[extropy-chat] The Inevitability of Universal Immortality in a Finite Universe

[Hara Ra]

I challenge the assumptions made here:

1. I am often told by those reluctant to consider cryonics that Life 
Extension will work, especially if one is young, due to the bootstrapping 
effect - each year of more life brings more options, etc unto an extremely 
long life. What is missed here (just one of several things) is that 
biological systems are very complex, and each level of intervention will, 
yes, provide more life, but the next level will be much more complex. 
Melatonin is simple, Telemeronase is complex, and the Human Genome 
seriously complex.

My favorite analogy is used cars. I am a cheapskate and buy cars about 10 
years old. They generally run for 5 - 7 years and then the mechanic tells 
me the repair costs more than the auto is worth. So on to the next one. The 
promise of nanotechnology suggests two things: A) Constructing an object 
the size of a human body uses some 5 x 10^28 atoms, so if the first 
assembler can do one atom per second, and a BIG presumption, that Moore's 
Law will still apply, at 10^2 per decade improvement gets a value of 14.5 
decades. But that is fabricating a human body in 1 second! If we allow a 
couple of weeks, 10^6 seconds, 3 decades go away, and now the estimate is 
11.5 decades.

Now, Moore's Law has been a pretty good predictor of my personal PC, whose 
cost has been constant in the $800 range, from the Commodore PET (8K RAM, 8 
bits, .5mhz 20K Tape storage) to the by now obsolete Pentium I use, (2 gb 
RAM, 32 bits, 2ghz, 240 gb Hd storage). So, if the cost of the first 
nanobuilt body is $800 million dollars, guess what - 3 more decades (back 
to 14.5) and the cost is the same as my PC.

The point here is that there will be a time when total body replacement is 
a cheaper option than continuing life extension. It reminds me of the 
cherry condition Edsel I saw parked in the street next to my house about 20 
years ago. The maintenance cost of that machine must be at least 100x per 
mile driven than that of a 10 year old used car.

2. Now uploading (or inloading, replacing the brain with computronium) is a 
whole other matter. In NanoSystems, Drexler using a mechanocomputing model 
estimates that less than 1ml is needed to create a human equivalent 
computer. More fun with numbers: 200 billion neurons, average 2K synapses 
per neuron is 10^11 x 10^3 x 4 = 4 x 10^14 synapses. If we allow a 
nanobuilt "synapse" to use a cube of .1 micron on a side (and that is 
generous, even allowing for the connections), now, .001 cubic micron per 
synaptic equivalent, the volume comes to 4 x 10^14 x 10^-3 x 10^-18 = 4 x 
10^-7 M^3 or 0.4 milliliters.

A 50 Kg body is 5 x 10^1 x 10^3  = 5 x 10^4 milliliters, so the ratio 
becomes 5/0.4 x 10^4 = 1.25 x 10^5, so to build a nanoequivalent brain 
takes less nano resources, if we again apply Moore's law, now we come to 
14.5 - 2.5 or 12 decades, and if it still takes 2 weeks, now the number 
becomes 9 decades. If the cost of such a device is $1 Million, or about 
1000x that of my PC, well, ok, 10.5 decades.

Please note that the real money improvement in personal income is around 
100x per century, so a century from now the real cost is about the value of 
$10,000 is today. This is clearly not very expensive.

And to top it off, even a mechanocomputer will run some 100x faster than a 
biological brain, so an upload will experience a 100x time expansion factor 
as well.

3. Our attitudes about life are a combination of genetics, culture and 
early family experience, all of which are currently not editable. I rather 
think that a "Life is wonderful and a true joy" mementic installation will 
prove very popular, ergo those selecting super long life will approach 100%.

-------------------------

Of course this is lots of smoke and a nontrivial number of mirrors, and 
getting better values is intractable at best, but this is why I think the 
numbers and methods mentioned in this thread are nearly pointless.

>Mark Walker wrote:
>
>>Suppose a world's population is fixed at 10 billion inhabitants and only 10%
>>of these (autonomously) choose to pursue superlongevity (to tens of
>>thousands of years or more).

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=   Hara Ra (aka Gregory Yob)    =
=     harara at sbcglobal.net       =
=   Alcor North Cryomanagement   =
=   Alcor Advisor to Board       =
=       831 429 8637             =
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