X-Message-Number: 21772 From: Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 03:52:38 EDT Subject: very long life --part1_ea.390582b6.2bf895c6_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Francois and Mike Perry for example have argued about eternity. I think some actual concepts such uploading, cryonics,... may extend life or survivability up to the technological civilization duration. This in turn may be limited only by the species life expectancy, given that we get ride of all religious groups. Now, what can we hope from our species? Modern man is some 100,000 years old, it would be astounding if it could survive more than one million years. Some time ago, an astronomer has pointed out that time must be Copernican, that is, all epochs are similar. Here is an example: Assume we are in 1980, you come in Europe and visit some monuments. There is no causal link between the monument building and you or your visit. You come to Paris and visit the Notre Dame cathedral, built 800 years ago. You go to Berlin and visit the wall built 20 years ago. Now, there is very few probability you see these architectural madness right at the time of their building or destruction. The largest probability is that you see them in the middle of their life span. So your guess is that ND-paris will be here for some centuries and that the Berlin wall may well not see the 21st century. At least on the second account we now you would have been right. What that tell us about man? First, our life expectancy as a species is at most in the 100s thousand years. Second, given the actual population explosion and the low population level in most historical times, we can predict a drastic population reduction. The sustainable population level may be only in the tens thousands, far too low for a technological civilization. So this one must collapse with the high population level. Given that that level is only century old, this give the time span for the technology. The overwhelming probability is that some fanatic group will succeed in imposing something that will reduce the civilization to dust and the population to 30,000 or so. Call it Al'Qaida, Saddam revenge, scientology, roman church... What would be the way out? Assume we pick out another species with historical large population and a common ancestor with us far in the past, may be 150 millions years or more. We could take some of their genes and give them some of ours, so they would get bigger with a large brain able to sustain a technological civilization. Slowly, more and more genes would be put in common until there would be only one life form. That could be done on a very long time, may be 100 millions years. Because the process would start soon, we could count that the root of that common species would be right now at the time of the last common ancestor, that is 150 million years. For most of that time, the population could have been in the millions, so that, this level could be sustained for the coming 100 million years at least, without too much strain. Ready to make "cause commune" with some rat-like species? Now, tell to religious people or politicians (this is the same group) we need some "inferior" species to survive an watch their reactions... Yvan Bozzonetti. --part1_ea.390582b6.2bf895c6_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21772