X-Message-Number: 5985
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics,sci.life-extension
From: (Keith Henson)
Subject: Re: Virtue of suffering
Message-ID: <>
References: <> <>
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 22:53:24 GMT
John Sharman () wrote:
: In article <>
: "Keith Henson" writes:
: > John Sharman () wrote:
: > : In article <>
: > : "Keith Henson" writes:
: >
: > [snip]
: >
: > I can't tell you why society or "revivalist" in the future might consider
: > it worthwhile. I can tell you why *I* would put forth the effort to get
: > the last hard cases out of the can, because I have committed to do so. I
: > must say, given the libertarian bent of a clear majority of cryonicists,
: > that few of them expect "society" to be involved with their revival.
: Actually, I was counting you among the "last hard cases." Do you not see
: nanotech power (I mean the capability to direct the application of
: nanotechnology) as being concentrated in large corporate hands? Or will
: every private individual have personal free access? Do you accept that
: it will be a priority to secure a reasonable quality of life for all the
: living before they start reviving the dead?
I could be a hard case, or an easy case, or with enough luck, I might
live through to the time where I would not need the LN2 dip. My
personal guestimate is that we have at least a 100 to 1 range of
difficulty of revival in the patients we *already* have stored. We
have *two* with bullet holes in the head, one of them with a hole in
the brain. The range may be 1000 to 1 or worse.
Re concentration of nanotech, it is hard to say. If you use the
software model, no, capable software, some of the *most* capable
software is widely distributed in private hands. On the point of
a reasonable quality of life before reviving the suspension patients,
priority or not, it is reasonable to expect that. However, it should
not take long after nanotech is available to accomplish that. (A few
weeks to a few years.)
: [..]
: > I don't think so, at least not for the mildly damaged cases. Now, the
: > ones with bullet holes in the brain, that may well take some serious
: > level of understanding.
: I see. You will give the old crocks enough treatment to get them up and
: running and then leave it to them to select whatever degree of fine
: tuning they may choose?
Well, it is what *I* would like. What would be your preference?
Do you regard as relatively easy, say, undoing
: the damage suffered by a punch-drunk heavyweight prizefighter?
Relative to bullet holes, yes.
: > From where will this
: > : knowledge be derived? Do you envisage some volunteer sitting reporting
: > : his subjective experiences while his brain is subjected to a succession
: > : of procedures by nanotech devices?
: >
: > I rather doubt subjective experience would be much use. There is just
: > way too much which goes on well below the level at which we have much
: > subjective experience.
: I am not sure that I'm following you. Do you hold that "personality" or
: "self" is so deeply ingrained as to be essentially unaffected by freeze
: damage or is it your view that it doesn't matter and you will just
: restore life and sentience "as it comes"?
My point here is that there is too much going on in our brains about
which we have no monitoring ability for subjective reports to be of
much use. I suggest reading the books by Oliver Sacks, and Michael
Gazzaniga to get a feel for the depth of the problem. There are
many cases on record where the subjective reports are clearly out of
line with reality. One of the things which comes out of brain
research is that the brain support mind with many modules, most of
which we do not have much subjective access. On the second point,
if memory and personality are embedded in physical structure (very
likely) then restoring the physical structure should bring back
memory and personality.
: > : Do *you* seriously think that we are going to be reaching that kind of
: > : scenario within the next 50 years? Maybe it will be so, but we really
: > : must be very slow starters indeed if the time for the whole race is
: > : going to be so short.
: >
: > I think you would be amazed at how fast things would progress in medicine
: > with nanotect tools. What we have now is much worse than trying to pick
: > your teeth with an oil tanker.
: How many years already since Feynman's seminal address? And how far down
: the road are we towards the nanotech goal? Exponential growth is not
: necessarily fast growth. It depends on the units of the x-axis.
Feynman's "Plenty of room at the bottom" speach was in 1959, so we are
out 45 years from the first vision. And, yes, growth depends on the
doubling rate, itself a variable. I think we can only say how far we
are down the road at *this* point after we reach the goal. However,
one way to measure this factor is to see how many papers with the word
"nanotechnology" in the title or abstract are being published and plot
the progress. I happened to check on this in a large library recently,
and though I did not count the articles, most of them were in the last
two years.
: [..]
: > No, I have as big a thing about staying in matter as you do against
: > being frozen. But it is not that hard to cross between the stars. The
: > sun puts out enough energy to accelerate about 1500 tons per second to
: > near light speed.
: That is not a bad indicator of the magnitude of the task. How many years
: before nanotech can build and manage a sustained, controlled, directed
: mini-sun putting out enough energy to accelerate, say, a 1-ton rest mass
: to, say, c/2 within, say, 10 years?
Why would anyone bother with making a mini-sun when we have the real
thing close at hand?
