Medtech a la Los

Qouth the Wizard one Los by Name:

> >** Clone them at 20. If we have a high level of anagathic tech, we
> >could well have a clone soldier useful for 60 years... Make two or
> >three when a promising soldier is twenty, with all development of
> >muscles and such and brain pathways, make sure the mapping is
> >reasonably accurate, and cold sleep them. Then revive and overlay as
> >required. Periodic update periods would help lessen the transition
> >shock.
>
> One thing though OK, explain one tiny detail to me here, skipping the
> ethics of creating virgin brain clones, how the hell do you get one?
People
> who are cerebrally dead waste away in beds in hospitals all around the

> world; microcephalic foetus have a 99.99% abort rate etc etc. So how
the
> heck are you going to get a clone to the size of a 20 year old (even
if you
> do it damn fast) without it having any cerebral function at all? Guess
this
> is another one I'm going to have to put down to future science hey?
>

>Especially since the establishment of neural pathways have nothing to
do with
>cloning. regardless of what age they are. those come from
doing/experience.
>Unless they are confusing cloning (where you grow a new person from
scratch,
>makes no differnce at what age you sample the original it could be 90.
) with
>replicating ( where you would, say, put Mr Spok through the teleporter
and save
>a back up of him and rematerialize it so that you have two of exactly
the same.

Actually, it would in the terms I'm speaking in. If I can map a brain
enough to identify those pathways and connections and how the cells
interrelate physically, electically, chemically.... and presumably this
*is* enough to map the human mind.... then I sure imagine I can create
this situation by growing the brain the way I want to. And as for
remapping it.... it might be as simple as a nanite injection to remap an
area of the brain by altering its physical structure. All the tools to
grow brain cells an connections exist within the brain (as I imagine due
contrary operations) and we'd just need to be able to activate these and
control them. This would be a requirement to "update" a stored clone.

You know, I wish I could be around 200 years from now just to see it. Or
2000 years. If we don't do ourselves in, you just may be able to go into
Recall Corporation ("Blue Sky on Mars...") and get a bad memory flushed.
Or get a good trip memory installed.

It might never happen. I just don't find this particularly more
unbelievable than the control of gravity which is as likely to be
science fiction as anything even in 2200... simply put.... I think that
the brain isn't well understood, but it seems likely we will one day
understand it. Quantum barriers may give us a pain as may Heisenberg.
But antigravity involves controlling particles or properties of waves or
fields that don't even exist (ie we have no proof of any sort of
oppositional counterforce to gravity) today. So it seems (unless
something has changed in the last 4 or 5 years since I cared enough to
look) we're pretty unlikely to do this. But AG tanks and inertial
compensators are a staple of the GZGverse. Seems to me that remapping
the human brain is a joke by comparison. YMMV.

> >** Sort of my point. Imagine what they were talking about in 1880 and

> >what we could do in 1980... I'll bet they would not even have come
> >close.... we're in the same boat. How many things thought impossible
> >would we have actually made easy? How many things they thought were
> >rules or laws of the way humans were put together have we broken and
> >ground into the dirt? A fair few.
>

> This argument always gets tossed out in these types of debates like
it's teh
> final word which should end all skepticism.

Buddy, I don't think jackbooted thugs with cattleprods could eliminate
YOUR skepticism :)

(Or my own.... skepticism is a good thing - I think it has evolved in
our nature as a good defence against the perils of optimism...)

> .Of course in 1945-55 it was a given
>  in most all sci-fi that we would be doing all sorts of wazoo stuff in
1990-2001

Hmmm. Seems to me science is doing lots of wazoo stuff.

>  like flying pan am clippers to space for business/vacation,

Look for this one in about 10 years. It's coming... it's just been
slowed up by costs. But I've seen the prototypes.

having a functioning
> moon base (with Martin Landau in control),

This one's real. I've seen it on TV. TV never lies. How could it?
<grin???>

Seriously, this one was a tad hopeful, though I don't think it was a
technical thing that stopped this. There just was very little point to
it and better ways to spend our money.

operating a the vaunted International
> Rescue,  blah blah blah,

That blah blah blah turns out to include things like:
Prediciting the world full of interlinked computers in which we can shop
at home, communicate with each other using voice and video, etc. Hmmm
that one seems to have happened.
Flying around the world really fast. Not yet, but their are some nice
projects in later stages of developments that may realize this in the
next 10 or 20 years.
Amazing progress in biosciences. Gee look... they're growing corneas
now. Pretty spiffy to me.
Amazing progress in physics. Gee. We have Nuclear Power. We have designs
for bomb rockets and other kinds of nuclear engines to take us to the
stars. We can utterly destroy our world on a whim. I'm pretty impressed.

