X-Message-Number: 10989 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #10968 - #10973 Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 22:44:10 +1100 (EST) Hi everyone! To Bob Ettinger: This is actually related to my reply to Tim Freeman. No, the idea was not that you would not show any signs of the passage of time. The idea was that DEATH RATE would cease to increase with age, a very special feature. Not only that, but the author was NOT claiming that death rate was small, only that it ceased to increase with time ie. if you attained the age of (say) 110, then your probability of dying at 111, 112, 120, 130, etc was constant. Yes, constant. But also rather high. I'll add that this author's ideas were based solely on considering the statistics of death rate with time, and he argued on experimental grounds that we didn't really know just how it changed (if it did) at high ages. The obvious problem in practice is that death rate is high at high ages, and alone this doesn't mean very much. It DOES suggest, however, that if we found some way to bring people of 100 up to the same level of self-repair and health as someone much younger, then we would have found a way to make people live very much longer. You'll also notice that I mention self-repair here. Normal objects, the kind that we make right now (TVs and cars and furniture), have no ability at self repair. They consequently show signs of wearing out. However people have done statistics on just when (say) a TV has a final irreparable breakdown, and the rate of breakdown with time is FIXED. That means that our TVs do not AGE. They AGE if their rate of breakdown increases with time (in human beings, the increase starts about age 30). Unlike any object now made, we CAN do some self-repair, but that ability, too, falls off as we age. If we did not age, and our ability at self repair remained fixed at some very low level, then we would definitely show the signs of random damage over time, but our death rate would be fixed. You may even have noticed this yourself. When we ask for immortality it's far from sufficient to simply do away with aging. We need also to have lots more means (external, most probably, but internal too) of self repair and resistance to damage. That is the origin of those calculations which suppose that we did not age and then work out (on various assumptions) that our average lifespans will be (say) 600 years, or whatever. I hope that this explains the issue and the problem. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10989