X-Message-Number: 22147
Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 00:49:14 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Re: Hope Beyond Cryonics

Alan Mole, #22134, and my responses:

>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.

I wouldn't go that far. Nanotech I'm sure will have some limitations but 
today we carefully assess its potential by noting that certain 
possibilities do not violate known physics and do seem achievable in principle.

>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. [snip] And what will 
>the hyper intelligent do? [snip] Time travel perhaps -- sooner or later
>they'll crack that nut,


Though there are some respectable physicists who claim to take time travel 
seriously, I think it is getting perilously close to what would violate 
known physics (by playing hob with causality in particular). The 
grandfather paradox supposedly can be circumvented. But as to how it would 
happen, it appears the time traveler who inhibits his ancestry 
("preventing" his future existence) just pops into a parallel universe 
where he doesn't end up existing after all (except as the traveler he is). 
Yes, that would solve the problem but would not be true time travel, as far 
as I am concerned. Moreover, you'd be stuck in this parallel universe, when 
you might want to find your way back home again. In any case it could be 
said that certain wonders like this *might* be possible but it is not clear 
they really are. The case for a mature nanotechnology that could possibly 
revive a frozen human at least seems far stronger.

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

Nice if you could do that but the evidence that it will be possible seems 
thin, putting it mildly. Actually, in my book I explore another possible 
resurrection scenario, one that accepts that the distant past is 
unrecoverable but treats different historical timelines, which surviving 
records are insufficient to distinguish, as equally "real." Loss of 
information makes the past ambiguous. Everybody, it turns out, is 
resurrectible, at least in the form of a duplicate or copy, but it does not 
follow from this that the recreation would be "just as good" as a cryonic 
revival. I devote a chapter to reasons I think it would not be. (But it 
still does at least offer hope.)

>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?

An interesting possibility, that agrees in broad outline with what I and 
others have imagined, though the details of our various scenarios differ. 
But I don't accept that burial and cremation are of equal merit to 
cryonics. Frozen or not you may be saved, in an ultimate sense, but not all 
paths to salvation look equally smooth, and I take this seriously.

Mike Perry

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