X-Message-Number: 27291 From: "John de Rivaz" <> Subject: time Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 12:04:31 +0100 The subject of time "travel" seems to raise a lot of comment on CryoNet from time to time. But none of the following list of unlikely activities are necessary to revive unpreserved dead people 1 physical travel into the past 2 sending messages to the past 3 receiving messages from the future So arguing that they violate causality, or are unlikely, or impossible, is irrelevant. What we need to consider is transmitterless reception from the past. Assimov described a fictional instrument for this purpose, and called it a "Chronoscope". I cannot say whether it is possible or not, and neither can anyone else. But it doesn't violate causality. You couldn't use such equipment to generate paradoxes. (But you could make a bloody nuisance of yourself as Assimov suggested in his story "The Dead Past". Halperin's "The Truth Machine" touches on similar issues.) The problem exists that some may see the concept of transmitterless reception from the past as a competitor to cryopreservation. People can read a popular physics book and think "Oh well, I needn't bother about cryonics because the Omega Point, the Singularity, or some such modern deity will rescue me." The solution some adopt is to label something unthinking people may associate with chronoscopy, with an absolute negative that isn't really justified unless the writer is omniscient. But isn't this surely exactly the same actions that most conventional people take when they don't want the cryonics movement to grow for other reasons such as stopping people spending their money on ordinary activities that they think will benefit the economy (or even worse themselves or their successors directly)? They label activities like trying to recover a cow from a hamburger or a strawberry thrown into a home freezer as being identical to a future recovery from a carefully performed cryopreservation. They don't give the economic arguments because they known that they will be rightly attacked on the grounds that people should be able to spend their money as they chose. Instead they state categorically that cryonics won't work, and possibly wheel in members of established professions to support their argument. So I think cryonicists need to be very careful when they state rivals to be impossible. There is an answer: That is not to state categorically that anything is impossible, but to show balances of probabilities. This must also be done honestly. Retrieving information from the past astrophysically does not break causation concepts any more than doing it archaeologically. But it is transmitterless reception, which is difficult even if you are attempting it without receiving from another time. If people are revived from cryonics, this is reception from transmitted material. Clearly this is more likely to happen. Further reading: NF Ferdorov (Fyodorov) http://www.venturist.org/fyodorov.htm Probability of cryonic rescue http://merkle.com/merkleDir/cryptoCryo.html another about rescue http://www.cryonics.org/probability.html A Google search on the probability of time "travel" being possible http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=probability+of+time+travel+being+possible&btnG=Google+Search&meta= has about four and a half million entries! The first few produced look authoritative from well known authors. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=transmitterless+reception+of+information+from+the+past&btnG=Search&meta= only produces my own work mentioning transmitterless reception from the past. Gregory Benford wrote a novel "Timescape" about sending messages **to** the past which is much more unlikely and difficult, although reception equipment of various sorts could be targeted if it is suitable. This could be an explanation to inventors' claims to have received creative ideas by ESP or spirit messages, although I think myself that there are much more prosaic explanations for these claims. These matters are not relevant to reclaiming dead people, but have been discussed before and their complications should not be confused with statements about time engineering for reclaiming dead people. -- Sincerely, John de Rivaz: http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy, Nomad .. and more Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=27291