X-Message-Number: 19108 Date: Sat, 18 May 2002 00:16:21 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Immortality, SF writers Brett Bellmore, #19099: >Regarding their dismissal of immortality... It's reasonable, given what we >currently believe about physics. "Immortality" means that you live forever, >that nothing can kill you. And yet, we live in a statistical universe, and >arbitrarilly violent events can occur, with comparably low probability. Any >finite probability, however low, must eventually integrate to unity with the >passage of finite time. Living for an infinite period of time IS impossible. Not necessarily, one possibility being to extend oneself by backups or redundancy so that, for example, a given catastrophe is likely to have less and less effect, relatively speaking, as time progresses. One's components would not have to be physically connected, just communicate, and might eventually stretch to considerable distances in space. As Ettinger says in *Man into Superman*, "If a star goes nova, only a few planets may be lost--a trifle, a toenail." I elaborate on this idea in my book too, and no doubt it has been considered by many others. My feeling is that this is one more instance where the SciAm "experts" are straining a bit unduly to put down any thought of serious life extension. On SF writers: I am greatly saddened too by their rejection of cryonics and their acceptance of destruction (burial or burning) in the "normal" manner. Well, they too are human, all too human, as Nietzsche would say, but I had expected better, given their interests. A. E. Van Vogt, for example, was an inspiration to me with his story "Resurrection" in which dead humans are brought back to life by visiting space aliens. (The aliens are really not so benevolent, and one of the humans eventually gets rid of them.) The science in this story is left pretty nebulous, especially when it comes to getting back memories from the dried remains of the dead so they know who they are. But for me the important thing was that it opened the possibility that death might be a problem to be solved scientifically, to bypass the dependence on putative superhuman assistance. I was twelve at the time, and it helped steer me away from traditional religion toward scientific immortalism, for which I am grateful today. To Van Vogt I suppose this was just another story. If you are really interested in reanimation after "death" you must also consider the quality of preservation; you want to do better than the grave or the fire. Like so many others, Van Vogt didn't seem interested, and died and was not preserved in any special way. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19108