X-Message-Number: 17014 Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 10:17:59 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #17004 - #17012 Hi everyone! A small comment about comments on my recent posting on selfishness etc. Yes, a system of repair machines able to enter single cells would constitute a big advance over the present in terms of our ability to repair things. However there is NO advance that will cover all the things that can go wrong. On the simplest level, if we have such repair machine systems then one day for one or more cryonicists being repaired they will go bad and do the wrong thing. Usually they'll work fine, of course, which is why we'd use them, but "usually" isn't ALWAYS. There is another way to look at such machine systems, too. We may have an ideal picture of what our machines may look like, but when we come to actually BUILD them then inevitably we won't be able to make a perfect version ... a problem of living in the real world. And so these machines would also fail because of their faults. This is a seperate kind of failure from one in which the design of the machine system itself suffered from a mistake which caused problems. Naturally while we consider such systems purely theoretically then they will look perfect. The real issue arises if we have an actual system of repair machines. I await with interest a REAL nanomachine designed for repair, not only for its usefulness for repair, but also for a far better sense that pure theory will give us about just what such machine systems will do in the real world. Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17014