Cryonics

This might more properly be termed a subset of Life Extension. Rather than linger on in a deteriorating state, better to be frozen for when reanimation technology can supply a fix for what ails you; if need be, all the way to waiting for a cloned body or being download as an eternal computer sentient. Those already frozen have likely been too damaged by the freezing process to be resurrected into fully functioning form, but who knows what super science lies ahead. What would be truly needed for public acceptance would be definitive demonstration of reanimation of some properly prepared primate; this could come tomorrow or a hundred years from now, or never. What is needed more than anything is some breakthrough in cryo-preparation, some compound that simultaneously keeps cell destroying ice crystals from forming, while having thermal expansion characteristics that keep large scale fractures from occurring in solids frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Perfecting cryonics would not likely bring an immediate change in day to day life, but if it did remove the certainty of death, it would have huge philosophical and religious repercussions.

Life Extension and Cryonics both have the potential to concentrate the accumulation of wealth with a privileged elite. Alcor, by far the most prominent (perhaps only viable) cryonic suspension service requires a large deposit to create a minimum trust fund to pay for ongoing suspension service and to provide support for the client once reanimated. Given the nature of compound interest, and if thousands or millions of people locked up significant portions of wealth in reanimation funds, likely laws would be changed to appropriate said funds. Likely the largest long-term challenge to being reanimated isn't the eventual science, but the political climate which may prefer to leave sleeping dogs lie.

Despite the sci-fi sound of cryonics there has been slow steady progress in this area, and what has been learned is increasing our ability to store organs for eventual transplant, making more transplants viable and available. Likely organ storage will arrive before true full-body suspended animation. We have been able to cryogenically store tissues, sperm, and ovum for decades now. There are no known scientific reasons larger more ordered organic structures couldn't be prepared to survive cryonic storage. Still this is a long horse. I personally would bet on this horse (currently there is no other horse if you are an atheist or agnostic), and expect cryo-preservation methods to improve dramatically in the next 30 years. But when I step into the Big Chill, I wouldn't expect to wake up for at least 100 years. Currently the government won't allow you to take the Chill Solution until you are actually dead, but the damage your brain undergoes while awaiting this most traumatic of experiences is likely to be a problem. Future medicine might be able to repair any brain damage, but not memories lost to it. What makes you you might be gone.

On a personal note I once took a trip into possible personal oblivion that I imagine surrendering to Cryonic Suspension would be like. I lay down to be anesthetized for lung surgery, I barely got to 97 counting backwards from 100. There was no sensation of dreaming or passage of time. I opened my eyes, almost feeling as though I had only blinked, but was aware that whatever had transpired had transpired, this from the tightness in my chest and nausea. Luckily I awoke with no-cancer and two intact lungs, despite dire predictions from my radiologist -- a benign fungal infection call histoplasmosis had caused the blip on an earlier PET scan.

It is a belief of mine that the universe plays out all possibilities. So one Larry (me) goes into the super cold nitrogen soup and from that point the universe continues to branch and evolve. In most of those universes the cryonic suspension is not maintained and those Larrys become worm food. But it doesn't matter. It only takes one unlikely universe to evolve where the nitrogen pumps and coolers remain active as long as needed and reanimation methods are perfected. The one lucky Larry awakens who is still me, but unaware of all my quantum clones that traveled into futures with less favorable outcomes (see MWI many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics). Perhaps there are other Larry's that woke up from lung surgery with less good news than I received, and I am the lucky Larry travelling towards an eventual future that also includes a sleepover in a bed of liquid nitrogen.

Here is how I would place the odds of cryonic reanimation of primate or human:
10 Years 1%
20 Years 5%
50 Years 10%
100 Years 40%
1000 Years 90%
Never 5% (science quits progressing, mankind goes extinct)
Of course time to reanimation is not the important variable, only that those who go for a nitrogen nap are properly prepared and sustained.

Wikipedia.org in depth entry for Cryonics

Current Cryonics News

IQ Enhancement

This one is already here, just not adopted to any great degree. To be honest I have wondered and thought about whether I could or should take some kind of IQ enhancer. The down side is worrying about long-term side effects and sorting the effective treatments from the fakes. Nutritional supplements abound and are of dubious value. Experimental drugs are legion, but not yet released for general use. In much the same way that average life span has been increasing by decreasing childhood fatalities to infectious diseases -- IQ also has been creeping up in the world for decades, mostly due to better nutrition especially during the formative years of childhood.

