X-Message-Number: 8868
From: Andre Robatino <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #8864 - #8866
Date: Sat, 29 Nov 97 13:21:54 EST

> Message #8865
> Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 08:05:17 -0800
> From: "Joseph J. Strout" <>
> Subject: Re: CryoNet #8858 - #8863

<snip>

> >Even if it is as easy as
> >shaving in the morning, but not as visible, if it remains undone,
> >there is great temptation to delay.
> 
> Well, that will vary from person to person, no doubt.  But I suspect that
> when death becomes rare, it will seem even more tragic than it is today.
> And this would encourage people to spend their one night a week (or month,
> or whatever suits you) in making sure it doesn't happen.

  There are both incremental and comprehensive backups.  Each requires that
the files being backed up not be modified while they are going on.  Thus
there would be no sense of subjective time while the part of the "brain" in
question was being backed up.  The inconvenience would be in having to cut
off communication with others while the backup was in progress.  Incremental
backups might be possible to do surreptitiously if the backups were frequent
enough that the part being shut down each time had an insignificant impact
on one's thought processes.  (This requires that one has a continuously open
communications channel to do the backups, of course.)  Merging the incremental
backups can be done automatically.  In principle comprehensive backups can be
made as rare as desired.
  Even if one makes multiple backups, it may not be possible to get
geometrically decreasing probability of all of them being destroyed.  If the
probability of one of them being destroyed in a given time period is p, it's
not true in general that the probability of n backups all being destroyed is
p^n, since the probabilities are not totally independent.  A catastrophe
acting over a region encompassing all of them can destroy all of them
simultaneously, and for large enough n this becomes the limiting factor on
how safe one's backups are.  I read a few years ago about someone in the
Midwest during the floods who had backups of their files both at home and in
the office.  The floods got both of them.  Also, since self-replication in
construction will be commonplace once nanotech takes off, this makes it easy
to use up all raw matter within easy reach, which may thus become a scarce
commodity.  Thus doing multiple backups may be expensive.

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