X-Message-Number: 4682
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 18:02:37 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Eugen Leitl <>
Subject: stability, shmobility
This is forwarded copy of a private mail to Mike. He asked me
to post it to cryonet, and I did (this was a flame reflector ;)
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> Date: Jul 95 16:10:17 EDT
> From: Mike Darwin <>
> Subject: Re: Long Term Stability of Cryonics Service Providers
>
> Eugene Leitl writes:
[ mercifully ommitted ]
> I'll be happy to answer this question. Cryonics societies have given a
> great deal of thought to this issue, performed countless hours of research,
> run literally thousands of hours of simulations on both Cray XMP and HAL
> 9000 computers. Here are the conclusions they have reached:
Hmm. I think by now I should have detected a faint trace of irony here? ;)
> 1) Most of their members/customers are so doped-up with over the counter
> optimism (which they dispense freely) that they are incapable of imagining
> anything but Nanotechnological nirvana arriving within the next 50 to 100
> years or so. In the meantime, computers, relentlessly advancing
> rationality, and the milk of human kindness will all combine to
> increasingly stabilize the world. Further, the formation of small groups
> to prepare the world for the dowsides of nanotechnology will be effective in
> keeping everything hunk-dorry through a time when little things can be made
> that will crawl into your brain and make you appereciate modern art. This,
> despite the fact that no matter what is done the world won't even know what
> nanotechnology is till after its kicked it in the b----s.
Good. Really good!
Seriously, though: this ubiquitous uncritical belief in the nanotech
advent ("Yeah, verily, the Drexler generic assembler engine shalt come
forth whatever else heathens preach") doth strike me as somewhat
overoptimistic.
Though me & friends being chemists the Good Man Drexler & consorts keep
telling us: You don't understand anything about chemistry since it is not
the _normal_ chemistry, you know. At the same time he says 100 pm
arm tip amplitude rep precision is sufficient to build a perfect diamond
lattice from dire reactive species. And he seems to be able to compute a
nanoscopic cantilever diamondoid platform dynamics (of perfect diamondoid
lattice, of course) with some magical quantum finite element software
package.
I just hope it is PD. 'cause there is nothing commercial around which could
compute it.
"Relentlessly advancing rationality and the milk of human kindness
(tm) ShakeSpeare"
Say, are you speaking of late 19th century Albion here ? =)
> 2) ALL of their customers are science or computer nerds who've never
> cracked a history book in their life (they had a copy of "Programming In
> Fortran" tucked into the jacket of their world history books during high
> school and college). As a consequence almost none of the customers sees
> the world as a whole in any meaningful context.
You are sure right. However, we should be falling into a technological
singularity by now (at least, according to Vinge), so any predictions/
extrapolations should become invalid on the mid run. However, humans being
humans.... Too hard to tell.
> 3) MOST of the customers have been born in an era of almost unbounded
> technological progress. They have never read Tacitus, never read Gibbon,
> never read Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, never
> understood the heights to which Middle Kingdom Egypt reached (cultural and
> technological) and never read William McNeill's Plaugues and Peoples or
> any other good histories which explain why little problems like the middle
> ages occured largely independent of human stupidity or mismanagement...
We know the evolution has no long-term goals. But at the same time there
_is_ a trend towards "progress" (and the cerebralization quotient
_does_ rise according to fossil record), and things seems to fit the
exponential function well, particularly in the last few decades. Sure
population growth has slowed down just recently, but we should only be
too grateful for that.
Progress is a brittle thing. And I just hope there won't come an A+B war,
a straying asteroide or simply a new strange attractor to bring the system down.
But: who is the German whining gas bag in here?
> 4) Most cryonicists don't know anything about the dinosaurs and those that
> do are so arrogant that they cannot imagine anything which they
> (cryonicists) can't control, snuffing out 90% of all the life on earth in
> one fell swoop. A corollary is that some cryonicists unlike Creationists
> who believe that dinosaurs and men were contemporaries, actually believe
> that dinosaurs and men will be contemporaries again in five years or so, if
> they don't already believe that they've been secretly cloned already.
Provided, the entire DNA sequence information is there (from amber-encased
fossil bloodsuckers or wherever), albeit fragmented, and that total
sequencing is trivial as is transfection, we _could_ clone dinos.
(But we shouldn't have cloned the Creationists. They'd better remained
extinct. Shit. Too late.)
> 5) Viet Nam was as close to economic disruption as anybody has come in the
> US who comprises the bulk of the customers. They were all sucking their
> thumbs when this went on, or busy chasing cheerleaders around the high
> school football field. In fact, it might be instructive to note that Viet
> Nam almost cost one patient getting frozen. Dear Richard Nixon and his
> dear old Objectivist buddy Alan Greenspan had instituted price controls
> (Phase IIII or Phase IV, I can't remember which) and petrol rationing circa
> 1973. A colleague and I had a patient who was down in a small town in
> Maryland. They (the entire town) were OUT of their alloted ration of gas.
> The only way we could even MOVE, let alone fuel the Cessna to fly us out of
> there was to bribe some locals (we didn't do this directly, the pt's son
> did: the family was VERY influential in this town: they ran the liquor
> store). Otherwise, we would have been screwed, or more precisely the pt
> would have.
