X-Message-Number: 30233
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: Re: Prophets of the New Age of Immortality
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 07:05:07 -0800

In Cryonet #30228, Mike Donahue writes,


>I can promise you that they will all be wrong again and again, until one of 
them is right.


The "right prophet" may come along too late to do us any good. And even then, 
engineered negligible senescence (who the hell can pronounce that phrase 
easily?)won't solve the problem of trying to resuscitate patients in cryonic 
suspension, every one of which represents a unique challenge, with different 
pathologies, damage and information loss.


We also have to assume continuity of progressive technological civilization, a 
scenario which has started to look problematic because of the oil supply. M. 
King Hubbert , who back in the 1950's developed a model for forecasting oil 
production, accurately predicted U.S. Peak Oil in 1970, and thought that the 
world oil supply would run into trouble around the year 2000, looks like a much 
better "futurist" these days than the paleo-transhumanists in the 1970's who 
predicted that we'd become "immortal" by now and live in space colonies.


As for future fatigue in general, we may have entered a period of relative 
technological stagnation for some intrinsic reasons. Refer to physicist Jonathan
Huebner's paper, "A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation":

http://www.box.net/shared/static/cynj31non2.pdf




"There was a time before reason and science when my ancestors believed in all 
manner of nonsense." (Narim on "Stargate SG-1")

Mark Plus

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