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In *my* future world fibre optics will long have been replaced by 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

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