And the world is a crock of excrement, which stinketh. I'm just happy
I was a babe on the other side of the Iron Curtain just then.
> And that was only Vietnam!!!!!! Incidentally, you, *all* of you, are STILL
> paying for that war and the "cold war" the went with it. What this means
> is that ALL of us are certainly a lot pooer than we otherwise would have
> been. What this means is that people who would have been making 30K a year
> instead of 15K would be able to freeze their 90 year old grandmothers.
> What *that* means is that economic disruption is already costing "patient"
> lives, lots of them. But then these "deaths" or noncryopreservations are
> not seen as related at all. Again, as the Austrian economist Ludwig von
> Mises so aptly pointed out: this is the problem of that which is SEEN
> versus that which is UNSEEN.
The whole body of politics is based on the rockbed of _unseen problems_.
Sheesh, most of the politicians are so apt in concealing, they fail to
notice them themselves!
In fact, just being smart does not increase one's fitness function.
Since the world's complex, we all might as well throw dice.
> 6) The most effective way of dealing with the problem (according HAL 9000
> analysis) is to get cryonicists into small, local groups where they can
> hold each others' hands, talk about the grand and ever upward sweep of
> history, and mentally masturbate each other 'bout the coming Golden Age of
> Nanotechnology.
Hmm. I think you shouldn't use this wording, the cryonicist's average
age and background being what it is =)
> 7) Failures are not discussed. Except for an occassional rogue madman like
> Mike Darwin, no one mentions that, other than Bedford (whom Mike Darwin and
Come, come...
> others "rescued'), nobody who was frozen prior to 1973 is still frozen:
> they all got thawed out. Also, nobody mentions that even now, in this
> peaceful time (unless you live in Bosnia and your first name is Mustafa)
> the rough 180K Bedford set aside for his care was eaten up dealing with
> crises (manmade!). Furthermore, the roughly $1 million (not my estimate)
> spent to fight the bureaucrats or accomodate them here in California and in
> Arizona in order to go about the business of freezing people is largely
> left unmentioned.
And this is California/Arizona. I just shudder to think what legal problems
will arise in Germany. Hah, I'll just contact Klaus Reinhard to find
out how hard the legal problems here really are. A good idea, this.
> 8) As soon as they can, the last traces of Mike Darwin's madness
> (=depression=lack of perspective=jaundiced view of what a nice place the
> world is) will be removed from the literature of cryonics organizations
> using what Mike Darwin wrote on these subjects (which, even Mike Darwin
> will concede, was REALLY watered down compared to what he actually
> THOUGHT).
Ooops. You do have a thought weapon license, do you?
> 9) VERY few of the customers have ever been to corrupt 3rd world countries,
> ever visted the former Soviet Union or its "client" countries and thus have
I _lived_ in the very heart of the Great Satan for 14 years. Now it is
even 10^3 times shittier than before, and they still have most of those
nukes, ready to claim for Ivan Adolfovitch Shirinovsky. Jeez, I'm just
scared.
> no idea about things like Mordita, corruption, systematic beating and
> killing of people with with slightly divergent views and what a
> dictatorship is all about. The nice thing about this kind of ignorance is
> that, if you wait long enough, you won't have to travel to see it first
> hand. It will come to you. By way of example we just did 7K in SIMPLE
> construction at the lab: the regulatory bill (permits, extra drawings,
> etc.) was 3K. A lot of this was FEDERAL. Go figure.
So they have landed, already. But they have claimed Bavaria even
decades before, so relax.
> 10) The Cray XMP and the HAL 9000 working together have decided that the
> very BEST approach to dealing with the problems Mr. Leitl cites is to TURN
> CRYONICS INTO A RELIGION. Work is already well underway to achieve this
> end, but the problem is that no one seems to be able to write the liturgy
> in anything other than Pascal or Unix, and this means that lots of people
> who only understand Basic will be cut off from Salvation.
>
> So, there you have it: that is the top ten list what most of the cryonics
> societies are doing to solve the problem at hand.
Problem? Which problem? ;)
>
> Oh Yeah, a few crazy people are trying like hell to develop suspended
> animation (reversible cryopreservation) so that they spend the absolute
> MINIMUM amount of time possible in the hands of the people who practice
> 1-10 above, and their noncryonicist cohorts who, due to equal, creeping,
> unrealism destroy productive societies on a clockwork like basis and plunge
> humanity into chaos, often accompanied by darkness.
>
> Have a nice day :)
You have a darn poetic way of saying|stating things, do you know?
Vinge's "Across RealTime" is painting roughly the same picture,
though having stolen the embobblement technology (isolated
spacetime bobbles) idea from Silverberg. Those who want to
see the future destroy it since they do it in masses. But it
will be a _long_ time before cryonic suspension becomes a
threat to the economy, if ever.
But this suspended animation (the SF guys have called this
anabiosis, I think) project, how should it succed without
zeroing metabolism, which requires vitrification, which
results in cryodamage?
Does not appear viable, imo.
-- Eugene
>
> Mike Darwin
>
>
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