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Ray Kurzweil and Cryonics


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#1 xlifex

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Posted 13 February 2005 - 03:49 AM


Except for an appearance at the 2002 Alcor conference and an exchange with Drexler on his website about the subject it appears to me that Ray Kurzweil tends to avoid talking about his Alcor membership. His latest book on life extention, co-written with another Alcor member, doesn't mention cryonics at all. Is Kurzweil maybe a bit embarrassed about his interest in human cryopreservation? Does he see it as a sort of defeat, ie. acknowledging that he may not be young enough to benefit from extreme life extension in his lifetime. I mean, I don't think Kurzweil owes it to the cryonics community to talk about it but considering that he doesn't have any problems discussing the most far out science it just seems a bit odd.

#2 Matt

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Posted 13 February 2005 - 07:52 AM

Well I follow a lot of his work, Ive listened to many talks and seen a lot of essays. He does avoid the mention of cryonics, but for a reason.

His attitude isnt that we just wait around for things to happen and if we dont make it, then we can just go in cryonics and everything will be fine.

Hes looking more into ways we can stay alive now untill radical life extension is possible. So basicly, lets not die in the first place!

A lot of people are not going to make it, he does say that and im suprised he hasnt mentioned cryonics. But hes putting more effort into getting people aware of the near future and its possibilities and saying start a healthy life style NOW when you can and dont just wait around and hope cryonics might save you.

But I dont know, thats just what I think. Make people aware and give them hope to carry on living and try harder to make it to the point when life extension is possible.

#3 JMorgan

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Posted 13 February 2005 - 07:59 AM

I think "Fantastic Voyage" is tailored to the mainstream crowd who might literally laugh at the notion of cryonics. The book seems mostly geared to maintaining a physically fit and healthy body/mind so that people will be healthy enough to benefit from the advances over the next few decades. He stays pretty clear of anything implying immortality, in spite of the title.

#4 reason

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Posted 13 February 2005 - 09:32 AM

One suspects he takes the same tack as I do - cryonics is an essential insurance plan, but not the main thrust of greatly extending healthy life span for someone young enough to benefit from near future biotechnology.

http://www.longevity...cs/cryonics.cfm

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#5 bgwowk

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Posted 14 February 2005 - 08:10 PM

His attitude isnt that we just wait around for things to happen and if we dont make it, then we can just go in cryonics and everything will be fine.

Whoa there, whoa! You seem to be saying that cryonics is intrinsically passive and lazy. Cryonics only stands a chance of working because of aggressive ongoing work to improve the technology and protect the field from frequent legal attacks. Cryonics technology is now capable of doing things (like ice-free preservation) that would have been unimaginable 25 years ago. That didn't happen because of people just waiting around for things to happen.

A lot of people are not going to make it, he does say that and im suprised he hasnt mentioned cryonics. But hes putting more effort into getting people aware of the near future and its possibilities and saying start a healthy life style NOW when you can and dont just wait around and hope cryonics might save you.

Cryonics is complementary, not competitive with a healthly lifestyle, calorie restriction, advocacy of aging research, etc. As to how important it is, I can only tell that I have books on my bookshelf with subtitles like "Why this will be the last generation to die" going back to 1960. Two generations ago! Every generation of immortalists always thinks that they are going to be the ones that "just make it", and then don't.

Someday this pattern will end, but it's too soon to even guess a date. While Kurzweil may talk about indefinite lifespans within 20 years, the mighty pharmaceutical industry with all their gene chips, molecule libraries, and bioinformatics tools can't even devise a goddamned COX-2 inhibitor that doens't end up killing more people than it helps. To say nothing of effective anorectics. Don't even talk to me about living indefinitely while there is still no definitive non-surgical remedy for something as simple as obesity.

What does this mean to you? Consider this: If you are 40 years old right now, there is a one in thirty chance that you will not live to see fifty. ONE IN THIRTY! If you are in perfect health and doing everything right, your chances will be better, but not much better. Even young people today are about as safe as customers in a shopping mall with a mad gunman running through it. I see nothing happening to convince me that this is going change with the suddeness Kurzweil predicts. If medical development were as unregulated as the computer industry from whence Ray comes, perhaps. But that is not the world we live in. Now do you want that kevlar vest, or not?

