X-Message-Number: 19000 Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 09:49:17 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #18990 - #18998 HI everyone! This is a comment for Natasha Vita-More, with a little for Bob Ettinger: When you speak of someone who comes up with things that can go wrong, you should not simply assume that they are pessimistic. The real question is what can be done to deal with them; if we don't know they exist, then we'll do nothing about them and end up in a worse state than if we look at them explicitly. To believe that we'll never achieve perfection hardly means that we cannot improve ourselves continually. Nor, for that matter, can we divide the things that can go wrong into nice classes of a finite number each of which we can make nanorobots to fix ... or cure, depending on what you want to say. Radiation sickness caused SYMPTOMS which many doctors had already seen in other contexts, but its cause was not the same. Prion disease, as mentioned by Dr Hughes, gives one more example. Errors in the nanorobots themselves will cause added problems; I will not repeat myself on that point. We don't even need any malignity to run into such problems. Errors alone can become quite serious. Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19000