X-Message-Number: 5758
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 08:53:18 -0500 (EST)
From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #5749 - #5757

Marshall Rice wrote, in separate postings:

> I don't find the prospect of rotting in a box particularly attractive, and 
> believe that cryonics has considerable potential, I simply think that it is 

> and always will be impossible to reverse cellular death. The degree of entropy
> is simply too great. It may be possible to create a new cell from the 
> remains of the old, but in no sense would they, or could they, be identical 

> on the molecular level, and that is the degree of organisation which you would
> need to duplicate to restore a brain.

(....)
 
> Let me draw an analogy. Imagine a shelf of books. Imagine that you began 
> tearing out the pages and throwing them on the floor, then tearing the pages 

> into individual sentences, then the sentences into words and finally the words

> into letters. At the same time, imagine that someone was recombining fragments
> in different order to the original, which you again tore up.
> 
> At what point could you say that the information in the books could never be
> recovered? You could not say precisely, but you could be pretty certain that
> that point would be passed, probably by the time the first few pages were
> torn up and certainly by the time a few sentences had been recombined.

I heard a story recently that the American Embassy staff, in pulling out of 
Teheran, shredded all their documents.  And that the Iranians put 
hundreds of people on the job, and successfully reassembled the whole lot.

The point is, if you have enough processing power, you can do something 
that appears impossible but is in fact only laborious.

On the 50th anniversary of the computer, now that ENIAC's 5 tons of 
hardware has been replaced by the hand-held throwaway calculator, who 
would like to predict what processing power will be available in several 
times 50 years from now?

Always optimistically,

Robin HL


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