10^43 Hz),
one can work out how many trial copies each monkey will type for a
period equal to the current age of the universe (10^10 years).
Now, if we assume the that each monkey has the dimensions of the
Plank length (10^-35 m), and that the universe is completely full
of monkeys working in parallel (taking the diameter of the 
universe to be (cT)^3 where c is the velocity of light), one finds
that the monkeys will end up generating about 10^240 trial copies.

Now 10^240 is approximately 2^800, so that the monkeys can only be
sure of finding all the combinations of 100 bytes of information.
Therefore, they can only be sure of coming up with the first sentence
of the text, even if they worked for a period equal to the age of the
universe. As we contain vastly more information than even that contained 
in the works of Shakespeare, the above argument shows that once that
information is lost, it is lost for ever. Maybe this fact alone gives us
a good enough reason to live and preserve the information within 
ourselves.

-- John Eastmond


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