X-Message-Number: 22134
From: 
Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2003 16:32:28 EDT
Subject: Logical hope besides Cryonics

Hope Beyond Cryonics 

We base our hopes for immortality on cryonics and nanorepairs, betting 

there's almost nothing technology won't be able to do in fifty or a hundred 
years.  
Which is probably true. But taking this argument one step further, maybe we 
don't need Cryo.  

Vernor Vinge, and ray Kurzweil postulate brain-computer melds in around forty 
years leading to a vast increases in intelligence.  So vast, that when we 

look at an Enhanced One we'll be like a dog watching his master discuss quantum

mechanics on the Internet--not only will we not be able to follow the argument,
but we won't  know what he is doing and we won't even grasp his motivation.  
Vinge calls this the Singularity.  

And what will the hyper intelligent do? "Telepathy" perhaps, to let them fly 
as an eagle or swim as a whale.  Time travel perhaps -- sooner or later 

they'll crack that nut, and experience battles as Alexander the Great--or his 
merest 
soldier.  And record Alexander's mind somehow, and keep him around to talk 

to.  And record the mind of everyone who ever lived, likewise.  Including me and
thee, and making cryo redundant.  

The same logic that says future technology will be able to revive the frozen 
soon -- well, sooner or later -- must hold that it will advance beyond that 

point, until in five hundred or surely in five thousand years, all this will be
in our capability and will get done.  So, frozen or not, you get saved.  

Anyone comforted? 

Cheers, 

Alan Mole

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