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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>>…</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> <b>On Behalf Of </b>Will Steinberg<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [ExI] destroying 3 billion year old lifeforms, was: RE: how mosquitoes fly in the rain<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p><span style='color:#1F497D'>>…</span>I reckon this is the most beautiful thing I have read posted by Spike thus far on this list. Simply excellent.<span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>Thanks Will. You like that one? I am full of it. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>THEM, rather, I am full of THEM! Flights of fancy, like mosquitoes desperately rescuing pico-memory lifeforms, with their needle-nose probosci, lots of that kind of junk rattling around in my head.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>There was kind of a point to all this, which I will now present.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>I made the argument that every living cell in our bodies have continuity backwards to a previous cell, all the way back to an embryo, which has continuity back to a previous embryo and so on back to the very first living organism. Furthermore, humans are rather unique among beasts in that nothing eats us, other than mosquitoes (other examples please?) and our bodies are disposed in such a way that usually all the cells die.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>However, there is one other mechanism whereby some of these ancient organisms can perhaps survive in a sense the experience of having been a picohuman: blood donation. We can look up the volume of a typical human erythrocyte and see that it is about 100 femtoliters, but using the argument I gave earlier, that doesn’t count, for the red blood cell has no nucleus and therefore does not divide. I am not merely expressing anti-procaryotic chauvinism, but rather holding to the reasoning given in the Emergency Medical Mosquito post.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>We can even disregard the leukocytes, which are larger but still irrelevant for this next flight of fancy, but the blood contains some number of stem cells. We know that stem cells must be transported to the site of injured tissue by some means, so my reasoning is that a few of them must be in the bloodstream. I don’t even know how to estimate an order of magnitude, but perhaps Anders or one of the other JupiterBrains among us can offer a suggestion. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>In any case, last Wednesday I visited Stanford to excrete a unit to complete my fifth gallon of blood donations, so I would take a wild guess and estimate at least a billion stem cells would be sloshing around in that bloody mess, and these would go into patients who would (I hope) recover, and of these, some fraction would then go on to breed, after having one of my stem cells fortuitously land in his testicles and contribute to generating a sperm cell. Hey, those things come from somewhere, and keep coming from somewhere, so my reasoning is that stem cells must come into play somehow.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>So by way of blood donation, my cells end up in another yet another human, which from the cell’s point of view is like leaping from the sinking Titanic into the icy sea. But perhaps the new, young human will be inclined to blood donation as well, in which a cell could wind up surviving yet another perilous longshot to ultimate survival, and eventually be rescued by a mosquito, or perhaps another intriguing possibility, which I will now suggest.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>At Mount Rainier, near where I observed the snowflake dodging mosquito, I recently heard a couple of greens discussing how to dispose of their earthly remains in the most environmentally friendly way, using the least amount of fuel for their cremation and so forth. I suggested having one’s body frozen in liquid nitrogen, then using perhaps a modified clothes dryer held at liquid nitrogen temperatures, , tumble the frozen body with a couple of shot-puts or cannon balls until it is bashed into bits the size of beach sand. Then take the remains in this form (punsters, do think of a name for it) up the slopes of the revered mountain to scatter widely, at which time the material melts and is an ideal size for snacking by the local ant population. No burial sites cluttering the landscape, no fuel use, a good excuse for your friends and family to hike up in that beautiful place, and most importantly, those cells immediately escape the perilous end-game existence as a femto-human to become a much larger fraction of an ant, which causes it to be far more likely to rejoin the mainstream of life on this blue-green planet and continue its 3 gigayear existence.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>For those of us who are cryonics-oriented, this is all perfectly compatible with our vision: remove head, freeze, store, into the dryer with the rest of the remains, tumble to frozen sand, scatter. Alcor could perhaps offer the service to green-minded individuals. Perhaps some of these clients have plenty of money and no children, and may see the wisdom of getting their heads preserved while passing along the rest of their carbon to the ants on Mount Rainier, minimizing their own carbon footprint etc. I donate this idea to the public domain. Say nice things about me if you make a fortune on it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>But go give blood. It’s the kind of good deed that doesn’t even cost you any actual money.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>spike<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>