---BrianW

#6 Matt

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Posted 14 February 2005 - 09:02 PM

I can only tell that I have books on my bookshelf with subtitles like "Why this will be the last generation to die" going back to 1960. Two generations ago! Every generation of immortalists always thinks that they are going to be the ones that "just make it", and then don't.


Theres a big difference in why previous generation of immortalists failed to achieve immortality and why todays immortalists have a much better chance.

I will expand on this after I finish off some college work

#7 JMorgan

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Posted 14 February 2005 - 09:32 PM

Theres a big difference in why previous generation of immortalists failed to achieve immortality and why todays immortalists have a much better chance.

I will expand on this after I finish off some college work.

Yes, please do. This has been a sticking point for me for a long time.

I WANT to believe we can achieve these things, but I also know that a cure for death is something people have been trying to find for thousands of years. And every so often, somebody comes up and claims that they've found the way. When I first heard Aubrey de Grey speak in a clip online, I said to myself, "This guy is either completely nuts, or he's a genius." I'm kinda leaning toward 'genius' but at the same time, I don't want my desire to avoid death to distort my perception of reality so much that I start to believe things that aren't true. :)

#8 bgwowk

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Posted 14 February 2005 - 11:12 PM

Of course, fundamentally Aubrey is right. We are all molecular machines, and machines can in principle be repaired and maintained indefinitely. This idea is old and indisputable. Aubrey has laid out a repair and maintenance agenda more specific than anyone before. This is a necessary and valuable beginning. Yet even if Aubrey should be proven wrong (in the sense that there is much more to repair than he anticipates), aging remains a finite problem. Malchiah, you need to read Drexler's "Egines of Creation" if you don't understand why the aging problem is fundamentally soluble.

What I scoff at is the naive belief that *the current generation* of immortalists has it made in the shade.

who182 wrote:

Theres a big difference in why previous generation of immortalists failed to achieve immortality and why todays immortalists have a much better chance.

Of course there is a big difference between this generation and the last. Of course this generation has a much better chance. But these same two observations can be (and have been) made about all successive generations of the past century! So the question is not whether the current generation has a better chance, but what the magnitude of that chance is.

19 years ago, when I was a much younger man, I made the same pitch "whoa182" is making to me now to a cryonicist named Thomas Donaldson. Thomas, a generation older than I, said, "I think there's an excellent chance that only young children may live to see immortality." Whoa182 was one of those small children. Now I'm here to tell whoa182 that even though his chances are better than mine, and much better than Thomas Donaldson's, I still think there's an excellent chance that only young children today may live to see immortality.

I'll conclude with Thomas's final words in that email exchange of 19 years ago (yes, there was email even back then). He said, "Immorality is like the tide." (Meaning that puplic interest in technological immorality waxes and wanes like a fad, and he has seen several cycles.) "But someday that will change. It's got to."

---BrianW

#9

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Posted 15 February 2005 - 04:20 AM

I'm not going to make the supposedly assured claim that biological immortality is just 20 years away. Cryonics is an insurance policy just in case our future outlook doesn't come to fruition as quickly as we had hoped or expected for various reasons. Cryonics has come a long way over it's short history, but it has a much longer way to go before it brings patients back from their suspension.

Here's a recent article about cryonics in the NYTimes.
http://www.nytimes.c...print&position=

#10 bgwowk

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Posted 15 February 2005 - 07:07 AM

adbatstone wrote:

"I still think there's an excellent chance that only young children today may live to see immortality."

At the time Thomas Donaldson said that (1986), even the most powerful supercomputers were only a fraction of the power of today's most humble desktop PCs. Cell phones were in the conceptual stage, and massive, unsophisticated bricks they were too. Vinyl LPs were still the norm, as MP3 was something still seen as science fiction.

Ha! ha ha! [lol] This is hilarious! Why? 1986 was the year Drexler's "Engines of Creation" was published. That book predicted COMPUTERS THE SIZE OF BACTERIA in a few short decades. Talk about Moore's law! In 1986 molecular nanotechnology was the all the rage among immortalists, the kind of rage that SENS now is. Cryonicists (like me at the time) became so enamored with nanotech that old-time cryoncists like Donaldson would say things like, "Brian Wowk thinks cryonicists were just mummies stumbling around in the dark until Drexler came along." In reality, cryonicists had thought up biological versions of Drexler's technology many years earlier. So Drexler was really validation (and vast elaboration) of what was expected all along.

