From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Mon Dec 16 2002 - 18:55:26 MST
I have read Brent Alsop's novella, and found it, quite good.
A similar work of literature, by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke is
called, "The Light of Other Days" Here, the authors developed the
'reanimation" concept even more provocately; with the use of wormhole
technology to study the past, and eventually, to copy genetic, and then
brain-states, to recover the person from death.
Roboticist, Hans Moravec, in a short email exchange with me, that he believed
that A.I.'s with an intelligence level "somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and
God" would re-establish vanished peoples, civilizations, and worlds.
For me, as one of those mundanes, who are all to aware of mortality, harken
to this sort of thinking. It adds structure to the hand-waving that we all
do, in order to move towards our goals. How likely is all this? I absolutely,
don't know, though I can surely see how it would seem to fit the bill.
Storage of life information is cool, though a bit like what the ancient
Egyptians rulers did with items that supported them in life, chariots,
swords, paintings of activities, foods and the rest.
Brent Alsop stated:
<<Robert,
I explore this idea in a short story I’ve written. Basically once we have
near
human level AIs what is called an artificially intelligent "Estate" is
created
for everyone that has known to have existed. The goal of these AI "Estates"
is
two fold. One is to archive, recover, and keep as much as the original as
possible and two is to behave as the original would have behaved. In the
story
these "Estates" are given the right to vote but their votes only count as
half
a vote and so on.
If society advances to a state required to resurrect and restore people that
were not cryonically preserved a subset of a growing "Estate" will have
become
identical to what the original was. At that point in time the original
is "resurrected" in the state they were in just before they died. These
resurrected beings are worshiped and celebrated as the literal creators of
humanity, society, and all their descendents. They are then brought up to
speed and given all that the "Estate" had accumulated up until that time,
including all memories and so on.
It’s basically the logical extension of us wanting to preserve as much of
Sasha
as possible. As we move into the future we will rapidly become much better
at
recovering and preserving more and more of what Sasha was. Who knows if we’
ll
ever be able to truly restore enough of him to truly resurrect him, but
surely
we’ll soon be able to do infinitely more than we can do today.
For those interested the short story, entitled "1229 Years After Titanic", it
is available here:
http://home.attbi.com/~brent.allsop/
Brent Allsop>>
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