[extropy-chat] Suicide the Green way

[Anders Sandberg]

(As for the original question in this thread, I have always thought burial
at a tower of silence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_of_Silence would
be the most eco-friendly, although one has to tweak it to fit the local
ecology: http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin/0610043 )

spike wrote:
> So then cluey ones, how do we get DNA strands in a form that can be
> launched
> and separated into individual strands?

Do you really need them individually separated? Extracting DNA from tissue
is fairly easy (classic classroom demonstration that produces a gooey
fibrous solution), and one could easily dry that out to small light fibre
mats.

Maybe a bit of gel electrophoresis, and then we freeze the gel or turn it
into an aerogel?

>  And if so, will light pressure be
> sufficient to push them away from the earth and sun?  Without breaking
> them
> to pieces?

The UV radiation is bad for DNA, so if you want to keep it intact it
oought to be protected. Aluminium foil perhaps, and why not make it a tiny
solar sail? If you just want to make sure your carbon leaves, maybe you
should get it integrated into a carbon fiber solar sail:
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/carbonsail_000302.html

As long as it is less than 0.78 g/m^2 it will tend to drift outwards.

>  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?

If we are sending DNA as messages in bottles on solar sails, why not
encode other information on the sail? A good aluminium sail is supposed to
have half wavelength holes, and one could easily think of writing messages
with the holes like on a CD. Maybe a big macroscopic "how to read this"
pattern, and then a distributed error-correcting code with some
repetitions (to deal with micrometeorites) with the message. Since a human
genome fits when compressed nearly on a CD, I guess we could send our
genomes to the stars using microsails the size of a CD.



-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University