X-Message-Number: 20314
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Cryonics in "Forever Young" (washingtonpost.com article)
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 19:37:14 -0700

From:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12377-2002Oct11?language=printer


Eric Drexler, 47, the Silicon Valley nanotech pioneer, is more optimistic 
than either Kurzweil or Haseltine. He wears a medallion around his neck that 
asks the finder, in case of Drexler's death, to "Call now for instructions/ 
Push 50,000 U heparin by IV and do CPR while cooling with ice to 10C/ Keep 
PH 7.5/ No embalming/ No autopsy." For Drexler plans to come back.

He and others believe that robots smaller than a human cell will soon work 
like Pac-Man. Inject a few million of them into your bloodstream, and 
they'll gobble up fat cells, cancer cells, what have you.

That's why he wants to make it through the next decade or two until the new 
technologies kick in. If for some reason he happens to croak prematurely, he 
wants to get frozen right next to Ted Williams so that when the right 
technology arrives, he can be thawed and have a nanotech workover.

Does he think this will make him immortal?

"Depends on what you mean by immortal," he says, sitting at Silicon Valley's 
Original House of Pancakes in Los Altos, Calif., letting his ham and eggs 
get cold. "There is such a thing as proton decay."

Pause.

He's talking about the eventual collapse of subatomic particles in untold 
eons.

Okay, what about merely geological time? Hundreds of thousands of years?

"Oh yeah." He smiles. "That. For sure."





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