: > We already can levitate glass beads on laser beams
: > against one g. Given nanotech to "grow" what we need, we create the
: > power plants and lasers down near Mercury. The ships would be pulled
: > by very large light sails driven by the giant lasers. Accelerations of
: > a g for a year get you rather close to the speed of light.
: Shall we say a rest mass of a ton is reasonable (very conservative, I
: would say)? How "close" do you want to get to c in a year? You tell me.
: Then perform the energy equations. Or I will.
v=at, where a is ~10 m/sec. A year is ~30 million seconds, so you would
be going 300,000 km/ sec, essentially the speed of light, and for reasons
of abrasion with gas, this may be nearly twice as fast as you would want
to go. Re energy, think of it in terms of matter, because the energy has
too many zeros. You certainly can get up to half the speed of light on
a ton of mass converted/ton of payload. Well, the sun puts out the
equivalent of *1500* tons of energy/second. We would want to harvest
enough of the output to push some few hundred starships at the same time.
If the ships were to weigh 1500 tons each, we would have to harvest
on the order of 1/30,000,000 of the sun's output for each one. Nothing
too it. :-) You should see the methods proposed to *move* stars.
: > You send
: > a "seed" on ahead, where it slows down in the target system and builds
: > a breaking laser using the power of the target star. Dr. Forward has
: > written extensively about similar but more difficult method. Besides
: > light sails, there are other methods which are nearly as fast--given
: > the vast resources which can be created with nanotechnology tools.
: Shall we now perform the same calculations for this seed?
Nice thing about nanotech is that you can get the initial seed down
to the size of a bacteria. (If it won't hold all the info you need
to build the breaking laser, you can send that by microwave later.)
One way to get the seed there is to reorganize the sail and payload
into a very long electrostatic accelerator on the trip. Near the
target star you fire the seeds backwards so they enter the target
system near rest. Of course, this may fail once in while--in which
case your starship goes ripping by the target, and on to an interesting
adventure.
: > [snip]
: >
: > All I can say is that brains stored at -78 seem to do a lot better at
: > showing electrical activity than kidneys treated the same do at making
: > urine.
: As a matter of interest, do you know the lowest storage temperature to
: date for a successfully transplanted kidney? And what was the nature of
: the damage which rendered lower temperatures unworkable?
I don't know. Anyone in contact with Greg Fehy?
: > : > [snip]
: >
: > I am willing to take the chance.
: Brave man.
You might be amused at what I do for hobbies. (besides freezing AIDS
cases.)
: >
: > : > [snip]
: > : >
: >
: > I don't think *any* of those concerned with nanotech or cryonics think
: > that nanotech will issue in a world without problems. It is just that the
: > problems of *that* day will be more remote than ours are from our
: > ancestors in the middle of the last ice age. (Imaging if you will trying
: > to explain a computer virus to someone from the middle ages!)
: Assuming that my student was intelligent and that I could speak his
: language, I guess it would take me a day or two, working four two-hour
: sessions per day.
I.e., not a trivial effort. And, it is not clear to me that such a person
would *ever* consider these kind of problems to be very significant--
especially when you consider what they faced.
: > And, I
: > certainly agree with your point that it will be revolutionary. But I also
: > doubt that those with the current power bases will try to stop it rather
: > than try to figure out how to convert their power base to a new one.
: They won't necessarily stop it. At minimum they'll price it. They *will*
: try to preserve their power bases. "They" includes but is not limited to
: governments.
That's ok. When something costs very little to copy, the price at which
you get the most return is on a par with the cost of a copy of DOS. In
fact, you want to price it low enough that not very many people bother to
get a bootleg copy.
: > People with power are not much better at presenting a united front than
: > any other group. Besides, a lot of them are *very* interested in how they
: > can stay alive. I suspect that a *lot* of the older people who can afford
: > it are (for example) taking growth hormone.
: In the days when nuclear holocaust was perceived as a present threat, for
: what (size) fraction and which (identity) fraction of the population did
: the US government provide secure survival facilities?
Not very large, and mostly military for the most part. But I think a more
related question might be what fraction of those who could afford it
built fallout shelters. This was still a small fraction, but the numbers
were in the tens of thousands.
[snip]
: > I (obviously) don't take ghost stories seriously.
: Oh, I don't believe in them, but when everybody else in the community
: does believe in them I *have* to take them seriously. Otherwise I
: interact badly with my neighbors.
Interesting. Where I live (Silicon Valley) I would have problems with
my neighbors if I did take ghosts seriously.
: > But if you did, it
: > would seem to me rather likely that a frozen person should not leave
: > a ghost, but rather it would stick to their body. If they *did* leave
: > a ghost, you then have the disconcerting possibility of a person coming
: > back and confronting their own ghost. Well, if someone uses this as a
: > story outline, please give credit and send me a copy.
: Charles Dickens (among others) has beat you to it.
I see your point, but Dickens had the ghost coming back on the time
line instead of the person going forward. The ghost could bitch
about how dull it was to watch the dewars being filled thousands of
times.
Keith Henson
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