Now "adbatstone" seems to be saying, "In 1986 all those immortalists were just mummies stumbling around in the dark with no idea of the technologies and ideas we now have." Horse hoey! The general state of computer technology is now right where it was expected to be back then. Even the explosive growth and signficance of the Internet and World World Web "killer ap" (which Drexler called "hypertext") were foreseen.

Yes, "ENS" is coming, molecular nanotech is coming, and I believe even Drexlerian nanotech will eventually come. However there is a basic problem on this board with people (tech people, not biologists I surmise) confusing information processing power with actual biomedical technology. Yes, the uregulated computer industry can almost double clock speeds and storage densities every year, but so what? It now costs $800 million, and the better part of a decade, to bring ONE DAMN DRUG to market in the United States. If Moore's law were feeding into medical progress, drugs should be coming to market 100 times cheaper and faster than 20 years ago (like software now does). Instead drugs are ten times more expensive, and take just as long to develop. Go figure.

Nixon declared his war on cancer when? 1970? The NCI is now going out on a limb and predicting cancer may be a "managable disease" by 2015. Twenty f***ing fifteen. Any bets about whether even obesity will have been conquered by 2015? Immortality in 20 years my eye.

---BrianW

#11 Matt

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Posted 15 February 2005 - 11:47 AM

I dont see Biological Immortality happening in 20 years time, but this is what I do see :D

Obesity is because of BAD eating habbits and a bad lifestyle. Meaning we dont need a cure, we need prevenative measures in place to ensure that this doesnt keep happening, Education could be a start and more help to the people who are already obese. There is a pill coming out in 2 years time ( i cant find name yet ) but it supresses part of the brain that craves these kind of foods, something to do with the pleasure part of the brain, It will help smoking and obese people at the same time. But we have a cure for obesity already and it is simple.

Cancer

We are entering a new era in medicine, Now we are entering a time where Targeted therapy and 'smart' Drugs are being developed. Smart drugs will help the fight against cancer greatly. Take Nanoshell for example: “nanoshells,” are gold-coated globe of silica about 1/20 the size of a red blood cell that attaches itself to tumors. Now take a look at what happened when used

Halas has shown, in petri dishes, that flashes of near-infrared light burn the shells and cancerous tissue without destroying healthy cells. Now, just under a year later, Halas says the nanoshells work just as effectively in rodents. Tumorous mice injected with nanoshells and then exposed to infrared light became cancer-free within 10 days, and stayed that way after treatment. Good news for rodents, but will it work in humans? We’ll find in 2005 when Halas begins clinical trials.


Developement on these started back in 1997. I think there is a good chance of them working, because of the method being used.

How will people have a better chance of achieving immortality

Biochips are now entering the market and will be used a lot within the next 2 years +

How can these help us live that bit longer? Well its simple really, Early diagnoses of disease and other problems. Biochips could potentially help save millions of people by catching disease extremely early. At first medical professionals will have these and eventualy the publlic will have them at home, all made possible by the convergence of nanotech/Biotech/computer technology.

Lets look at the possibilities of biochips: Could detect cancers at a VERY early stage, Detect genetic problems, Detect diabetes and even warn of a heart attack before it happens. So a lot more people will live to see immortality being achieved because of diagnostic chips.

Nanotechnology

Older immortalists lived in a time where Nanotechnology didnt even exist and if it did, It was not practical at the time. If you look at the news we can see breakthroughs happening almost on a daily bases. Breakthroughs did not happen everyday in the past, so we are rapidly progressing in this technology. Also nanotech is starting to enter the market place. Yes we are still at the early stages, but look at the things that are being developed or have been already and we havnt even entered advanced nanotechnology yet!.

So fortunatly we do have some of the tools today to actually do something about it, we have the ability to do things that people could only dream of even 20 years back. So I wish people would stop comparing philosophers from 100's of years back to the current generation, there is a clear difference.

You will see Nanotech/Biotech and Information Tech merge more than ever in the next few years.

1000's of years ago, 100's of years ago, 100 years ago they never had the same tools, so dont compare their dreams to ours, We actually have some knowledge on how to go about it.

Did they have:

Nanotechnology ?
Stem cell therapy?
Genetic Engineering?
Computing power?
Robotics?
Networks to share massive amounts of information all around the world?


We DO have the chance of achieving it for the first time ever, older generations it was just merely a dream and nothing els, today we have the tools and the vision to make it happen, Older generations only had the vision and dreams of immortality, so it was impossible to make it happen.