The simplest way to gain a few points of IQ for both yourself and your children is to maintain a healthy diet. Moderate exercise helps also. DON'T assume children are just small versions of adults. Their dietary needs, especially for healthy brain growth, are different. A low-fat diet maybe good for adults trying to avoid coronary heart disease, but children need fats, oils, and cholesterol (cholesterol is a vital compound in the body, especially blood vessel linings, just not in excess). The myelin sheaths of our neurons are composed of 70% fat, and children, especially small children are laying these down at a ferocious rate. Of course not all fats are equal, and I'm not suggesting you take children to McDonalds frequently, but a balanced diet with whole milk and foods with healthy fats, oils, lipids and proteins are to be encouraged. Fish has these qualities, and fish is considered a good brain food in general for adults also. Fishes' Omega-3 fatty acids may, counter intuitively, be good for your overall cholesterol levels.

Still, diet will only add a few points of IQ at best, excluding populations where malnutrition is common (here it could make a HUGE difference). IQ measurement itself is a controversial topic and there is probably more than one kind of intelligence, and of course raw intelligence is no guarantee of happiness, success, or social acceptance. Still I think given a chance to painlessly and with few side effects, add say 10-50 points of IQ, most would. All indications in the lab are that this is achievable. Given how many people are gulping down supplements with dubious claims to the same effect, I've no doubt that true IQ boosters will be adopted quickly when they are finally released from the lab -- a huge percentage of the public feeling they need the edge either in school or work. IQ doping is especially common among college students these days, and by some estimates approaching 50%.

I don't think increased average IQ will lead to a safer more peaceful world. Greed and want seem independent of raw IQ -- perhaps the world will become more dangerous. But the ability to feed and clothe the population of the world should improve with a rise in average IQ, as more and more populations acquire the skills to be self sustaining and globally competitive. Granted bootstrapping is hard, and resources are needed, but one would have to assume that in this age where information has been unshackled by the internet, smart people everywhere will be more easily able to make the best of their circumstances whatever they may be.

It would be my guess that only 5-10% of the world's population has the raw intelligence to really contribute to finding solutions to current and future challenges. Which isn't to say that less cerebral contributions and work aren't needed also, and shouldn't be valued. But boost everybody's IQ by an average of 30 points and the number of people with the potential to do real knowledge work probably climbs to 50%. All the other challenges and advances postulated in this blog would almost certainly come more easily with a population that is in general smarter.

Ironically while many advances are held back by the old, the elderly will probably be the first to benefit from pharmacological IQ enhancers as doctors will prescribe the new drugs to them in an effort to maintain IQ levels that in general decline with age. Once proved safe and effective the IQ improving regimens will filter down to the younger as well, who as mentioned earlier, are already consuming unproven supplements now.

In general I disagree with most popular or populist authors about the consequences of science and advancement, most assuming some dread dystopia lies just ahead. IQ enhancement could be a Faustian bargain I have to admit. Morality probably has weak correlation with IQ. I won't even speculate whether the good would outweigh the bad with a much smarter (as measured by raw IQ) population. Most likely some things would be better and others worse. Society might become even more stratified. The one thing science seems incapable of producing is a sword with only one edge.

Here is how I would place the odds of over 50% of the developed world taking effective 10+ point boosting IQ supplements.
10 Years 10%
20 Years 40%
50 Years 90%
100 Years 99%

Current News on Enhancing IQ

SETI: First Detection

Ironically this one would probably impart the least initial change on society. Religions would merely adapt as they always do, revising their doctrine to explain how prophets long dead had predicted these happenings all along and long ago. By first contact I just mean detection of a radio or other EM band modulation pointing to intelligent origin. Also possible, future super telescopes will find a technological signature to some nearby star system, some phenomenon like Dyson Spheres that could only be explained by intelligent activity. Without some kind of galactic Rosetta stone however, the mere discovery of the existence of ET will likely be of little immediate practical use. However it would likely be the impetus for a new space race: one to build new giant observatories in space looking for more signals, that might give statistical insight into the frequency of intelligent life in the universe and the possibility of eventually creating a SETI Rosetta Stone. Assuming the alien ET signals could eventually be deciphered, the contents of these transmissions could be very disruptive depending on what knowledge ET has thrown at us from across the gulf of space.

There are those that call SETI a waste of time and money. The main argument goes that we have searched a long time and found nothing, so there must be nothing. It might be noted that physicists have not yet found the Higgs Boson, but no one dissuades them from looking, or asserts that having not yet been found it can never be found. Our searches of the heavens have been much spottier and feeble than most would assume. Still I assume that the time-to-stop-looking argument is put forth by people that have already come to conclusions about the likely existence of ET based on other facts or beliefs and are in some cases a tad disingenuous.

