X-Message-Number: 1289 Subject: CRYONICS Re: Future need for cryonics From: (Edgar W. Swank) Date: Fri, 09 Oct 92 15:41:39 PDT In cryomsg 1250, Thomas Donaldson says that we will NEVER escape the need to store badly damaged people into the indefinite future. I would submit that way before 2000 years hence cryonics and any kind of suspension of the badly damaged will be replaced by some kind of *non-destructive* copying and archiving of the perfectly healthy. In the event of any non-reversible accident, or even total destruction or loss of a person, just go back and reconstruct from the last backup copy. At IBM, we called that checkpoint/restart. It was a technique for running programs which took longer to run than the mean time to failure of the computing system. If you take a backup, say, every year or so, then the worst that can (subjectively) happen to you is loss of your last year's (or so) memories. I think most would choose that over the alternative of suspending whatever was left after an accident and losing decades or centuries of real time, even assuming no subjective memory loss. -- (Edgar W. Swank) SPECTROX SYSTEMS +1.408.252.1005 Silicon Valley, Ca Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=1289