[extropy-chat] Suicide the Green way

[spike]

bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Robert Bradbury




...Now, if you are really bored Spike, we can go back to the "How much mass
could we have landed on Pluto at sufficiently low velocity that it would
have remained in a functional state?" question...Robert




An even more interesting question was discussed by Amara Graps and me when
she was here for Richard Dawkins' talk in Menlo Park.  Someone noted that
Gene Roddenberry had arranged to have himself cremated upon his demise and
have his remains launched into space.  But my observation is that unless the
orbit is sufficiently high, one would eventually re-enter the atmosphere, so
this would be no more satisfying than having one's ashes scattered about the
globe in the usual (and far cheaper) fashion.

The question then becomes: how high would one need to launch ones mortal
remains in order to insure that one would not wind up eventually falling
back down the earth's gravity well?

The next question is can we assure ourselves that we would not eventually
fall into the sun?

I had some thoughts on this topic, which ties in nicely with the topic of
green suicide and reaching out to touch the stars.

If one grinds one's ashes finely, the ballistic coefficient is very low, so
one would need to clear the atmosphere by a long distance.  This would
necessitate circularizing the orbit, which means carrying a second thrust
capability and a guidance system out to apogee, which is expensive.
Alternately one could achieve earth escape velocity in the initial burn,
again very expensive.

But there may be another way.  One could reduce one's remains to carbon
dioxide, then at apogee the spacecraft could heat the CO2 and fire it
forward, giving it some extra delta V.  Then, even if the CO2 molecules do
not have escape velocity, the light pressure from the sun would provide the
extra energy needed to lift it on out of the sun's gravity well, and off
into the vast empty abyss you go.

This need not interfere with one's cryonics plans, and for that matter need
not wait until one perishes.  One could use one's toenails for instance, as
the source of carbon dioxide, or in some cases a semen sample, thus to
collect carbon that was once one's DNA, not to mention being less painful
than using a blood sample.

The previous posts on this subject noted that the sun is producing perhaps
100 grams of carbon 14 a year (I would welcome some extro-cluemeister
checking my estimates on this).  How cool it would be to launch into space
an amount of carbon from one's person equal to the amount of carbon thus
created in one's lifetime.  In my case this is 4.6 kg, which is a lot of
semen, but sacrifices must be made I suppose to achieve this form of
immortality.  

The latter approach of launching while we are still living has the advantage
of allowing a high-risk launch, since arbitrarily much DNA or personal
carbon is still available should the rocket fail.

Actually I would settle for a far smaller fraction of mass to orbit if I
could get a few complete DNA strands into the cosmos.
  
I propose we write to Space Services Inc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_burial

and ask how we might be launched in such a way as to insure eventual escape
from the sun's orbit.  Then Dr. Graps could offer consulting services to do
the calculations for the mission.

SSI offers canisters that eventually re-enter like an asteroid.  Well how
lame is that?  I counter-propose that the canisters are made of some
material that sublimes in deep space to avoid additional space debris, and a
small explosive device that would scatter one's remains or DNA widely, so
that the solar light pressure could act on individual DNA molecules. 

So then cluey ones, how do we get DNA strands in a form that can be launched
and separated into individual strands?  And if so, will light pressure be
sufficient to push them away from the earth and sun?  Without breaking them
to pieces?  How high would we need to go?  Are there any alternatives, such
as putting a facility into solar orbit, reading our DNA here, synthesizing a
copy of it there, and launching gently from that vantage point?

spike