X-Message-Number: 22156
From: 
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 22:26:54 EDT
Subject: Re: CryoNet #22136 - #22147

Thanks to all who responded to my "Anyone comforted" query.

Please allow me to clarify a some points and respond:

1. I do not recommend we rely on this possibility and drop our cryonic 

preservation plans -- I have a contract now and plan to keep it.  I have 
contributed 
to research and plan to give more. But it is interesting to speculate on 

other possibilities, and comforting to think there may be another chance if one
dies in a fire or some other way that precludes preservation.  And there are 

some here who cannot yet afford preservation, and they may take some comfort 
too.

2. Although the Singularity itself, or the rejuvenation or uploading 

techniques it invents, may also save us, that is not the aspect I am discussing.

Rather it is that a human mind, read into a computer and running much faster and
better, without distraction and with perfect communication with other minds, 
will have awesome powers of thought. (Or it may simply be augmented by a good 
connection to a computer.)  Or, we may find intelligence genes, and willing 

couples will fertilize all the woman's eggs and select the two or three embryos
with the most promising genes.  I think this would increase IQ by about 20 

points per generation.  In this way or with computers we may soon have humans 
with 
far higher IQ's than ever before.  Then if Feynman had, say, an IQ of 180, and 
was able to solve problems that the ordinary college graduate with IQ 120 
couldn't even understand, then what will a person with an IQ 60 points higher 
than Feynman's be able to do?  And what will IQ-400 think about?  Time travel, 
perhaps.  

3. Besides huge improvements in intelligence, there will be a lot of time.  
We invented nearly our whole civilization in the last 100-150 years.  In 3500 
BC the Egyptians traveled by sailing ships and horse-and-chariot. They cooked 
with fire and lighted their homes with lamps, wrote letters to communicate and 
had running water in some houses.  In 1850 we used the same methods, and 
likewise, to a great extent, in 1900.  Now it's not the same -- we use the 

Internet, heatpumps, LED lights, 747's etc.  We made all these advancements in a

century or so, with just natural intelligence.  Even at the same rate, where 
will 
we be in another century, and another?  Yet unless we destroy ourselves, we 

have thousands or billions of years ahead.  I cannot imagine the achievements of
future technology, nor can anyone else.

4. Time and Time Travel are difficult subjects (and granted, they are much 

harder than nanotechnology or cryonics). I have read everything from Flatland to
popularizations of String Theory, but never seen a plausible or satisfactory 
explanation of time.  Flatland does it for higher spatial dimensions, but 
nobody makes one understand time, nor the difference between present, past and 
future.  But then, before Einstein, nobody understood space-time or relativity 
either.  So, just because we don't understand time now doesn't mean we never 
will, nor that someone with an IQ of 550 won't.

5. Going back in time and making perfect measurements of a person's brain 
(without interfering with the normal course of events, thereby avoiding 

paradoxes) may be impossible.  But mankind has achieved almost every other 
material 
invention that has ever been dreamed of, and this is an obvious dream.  So I 
think there is a good chance that we'll do it.

6.    In fifty years we'll probably have intelligence genes and very-high-IQ 
offspring, thousands or millions of clones of our brightest scientists, 

man-machine interfaces to augment our wetware, strong AI, and nanotechnology.  
What 
will come of that we cannot imagine.  What will come of that in a thousand 
years, or a million, is utterly unknowable.  But it could well include time 
travel and mind harvesting.  Why *wouldn't*  it?

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22156