X-Message-Number: 17215
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 00:23:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis Epstein <>
Subject: Cryonet Catchup July 29-Aug 1

CryoNet - Sun 29 Jul 2001
-------------------------

    #17133: Re birthday greetings [Kennita Watson]

>For the curious, I'm 41.  I never went for that coy-about-the-age
>nonsense.  Besides, I may as well keep track while my age still
>has only 2 or 3 significant digits.  "How old are you?  Oh, 25,000
>or so -- what's a century or two among friends? :-) .

Casual remark from a character in
that future history of mine just
mentioned above,when a man asks her
age:"Low five figures".
(At the time of the story I'd set
this in,she is 11,263 years old).


    #17134: re: : Infinite Self-Worth [Gary Tripp]

>The possibilities that attend the prospect of our "reanimation" in a future
>filled with the marvels of nanotechnology are so great that it elevates the
>worth of anyone who possesses a sense of awe and wonder. Cryonics as a
>possible bridge to this future is a rational gamble with a huge payoff.

To be fair,some of the features claimed
for nanotechnology disturb me.There are
other science-fiction futures I'd rather
be seeing.But I don't want to be cheated
out of the galactic destiny by mortality!


    #17135: grammar etc. [Robert Ettinger]

>Language is constantly changing. Those who choose to stick strictly to
>currently "correct" usage tend to avoid blame but also to prevent
>improvement.

>Many officially approved changes in language are for the worse.

I dare say that an immortalist society
has a strong incentive to put an end
to avoidable changes in language.
We want the data we generate to remain
intelligible.It's one thing if the
readers of one century and the readers
of the next are different people...but
if they're the same people they won't
want to have to rewrite things.

>Language is usage, determined by the users--either the masses or the
>public speakers and writers.

The "descriptivist" position...I am more
"prescriptivist" in my position.

>If there were more writers with more courage, we could rationalize
>English spelling in short order and save a lot of student brain
>power for more important things.

I tend to oppose altered spellings for
the same reasons I despise the metric
system.Simplicity lacks character.


    #17137: Why not more cryonicists? [Olaf Henny]

>IMOEO [In My Often Erroneous Opinion :)] the reasons why many decline to
>even get informed about cryonics are as follows:

> We have *all* been subjected from early childhood on to very persuasive
>deathist conditioning.  It started with the evil witch, the evil
>stepmother or the evil queen in the fairy tales

I don't see that fairy tales condition children to believe
death is inevitable...after all,they may concern elixirs of
immortality,and living happily EVER after means you DON'T die...

>Furthermore about once a decade young children are exposed to someone
>close in the family dying, (great-) grandparent,parent, uncle etc.

That's unavoidable until death is conquered.

>This deathist believe has been deeply entrenched in all cultures and for
>good reason: Up 'til now everybody, *in all cultures*, has died within
>125 years of birth. By all we have experienced in all history, death _is_
>inevitable.

Exactly.

>To grasp the concept of eliminating death, takes a whole lot of
>independence of thought, which, although helped by education
>and intelligence, often even the brightest brains cannot achieve,
>due to the overwhelming power of conditioning they received
>throughout their lifetime.   "I cannot refute your arguments, -
>yet I find it impossible to believe them"

Certainly Ponce de Leon did not invent
aspiration to eternal life,and mythology
from the dawn of civilization alludes to
efforts effective and ineffective toward
seeking it.


As things stand,as I have said,it is considered a
sign of maturity and realism to abandon hope of
avoiding death.That perception will be a hard nut
to crack...and what sort of advances will be needed
to crack it?


CryoNet - Mon 30 Jul 2001
-------------------------

    #17140: Project Future-Bound [Peter Voss]

>** A note from Dr Jerry Lemler **

>To Alcor Southern California members:

>As the new Alcor Medical Director, I would like to make you an offer to join
>me in the development of an exciting new program that is currently underway
>in the Southern California area: Project Future Bound.

[massive snippage]

Didn't this whole "Project Future Bound" appeal
appear on Cryonet before?


    #17142: The World We Aspire to Join [Olaf Henny]

>If I believed this,
[quote from Tripp on likely decreases in diversity]
>I would join the "Fanatics Squad" in the "Deathist League" in the flick
>of an eye.

Life in a world with common standards would not be
worth living to you?

(It's an aspiration of mine that I am not pleased
to see predicted as impossible.But I note this flip
side to the opposite predictions of personalities
tending to become indistinguishable).