Clearly I have not stated how we are actually going to achieve immortality, But how MORE people are going to get there because of technologies being developed today.

Edited by whoa182, 15 February 2005 - 12:15 PM.


#12 bgwowk

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Posted 15 February 2005 - 07:22 PM

whoa182 wrote:

Obesity is because of BAD eating habbits and a bad lifestyle. Meaning we dont need a cure, we need prevenative measures in place to ensure that this doesnt keep happening.

I'm not saying that a drug cure for obesity is a societal prerequisite for medical advances against aging. I'm saying that THE CAPABILITY TO PRODUCE ONE is, and we still don't have it. There is an enormous market for an easy drug cure to obesity, lifestyle notwithstanding, and there only reason there isn't one is because the present biomedical infrastructure is still incapable of producing one.

We are entering a new era in medicine, Now we are entering a time where Targeted therapy and 'smart' Drugs are being developed.

That era is hardly new. In 1991, when I was doing graudate studies in cancer radiotherapy, the journal Medical Physics had a huge review article on targeted radioimmunotherpay for cancer. All medical physicists were going to have to learn the dosimetry of this up and coming new modality. Where did it go since then? Nowhere.

For many years now, almost every month, you can read about a new cure for cancer in mice on science news websites. Yet 5-year human survival still hovers between 50% and 60%, barely better than 30 years ago. The process of getting from the lab to the clinic is painfully slow and expensive. Did you read my last post about single drugs costing $800 million to get to market? Even the NCI (who knows a lot more about cancer than you or I) is not predicting major inroads against cancer until 2015.

Older immortalists lived in a time where Nanotechnology didnt even exist and if it did, It was not practical at the time. If you look at the news we can see breakthroughs happening almost on a daily bases. Breakthroughs did not happen everyday in the past, so we are rapidly progressing in this technology.

How foolish those older immortalists were to think that their stone-knives-and-bearskin nanotechnology could advance fast enough to save them. Clearly only our nanotechnology is advancing fast enough to save us. And 20 years from now, college kids will say, "How foolish those older immortalists were to think that the hyped microtechnology calling itself nanotechnology in 2005 could advance fast enough to save them..."

What you are lacking, whoa182, is perspective. You haven't spent a few decades promising your friends and loved ones that radical life extension was just around the corner only to have to them grow old and die, one-by-one, leaving you with the knowledge that the few left don't have a chance. I fear you may yet gain that perspective.

Perhaps it's wrong of me to critique your idealism. Every generation needs to believe their ideals can be achieved in their lifetime or they won't work as hard to achieve them. Keep the faith. But don't be so quick to dismiss the need for cryonics. If there is one universal truth in life, it is that everyone always has less time than they think.

---BrianW

#13 Matt

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Posted 15 February 2005 - 09:51 PM

Maybe Im getting sucked into the hype over nanotechnology... and all these advances will stay in the lab for another 10 years or never come to market, I dont know.

But I do know there is plenty of money and research going into nanotech... the amazing properties of these technologies have been demonstrated.

The amount of spending in nanotech has gone up significantly over the last few years, nano is actually now starting to enter the market place. real " breakthroughs" have happened in the last few years.

Ive only been researching Nanotechnology for a few years now and something I read always seems to be around the corner, a few years away. So I can understand your skeptisism.

because I wasnt really alive back a few decades ago I cannot comment on the state of technology and what reports about life extension were going around. How did they think life extension would be possible a few decades ago? How did they think it could be done?

Does anyone have really old articles or know any on the net?

But time will tell

5-7 years time and most cancers will be very curable because of nanotech.

I believe " nanoshells " will be extremely successful this year in Clinical trials. take a read of this http://www.newscient...le.ns?id=dn4341

optomistic prediction? probably, but we'll see

Edited by whoa182, 15 February 2005 - 10:10 PM.


#14 bgwowk

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Posted 15 February 2005 - 11:24 PM

because I wasnt really alive back a few decades ago I cannot comment on the state of technology and what reports about life extension were going around. How did they think life extension would be possible a few decades ago? How did they think it could be done?

