X-Message-Number: 8869 From: Olaf Henny <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #8864 - #8866 Date: Sat, 29 Nov 1997 22:49:40 -0800 In Message #8865 Josef Strout wrote: >No, you don't need an uploading facility in your home. You need only a >thick cable ... In *my* future world fibre optics will long have been replaced by buckytube wiring, so you will have to have extremely sharp eyes to even see a bundle of 100,000 strands. ;) >...and a mass-storage device. Uploading a biological brain is an >incredibly difficult task, that will no doubt require a huge expensive >facility. But once it's done, then making backups is trivial; artificial >brains will no doubt be built with a simple output port for exactly this >purpose. Plug yourelf in, hit the switch, and wake up 8 hours later (or >whatever) with a fresh backup. > >So when the two of us get caught in a fire, I will basically have up to a >week's worth of total retrograde amnesia, but you will be regrettably dead. Uh-uh,- since I have done the non-destructive uploading earlier (remember we were in an uploading facility, you for your weekly-, I for my annual update) you lose a week, I loose a year (well actually two, since I procrastinated) and have to trade my silky smooth body for the same type of creaky construct, that you have been perambulating about in. :-( You forget the setting of the uploading facility, that I selected for dramatic effect. So, I reasoned when we both burn, the back- up storage facility goes up in smoke as well; thus, bye-bye immortality. But since we met in a joint of *your* design not all is lost for me, since your uploading facility would be all constructed out of non-combustible materials and kept pressurized with non- combustible gases (that is where we recycled the LNG, which was in our dewars), and its only outside connection, the 2-way feeder cables go through a similarly pressurized heat insulated kiosk, where automatic switches physically separate the cables at 200C to avoid any heat transfer to the data storage. This explains of course, why my stored data survived the above fire after all. >>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. With the probability of recurrence of an accident, which is deadly with MNT, of once every 3000 years or once every 36,000 monthly updates, how long do you think you will keep up going out of your way for your updates? I have a pretty good idea, how often I would go. ;) >>Let's just simple call it attaining megalife (one word to give it >>more punch). ;-) > >That's an idea, but I agree with Will that we need something a little more >respectable-sounding. "Megalife" sounds like either a comic book character >or a multi-vitamin to me. You are probably right, BUT: There are a lot of people, who are sufficiently self-confident to look at all or most of the available facts, evaluate them, arrive at a conclusion and trust their judgment enough to follow through; i.e. the leaders in this world, who do not need a majority concensus to support their view, before they take action (note, I just described cryonicists). Many of those are entrepreneurs or thinkers of all types, who do not have an education in classic languages and for whom some of the earlier suggestion of Greek terms are "unrelated phonetics in a foreign (dead) language". "Megalife" or any more suitable *simple* word, which we can easily wrap tongue and mind around would make the concept more mainstream. And, hey, although 'life' is just an ordinary English word,'mega' is Greek, and should therefore impress intellectually. ;) To all the strikes against popularizing cryonics, we have been counting recently , we surely do not need to add scholastic elitism. The best to all, Olaf Henny Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8869