>In a world full of Marilyn Monroes, the one Phyllis Diller
>will be the most cherished woman.  We need diversity to thrive.  Just look
>at Secondary School students.  They are all compressed into absorbing the
>essentially same curriculum, with the result, that only a few excel
>either scholastically or athletically by the set norm, with the rest
>condemned to languish anonymously in the grey majority.  The kids try
>desperately to break out of that mould by the only means they are capable
>of *at that stage*, by assuming outrageous hair colours, tattoos, dress
>and body piercings.

Rather a recent and one hopes short-lived phenomenon...
which argues that the underlying motivations are not
necessarily enduring factors.

A world with a much more static cast of characters than
in former civilizations will also want,and need,much more
static institutions and cultures.The hysterical pace of
the past centuries is just a passing element of an epochal
transition in human life,and when it has passed,there
will be much relief.It may not have peaked,but don't think
there is no end to it.

>But back to our future world:  As our capabilities expand, so will our
>horizons.  There are about 30 to 50 solar systems for every person on our
>planet in our own galaxy alone.

Won't be so as we expand out to them,though.

>Some to explore, some with planets to terra form (should be easier than
>hitherto thought with nanotech) and others, at least for a long time to
>come, only to observe from a distance.  Interstellar travel, even without
>worm holes and restricted to the speed of light should be feasible, due
>to our longevity, as well as amenable, since with nanotech the size of
>the space ship(s) and its capacity to provide for comfortable lifestyles
>is only limited by the amount of available materials in the asteroid belt.

Wonderful futures of galactic empire await.

>Just as we have now a huge increase of diversity in occupations and
>lifestyles as compared to a couple of centuries ago we will have an
>exponential growth in such diversity over the next two centuries.

That,however,is a potentially disastrous problem that we will
need to overcome if our future is to be a peaceful one.
Remember that diversity has been the cause of every war in
history!!

>I can foresee a time, when we will have a greater number of possible
>occupations due to grows in divergence and expanded horizons than we
>have now people living on earth.  We will be literally living "worlds
>apart" and develop a new slate of cultural and ethnic variances.

The more cultures,the more culture clashes
and all their consequences.We MUST learn to
CONverge not DIverge!!

>Many of us will physically adapt to new environments

A thought that makes me cringe...
our species should consider itself
the culmination of evolution,with
all further adaptation to be done
by our environments at our instigation,
not by us.

>and our image of beauty an desirability will divert from the present
>to a much greater degree, than it does now from Rubens' concept of the
>ideal female form.

This also repels me enormously.
Aesthetics are for sharing.

    #17145: Avoiding death in Latin [Eivind Berge]

>And speaking of immortalist quotes in Latin, here's one by Horace:
>"non omnis moriar" = I shall not altogether die

>If you on the other hand are a deathist, here's one for you by Petronius:
>"abiit ad plures" = he's gone to join the majority

To which one can answer that one aspires
to fulfill the title by Pohl:
OUTNUMBERING THE DEAD.

>This isn't Latin, but too cute to leave out. It turns out John
>Donne was a cryonicist:

>"One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
>And death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die."

Well,I have used that last phrase before,in the
sense of eliminating mortality...but Donne it would
seem was looking to heavenly resurrection.

Tolkien gave Aragorn the dying words "We are not bound
forever to the circles of the world,and beyond them is
more than memory"...which I choose to interpret in an
astronautical sense,rather than that of souls gone.


Message #17146 From: "john grigg" <>
Subject: meme spreading devices(bumperstickers!)

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ]

Message #17147 From: "john grigg" <>
Subject: will indefinite lifespan and immortalism breed cowardice?

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ]

John,just what did you have to say on these
two topics?

Would be a shame to lose the text content
that you unintentionally HTMLized.

CryoNet - Tue 31 Jul 2001
-------------------------

    #17148: Re: Nanotech and Diversity [Gary Tripp]

>Diversity, of course, is intimately bound to our sense of identity and
>hopefully we will retain memories of our history but my speculation is
>informed by an abstract view of the essential philosophical underpinning
>that animates our behaviour. Without doubt, the insane banter of new age
>spiritualists will be found to be either inconsistent or untenable. The
>influence of nanotechnology will be devolutionary in the extreme and
>will preside over an era that will be pretty close to anarchy.

A very serious danger of it.

>In such an environment diversity will take of itself. I anticipate and
>look forward to a point in our future that will be tantamount to an
>explosion of diversity.

Something better anticipated with dread
and strategies for prevention.


    #17152: TIMESHIP IN FLORIDA? [Driven FromThePack]

>See bottom of 3rd page....
>http://www.mygeneration.org/departments/2001/health/0710_c.html

Interesting article.Bare mention of Timeship
(ten thousand frozen patients...that's a LOT
of expansion over what's now arranged for),
misconstrues Ventureville as a cryonics facility
(though I am not clear why David thinks it
important that it not include one).The "People
Unlimited" on page one may not survive the death
of a founder.I wonder how Roy Walford's diets
will actually wind up working for him and others.
And I share the writer's skepticism of much
extro-stuff.


