X-Message-Number: 26193 Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 10:24:03 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: news and comments to Hirsch and Coetzee Several replies this time, and a bit of news about the next issue of PERIASTRON: News first: a number of people have let their subscriptions run out recently, either by mistake or deliberately. If it's by mistake, then email me that you want to continue and I will send you the latest issue, just out, even before I get a check from you. If you've let it lapse deliberately, you have a perfect right to do so, but I'd still like to know why. I know that at least one person let his sub lapse a while ago until he felt he had enough money to continue it. I don't write it just to please subscribers: facts can sometimes be very unpleasant. But I'd still like to know why you decided not to subscribe any more. Comments: To Prof Henry Hirsch: Totally passive storage suffers from a major long term problem, easy to see if you look at human history. Consider the pyramids: when they were cared for by priests, no one looted them and they were maintained in good condition. By now, thousands of years after the priests left, even the fact that they were mounds of rock hasn't preserved them, and looting has taken away most of the easily findable archaeological objects. You like permafrost: what if the current climate changes (considering what various say, hmmm) and the ground warms up. Whether or not that happens, there are lots of microbes which will happily eat the stored remains, chemically protected or not. Put differently, cryonics is an arrangement between those who want someday to be suspended and those who are suspended now. It's the job of those who want to be suspended to care for those who are suspended, because otherwise they call into strong question their own fate when they are suspended. And anyone who believes that at some time in future history we will know how to prevent or fix EVERYTHING (meaning everything!) that might ever go wrong with us is dreaming. And to Basie: Answering your message is awkward because it doesn't look like it was seriously thought out at all. First, I pointed out that you were making an error of the levels on which you were talking: the evolutionary causes of aging do not affect the details of why it happens biochemically in our bodies (biochemistry of course also involves our DNA). If we alter our genes in order to live longer, that may or may not succeed, regardless of any evolution which produced our genes as they are. Second, of course, you seem not to have read anything on evolution at all. If someone has genes which make them 1.live longer, and 2. therefore beget more children, then those genes will spread, not diminish. Even inbreeding is good or bad depending on just what genes and what they do. Moreover, the idea doesn't stand up anyway. Why do mice live lives so much shorter than those of elephants? Because mice are subject to dangers and stresses that elephants easily avoid. An interesting fact: some have charted physical size of animals against their lifespans. The relation isn't perfect: turtles live much longer than mammals of the same size. However one group of mammals comes out as living longer than most other mammals of the same size: monkeys and apes generally. Their greater intelligence makes them able to survive predators that would happily eat other mammals. Moreover birds live longer on average than other animals of the same size. Why? They can fly away from predators. To throw a name at you, the biological theorist who thought up the theory I summarized in my last message was GC Williams. Others have extended his ideas to predict deathrates at various periods in the lifespan of living things. They can explain, in evolutionary but not biochemical terms, why the deathrates are high at the start of life too, not just at the end. We have no genes which tell us to stop living at any particular time; instead by the dangers and stresses we face, our probability of survival goes down with time, and even if that probability STARTS by going down exponentially, the fact that genes which show themselves only a high ages will have far less influence on our survival than those showing up in early life ... so that evolution works to enhance those early genes, not the late one. Result: over time the life curve ceases to be exponential and turns into the sharp downward curve we associate with the idea of a lifespan (*). Best wishes and long long life to all. (even if you've decided not to subscribe to PERIASTRON) Thomas Donaldson (*) Animals or creatures that die off exponentially, the result of purely random deaths, have no lifespan at all. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26193