On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, john grigg wrote:
> A true gentlebluntperson and knight of the extropian realm, Lord Robert
> Bradbury wrote:
[snip all the bluntness...]
(John, to keep the other John in his chair you may want to snip more
unless its fairly old and people may not have the thread in their inbox.)
> For those of us who could not make it to Extro 4,
> could you tell us about whatever you are referring to?
>
Lets just say that Dr. Campbell and I had a fairly strong disagreement
about how difficult it would be to use biotech to augment the human
genome. It isn't so much that Dr. Campbell (or Dr. Greg Stock who
feels similary to Dr. Campbell) are personally incorrect, but they are
basing much of their perspective (for germ line engineering) on "sources"
who are the same kinds of people who "print out their email to read it"
as someone recently put it. I suggest, you can't predict the future
based on the information that those kinds of people provide.
> I hope what sparked all of this creativity (cryonics feasibility) is in fact
> feasible.
We shall see. I'm going to do some more work on synapes structure
and then when Eugene gets his stuff available, I'll try to encourage
Robert F. to do a little early work on this (right now I think its
scheduled for Volume 3 of Nanomedicine and thats a few years into the
future).
> I still say more research into improved suspension technologies
> needs to be done.
Knowledge is good, so research doesn't hurt.
> I am not so sure that mature nanotech will be able to repair
> the brain structure damage done by current suspension methods.
You have to sit down with Nanomedicine and Eugene's forthcoming
pictures and ask yourself whether or not there is going to be
something the nanobots can't "feel" or "find" or some reason
they wouldn't be able to put it back together. Scale the cells
up to the size of your living room after you've let a dozen 4
year olds have a free hand with it for a couple of hours. Is
there anything there that you can't put back in order, patch
or replace if its truly broken?
> What did you think of the Mike Darwin paper I brought to your attention?
Its printed, but not read yet. I'll probably get to it to or from
the Gravitational Microlensing conference in Cape Town next week
(since the flight time is significantly longer than a trip to Russia).
Robert
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