X-Message-Number: 19855 From: "Francois" <> Subject: The problems of biological immortality Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 20:26:11 -0400 The aim of most of CryoNet's subscribers is to achieve immortality. This, in principle, can be done in many ways, some emotionally more satisfying than others. The prefered vision of immortality emerging from the many posted messages seems to be purely biological in nature. Either people die, are cryopreserved and revived when the needed technology becomes available, or medical science advances fast enough to vanquish aging before people die. The resulting individuals look exactly as we do today, except that they forever remain physically young. This, however, presents a problem. To illustrate it, suppose one of our distant ancestors, a Homo Habilis for instance, became immortal three million years ago. How this could have happened is irrelevant, it is enough to imagine that it did. This immortal Habilis could then still be alive today, but he would obviously be completely obsolete from the point of view of intelligence, having been left far behind by our much better and keener minds. Evolution would not have stopped just because he became immortal, and it would have quickly transformed him into an actual living fossil. Purely biological immortals will always suffer this fate. It is not easy for a living creature to "upgrade" itself. Normally, old individuals die long before this becomes a problem, but we will prevent this from happening. Immortal Homo Sapiens will suffer the fate of my hypothetical Homo Habilis, and probably much sooner than he would have because we will be faced with entities that can "evolve" much faster than any biological organisms. I'm speaking of the intelligent machines that will have to exist at the time of our reanimations. Biological brains have very strict limits, and we are very close to them right now. Machine brains don't have those limits. It has been demonstrated that machines can enhance their capacities up to literal infinity. The only way for us to cope with this problem will be to join the machines on their own turf and convert ourselves into machine entities. Then our minds will acquire the infinite enhancement potential of the machines. Biological immortality can only be seen as a temporary stepping stone to a different realm of existence. Francois --------------------------------------------------------------------- No lifespan shorter than eternity is acceptable --------------------------------------------------------------------- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19855