X-Message-Number: 19110 From: "Brett Bellmore" <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #19108; Immortality via dispersal Date: Sat, 18 May 2002 13:36:01 -0400 "....Living for an infinite period of time IS impossible." Me. Mike Perry: "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." Nah, I've actually looked at that. Given the speed of light as an absolute, there's no way the volume and mass available to you can continue to increase exponentially, as that scheme requires, for more than a short while. Not to mention the fact that other people might ALSO find some use for the universe... Secondly, the scheme ignores the possibility of some common failure mode which could propagate through the dispersed network, taking them all out. Such as the dispersed person becoming suicidal? Further, for dispersal to actually constitute survival on an ongoing basis, the dispersed units would have to be in communication. There too, the speed of light limitation gets you; The further apart the units get, the slower that communication, and if they're to remain in sync, the slower your subjective experience. So even if you did get an infinite objective lifespan that way, I think you'd still end up with a finite subjective lifespan, though I admit I haven't done the math. Maybe I will, when somebody starts advertising this service. ;) Alternatively, in as much as what we really want (Well, what I really want) is an extremely long subjective lifespan, anything which accelerates your thought processes without shortening your objective life span would have to be considered a form of life extension, right? There's probably the potential for a thousand to million-fold expansion of our subjective lifespans right there, without violating any known physical laws, by implementing our brains in nano-electronic form. That alone, without any increase in objective lifespan, would give us subjective lives longer than the time apparently remaining to this universe. And in that time, what schemes couldn't we hatch? Brett Bellmore Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19110