X-Message-Number: 29810
Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 12:05:27 -0700
From: "Jeff Davis" <>
Subject: Re: microbe longevity in permafrost

Someone wrote:
>>>
Analyses of five ice samples, spanning the last 8 million years in
this region, demonstrated an exponential decline in the average
community DNA size with a half-life of approximately 1.1 million
years,
<<<

Whereupon John de Rivaz responds:


> I would have thought that this "limit" could be regarded as indefinite as far 
as cryonics is concerned.

Yes John, exactly right.  The LN2 suspension temperatures are
substantially lower than the permafrost.  Then the rate of reaction
(ie chemical degradation), dependent on the temp and defined by the
Arhennius equation, is vastly slower.  Indeed that degradation should
take billions -- no typo that "b" -- of years.  Effectively, as you
say, indefinite.


> If someone remains cryopreserved for any appreciable fraction of a million 
years this tends to suggest that reanimation is becoming increasingly unlikely 
as time moves on.

But that suggestion would be ill informed.  First, the increase in
"unlikelihood" is vanishingly small -- what's a hundred thousand
years, or even a million, compared to a billion.

Second, and of vastly greater importance, the non-linear
(exponential?) rate of technolgical progress so outpaces the rate of
degradation as to reduce the latter to irrelevance.  Within hundreds
-- at the very most thousands -- of years, the technology for physical
restoration or uploading will have been achieved or, alternatively,
proven infeasible.

Call me biased but my money is on "achieved".  The evolved nanotech of
biology proves it can be done.  Which leaves us waiting on the steady
"grunt" work of MNT development.

I'll be waiting.  In the cooler.  In the oblivion of unconsciousness.
Patient.  And confident.

-- 
Best, Jeff Davis

               "Everything's hard till you
                     know how to do it."
                              Ray Charles

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