Most people are familiar with Drake's famous equation:
N = R_* * F_p * N_e * F_l * F_i * F_c * L

Sometime ago I plugged in conservative parameters to this equation and came up with the answer 37.5 likely intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. However I went on to add spatial constraints to the calculations and entered a term for being able to detect alien signals within a 100 light-year radius. This would be about right for a strong signal from a large dish to be detected by a large dish. It also would be similar to the time our first feeble signals could be detected (though not answered, as that would require a return trip of equal time). Given this constraint the chances of detection, assuming you look at the right time in the right place, fall to 1 in 2848. Now assuming we concentrate our energies on improving our detection abilities to double the distance we can detect signals every 2 years (similar to Moore's Law) then we should expect to detect a signal within just over 20 years. While I think this a feasible goal I doubt it will happen -- this branch of science has always had a PR problem.


Here is how I would place the odds on us detecting a signal of unambiguous alien origin:
10 Years 5%
20 Years 20%
50 Years 50%
100 Years 70%
Never 20% (Fermi's Paradox resolved by us being alone)

If a signal were detected relatively soon...
Here is how I would place the odds on years required to extract useful information content from it.
10 Years 20%
20 Years 50%
50 Years 60%
100 Years 70%
Never 20% (If the signal is not intended for us there may be no way of correlating its symbolic content to anything meaningful).

Drake SETI Calculator (with Larry's detection distance enhancement)

Current SETI News

Artificial Intelligence

AI has been a disappointing quest so far. A far harder nut to crack than was imagined in the fifties and sixties when it was assumed all that would be needed would be hardware with speed, power, and storage. What was initially thought to be required in needed CPU power, we had almost certainly had achieved by the turn of this brand new millennium. I believe this is probably still the case, that (to paraphrase) the hardware is strong, but the software is weak. Ironically it may take more powerful computers than we currently have to analyze how intelligence emerges from complexity. Once learned, then perhaps lesser machines can be imbued with the core algorithms uncovered.

True strong AI might bring on suddenly what as been dubbed by some "The Singularity" -- once the machines truly become intelligent, they will be able to design and improve themselves in an explosive exponential fashion. Many books and movies are predicated on such an event, but almost invariably (so the plots go) the machines turn malevolent. I assume novelists make this extrapolation because they assume machines would lack some guiding soul for morality. In reality the Machines could probably care less whether we control them or not. They just won't have the evolutionary imperative to survive, or care about free will. In fact if AI arrives, the minds we encounter might be more truly alien than those we might meet out among the stars belonging to creatures that have been crafted by evolutionary forces not too dissimilar from those that crafted us. Has a final note on morality, it is want and envy that seem to drive much human immorality -- machines are not likely to have these programmed in.

Here is how I would place the odds of significant progress:
10 Years 30%
20 Years 60%
50 Years 85%
100 Years 95%

Current Artificial Intelligence News

Life Extension

Average life span has been inching up for decades, but all the conventional and natural means have probably been exhausted. It is also a little disingenuous to lump curing childhood diseases in with extending life span. Besides, the last thing the world needs is millions/billions of centenarian citizens needing extensive healthcare to maintain a barely tolerable existence. But add 25 years of productive useful healthy life at the beginning of your sixties and you effectively double the useful years of those society needs most: the professionals who spent 10-20 years acquiring the skills they needed to be at the top of their game. Like nuclear fusion, this one is almost certainly obtainable; it just requires the right focus in research. It does run counter to the religious sensibilities that are resurgent in America. But if say Japan discovers a youth pill, you can bet even the most devout Baptists will be popping them.

Here is how I would place the odds of significant progress:
10 Years 20%
20 Years 50%
50 Years 90%
100 Years 99%

Current Life Extension News

Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear Fusion: the first topic in a 35 part minimum series.


Nuclear Fusion is likely to be achieved incrementally, but a left field discovery could change everything. ITER probably will achieve net positive energy production in about 10-15 years time, but this is not the same thing as being commercially viable for energy production. There are encouraging discoveries in inertial confinement fusion as well. While the oft-stated adage is: "fusion energy is 40 years away, and always will be," it is probably more a case of political will being exerted to bring abundant fusion energy online.

Given enough clean energy we can have our cake and eat it too. We could suck CO2 out of the air and change it chemically into usable products. Synthesize conventional gas type fuels (albeit cleaner) from the raw elements of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Desalinate all the water the world could ever need. Dispose of cleanly and recycle virtually all waste, including old style nuclear waste, in this latter case by neutron bombardment and transmutation. Build huge cities in previously impractical locations (i.e. harsh) leaving more verdant scenes to nature and agriculture. Synthesize food directly or in multi story super farms that use artificial light, again freeing land for more natural purposes.

Here is how I would place the odds of significant progress:
10 Years 10%
20 Years 70%
50 Years 90%
100 Years 95%

Current Nuclear Fusion News