X-Message-Number: 24962 Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 08:54:59 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #24940 - #24945 Hi everybody! Some comments for those who wrote messages discussing some of the points I made about virtually immortal people: For Jonathan Hinek: The major problem with looking at the behavior of present human beings to work out both the values and behavior of future virtually immortal people lies in current mortality. We currently live among people who believe they're unlikely even to reach 100 years age, and know that if they did so they would be not strong, healthy, and competent but weak, sick, and defective. It's the fact that these people believe so strongly that they will die that death in all its forms dominates their imagination. And why deaths through sudden illness, violence, etc? Because the last kind of death they would want is without honor at all, as a slow, sick, and doddering old man or woman... which, if they don't believe in the work on antiaging, looks to them as if it will be their REAL fate. As we all know, not only does death dominate their imagination but it dominates their literature and interests too. Nowhere is there simply love, it always seems to be love and death. And of course so long as the deathrate remains high, more children are needed to replace the dead, so that combination even looks rational. For Randolph Wicker: To reply to your question I will first consider just what is meant by "romance" in your title. It is not that I claim virtually immortal people would lack attachments to one another. But they would hardly be taken over by those attachments. After all, given 50 or 100 years both parties would EXPECT to grow in difference ways, and so grow into people that for practical reasons, if for no other, could not continue to see one another so often or live together as they had formerly done. The kind of intense preoccupation with one another that now occurs in young people who have "fallen in love" simply would not happen in people each of whom was over 100 years old (but physically and mentally still "young"). Not only that, but because they were attached to one another for however long, they would probably help one another to grow, and ultimately to grow away from one another. Would history still remain of interest? There would still be a few who wanted to know the details of what happened, say, 1000 years ago before they were born. But history would fail to attract any more general interest. If you've been through many changes, even many wars (not that wars in the current sense would still continue) they're all minor waves in a very deep ocean. Only a hydrodymamicist interested in wave behavior remains interested in those minor waves, and his/her interest is quite different from that of someone who takes each wave as something serious. I would repeat to you what I've just said to Jonathan Hinek above. Finally, you mistake me when I wrote of improving ourselves. I do not know of any robot, computer, or machine which is an improvement of ourselves. Certainly they can do things we cannot (put simply, cars go much faster than we could run) but that doesn't make them a fundamental improvement of human beings. However I do think that even humans in the biological sense can and will be improved. They would still keep a roughly human form, if only to help communication and other relations with other humans. As for cloning ourselves, given that we don't die, we'd be making competitors for ourselves, and very skilled ones at that. Hardly a sensible idea. However if 2 or more people got together to create an improved form of each of them, they'd be making a new human being; and of course they wouldn't do that without space and resources for that new human being. Finally, I suggested that 2 people would usually be the group that did so, for a very simple reason: nowhere in nature do we find more than 2 propagating sexes. Some animals do have a neutral form separate from the two sexes, which does not itself propagate. And cloning, particularly in one-celled creatures, is quite common. However cloning fails to allow the mixture of ideas which creation of a new creature, not just a copy of an old one, allows. Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24962