The key idea of "life extension in our time" has always been that there would be incremental advances that would buy you the few extra years you needed until the next advance came along. When I first became interested 30 years ago, the free radical theory of aging was very big, and people were fascinated with the effects of certain antioxidants on animal lifespans. By the early 80s, Walford was also raising awareness about calorie restriction, although experiments supporting CR are actually much older than that. So people thought that if they ate healthy, took certain vitamins, drugs, and even food additive antioxidants like BHT, they would live long enough to see the next wave of anti-aging technology, such as gene therapy.

In 1986 Drexler published Engines of Creation, and word "nanotechnology" entered the public mind. Immortalists were among the first people to take that book seriously, and in fact the acknowledgements section is chock full of cryonicists. Cryonics was so quickly appreciated as an important application of the technology (even by Drexler himself in his first paper on nanotechnology), that the moral and even financial support of cryonicists in those early days almost make nanotechnology a spin-off of cryonics. :) Okay, maybe that's a bit of stretch, but now that nanotechnology is a public word, most people would be shocked to learn that those "crazy body freezers" had a role in the nascence of the field.

Anyway, the technology foreseen by Drexer really made immortality a technological "slam dunk." It was just a matter of time until those omipotent cell repair machines would be built. So now it was vitamins--> gene therapy --> cell repair machines. Some people predicted that general purpose molecular cell repair machines could be as little as 20 years away (i.e. NOW!). Of course, that was not to be. Some of those same people were predicting in 1975 that 10,000 people would live and work in space by 1990, but that's another story.

So here we are in 2005, and it's still healthy diet, supplements, and exercise while you wait for (fill in the blank). The blank now being SENS and stem cells instead of gene therapy and cell repair machines (although something like Drexer's cell repair tech will ultimately be necessary for definitive immortality).

The more things change, the more they seem the same.

5-7 years time and most cancers will be very curable because of nanotech.


If you had a cure for cancer in your hand RIGHT NOW, it would take that long just get it through the FDA. I can sadly assure you that in 2010 people will still be dying of cancer.

---BrianW

#15 Matt

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Posted 17 February 2005 - 12:32 AM

Thanks for the bit of history...

Well I dont know what to say but, Mabey they were just a bit over optimstic? .. mabey I am ?

I dont know, I just try and do as much research as possible and look at all the advances that go on daily. I dont personally work in the field of Nanotechnology but funding for it is going up. Its starting to make an impact in the market place right now, although still small. So applications are coming through now, I believe some near term medical uses from nanotech will enable some people to potentially reach radical life extension.

If it doesnt happen, then Cryonics is the way... its definitly the better option!!! lol

Im 20 years old now, 60 years untill im 80.. Gee that doesnt seem long to be honest. I really hope we have it right this time and it is around the corner.

THE FDA, well that needs fixing if it takes 10 years to get drugs to market.

#16 jaydfox

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Posted 17 February 2005 - 12:44 AM

THE FDA, well that needs fixing if it takes 10 years to get drugs to market.

The funny thing is, even though most of the rational people involved recognize this, the FDA is still trying to make the process harder, and every time one bad drug slips through the cracks, everybody panics and demands we lock the process down even more.

What do you get? You get an FDA that won't allow large-scale trials for a treatment that is shown to be 80% effective in curing a disease in the first months, a disease that is 80% fatal in the first few years.

Even I can see that's a no-brainer. If the drug killed half the people you administered it to, that's only 10% more deaths overall. And the initial trials showed 80% total success (meaning the other 20% either were unaffected or were killed--probably unaffected), nowhere near 50% death rate. Likelihood that more harm than good would happen from a large-scale trial? A few percent, possibly even less. Likelihood that thousands of people will die if we don't do the trial. 95% or more. Damned obvious that the trials should go forward.

So what happens? Small-scale trials, with a third set of trials still required AFTER the second set of trials is completed. Delay? Years, at least, maybe half a decade. Cost? Potentially thousands of lives at least, maybe even tens of thousands of lives. Potential savings, in the few percent chance that the treatment is ineffective? A few dozen lives, a couple hundred lives maybe, and thousands of lives only if the trial has thousands of people, and somehow the results of the first trial were completely bogus.

#17 Matt

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Posted 17 February 2005 - 01:44 AM

Supposing that these " Nanoshells " cured 90-95% of the people involved in the clinical trials. Would it move through the system quicker?

Would we have to wait for the health status of people involved in trials months after treatment to see if they stayed cancer-free ?

Surely that Effective treatments in the 90% + should be brought forward quicker and take priority.




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