CryoNet - Wed 1 Aug 2001
------------------------

    #17158: Brand new teeth [James Swayze]

>> From: Louis Epstein <>
>> Subject: More catchup:
>>
>> I'm 40,and until I was 19 had no fillings.Now I'm uncomfortably
>> reminded of the perishability of teeth.What are we going to do
>> to make them last more centuries?

>Stem cell tooth buds. Grow a brand new tooth right in place. Being
>experimented on currently.Should be able to replace a whole mouthful of
>teeth in a few years.

What's the real status of these experiments?
There have been dental wonders promised before.

>Then there would be the fallback, nano molecule by molecule rebuilding
>and diamond outter coating to prevent wear from ever happening again.

Diamonds can be brittle...


    #17160: HTML [Kennita Watson]

>Please do NOT start sendng Cryonet in HTML!  I find it a comforting safe
>haven of fast-loading text in a world where people seem to have gone mad
>with graphics, fonts, colors, attachments, etc.  If I want to look at Web
>pages, I can follow links just by clicking on them in the email (I bless
>the day Netscape Messenger got smart enough to automatically make links
>out of anything starting with "http://" so I didn't have to cut and paste).

>Pretty much everybody gets free Web space now, so even if you don't have
>a ready-made page to link to, you can make one.  Netscape (and, I assume,
>Internet Explorer) gives me the choice of whether to compose messges as
>text or as HTML -- I choose text, because I find it easier to deal with.

And then of course there are people like me,
who stick religiously to a text-based computing
environment.I read email in Pine...I edit in Pico...
I browse the web in Lynx...and don't like seeing
stuff that's incompatible with the basic levels in
its zest to tack on layers of frills.

(If you have a Javscript-based splash page,as
far as I'm concerned,IT'S BLANK).

>So stand fast, Kevin!  Don't open the Pandora's Box of HTML!  Keep it
>simple!  Thus spake the programmer/tech writer/QA engineer.

I agree.


    #17161: Nano repair and computing power [Azt28]Yvan Bozzonetti.

>I see two ways to see cryonics:
>1/ The Alcor way: Frankly, cryonics is unworkable today and frozen corpses
>will remain so. The less we have the better. The only usefulness of current
>cryonics suspension is to advance the technology until we have a working
>(ie reversible) cryopreservation.

I don't think Alcor would agree with
that characterization of their view...

>2/ The cryonics Institute way: Cryonics is a gamble on future technologies,
>mostly in the nano tech domain. What we can do now is freezing to keep
>biological informations. That information is scrambled by the freezing
>process, to get it only a little less so is not worthy, the difference is
>not significant. Anyway, we will need a powerful nano repair technology to
>get out of the fridge.

...to my perception it is Alcor that
is the more "nano-messianic" of the
two,explicitly wedding reversal of
cryosuspension with nanotechnology.
Given my nervousness about many implications
of nanotechnology I am hoping for developments
that are less paradigm-shattering as a
means of keeping people going.


    #17164: can A.I. become truly as we are? [john grigg]

>Louis Epstein replied:
>Artificial intelligence is not the real thing, and never can be.(end)

>How can you say artificial intelligence will never be the "real thing?"

By defining the real thing to exclude it.

>I believe in the existance of a soul/spirit, but still am convinced long
>before this century is out we will see machines with all the self-awareness,
>intelligence, and "heart" of the best humans.

I am both disturbed by the prospect,
and unsympathetic to the concept.

>In fact, when it comes to "heart and soul" they may far exceed us in
>time.  I wonder if you are letting religious dogma get in the way of
>an understanding of the ever more rapid technological growth we are
>experiencing.

I don't think it's accurate to characterize my
philosophical positions as religious dogma.As
for technological growth,you can't let present
acceleration blind you to inevitable deceleration.
And strength is measured by staying constant in
the face of change.If inflexible definitions do
not survive,what can survive?

>I would find it a fascinating thought that some spirits are born here on
>earth as A.I. instead of human beings.

I would find it both ridiculous and terrifying.
Keep your ghosts out of my machines!


    #17166: a new role-playing game about transhumans! [john grigg]

>I love Steve Jackson's GURPs rpg system, and am very excited about what
>he will be releasing later this year!

I haven't tried it.
Trouble is,I hate having an incomplete
collection of rulebooks.

Steve's on Cryonet,isn't he?

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