----- Original Message -----
From: "Lee Corbin" <lcorbin@ricochet.net>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2001 2:49 PM
Subject: Living Forever
> Emlyn wrote:
>
> > I will add, that very few people involved in... extropianism, purely
> > cryonics, or whatever your flavour, would seriously suggest that any
> > of us will live for *all eternity*.
>
> You're quite wrong. I dare say that both a remarkable number
> of cryonicists and extropians do not concede the necessity of
> mortality.
It was a theoretical point that I was making... infinity or not infinity. A
big number, like 10^10^10^10 years, is not infinite, and maybe we could do
that? But forever is really long... I'd be surprised if you could show that
the probability of any given individual surviving does not approach 0 as
lifespan approaches infinity. I expect that I'll be toes up, or something
approximating that, eventually. I'm just not in any rush.
>
> > ...the maths alone says we must come a cropper some time before
> > forever. So, any life-extension techniques are merely temporary.
>
> Not at all. If persons now living do manage to get past the
> next couple of centuries, nothing prevents them from establishing
> numerous copies of themselves throughout the universe, and the
> chance of them all being taken out, in say a gamma burst, is
> quite small. And some folks, such as Freeman Dyson, have been
> talking a long time about physics that might support an infinite
> amount of computation. The ultimate source for these
> considerations is Tipler, "The Physics of Immortality".
>
hmmmm. If Tipler said it, it's gotta be right I guess ;-)
Emlyn
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