Your point is the guys in the 50s predicted some disney world happenings
and technologies, and we don't seem to have them. My point is the things
we do have are pretty darned amazing and not that far off from the stuff
of the 1950s. In fact, most of the stuff predicted in 1950s for 2000
could be viable and ongoing by 2050. I think they just didn't allow for
human lack of vision, human laziness, and the many other priorities of
life. But most of the stuff they talked about we aren't that far from
doing. Again, YMMV. But I think if you look at what we can do, many
times it is 1000 times more impressive than what they thought would
happen. They suggested things like us having aircars to fly to work -
I've seen a design for one recently. It actually works. I think it would
make the FAA nervous as hell to have all of us in the air, but the
design was viable and it might happen yet. They didn't suggest the
Internet exactly as it is today, and we've only grabbed a smidgeon of
its potential. They may have suggested wireless, but nothing on the
order of the magic we'll do with wireless in the next 20 years.

your arguments are just as easily turned on their head
> with the same number of supporting arguments that we can look back and
laugh at
> what we though was possible and we're still no where near
accomplishing.

Au contraire, mon frere! We're near accomplishing much of what the 50s
suggested (including robot maids... I've also seen designs for such
things or dirt cleaning nanites) and we've realized in many cases the
ideas were as fanciful as childs fantasy - not useful. If the idea is
useful, you can bet it'll probably happen (the one exception being
stardrive which I'm not sure we're nearer to). In most cases, we could
have done what they suggested if we'd had the money and will, and in
many cases we are doing it slower but it is being done and will
eventually be nearly what they envisioned. In some cases, they thought
of stylish things that were useless if you thought about it, and they
probably won't happen in that form. And they pretty much missed the boat
on some areas. But overall our techonology development rate is amazing
*AND* it is increasing. There are a lot of things that will transform
the world fundamentally in the next 100 years. Technology is probably
number one.

In fact
> it seems that most sci fi or future history prediction seems to be
wildly off
> base.

Or not so wildly.

Keep in mind in this whole thing I'm merely airing out the possibility
of something, not commenting on whether it will happen. Ethical issues
may prevent us from cloning life or cold storing spare parts. We may
find a quantum level problem. Their may just be some undefineable human
spirit. One way or the other, I can't know the future. But neither can I
endorse Mr. Ludd and his movement.  I think it is far too easy to point
to today's digerati (or digital cognozenti or intelligentsia) and
suggest that they have not heralded in the Golden Age of Humanity just
yet. Well, maybe not. But maybe that's not too far off in some ways
(technically... its a ways off culturally and psychologically). And
maybe just maybe our accomplishments to date are pretty darned
impressive if we weren't so busy taking them for granted.

Anyway, the whole point of the posting was to spark some thoughts, and
we've seen both viewpoints defended and attacked, and I think everyone
has formed some form of opinion on whether or not it will be feasible
and whether or not they want to include cloning and such ideas into
their PSB. Some just don't care (sacriledge!) :)  But one way or
another, I think we've explored some of the complexities involved and I
thank Beth for her (admittedly skeptical) contributions. Maybe I'm just
a rosy eyed follower of the church of high technology, but I'm impressed
by our technical achievements. I'm far more concerned about our ethical
progress, our societal dynamics, our environmental affairs, our
individual values and education, than I am about whether we can or can't
clone .... I think that will be one of the *easy* problems to solve.
When we want a hard one, we can try global governance.....

Happy Y2K!
Tom.

Los

--
---------------------------------------------------------------
"Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun." - Ash, Army of Darkness

Homepage: http:\\fox.ntsn.ca\~kaladorn\index.html
ICQ: 58316640 (Tomin8tor)

"Ah. I see. Inform me if there is any change in his condition."
<hangs up the phone>
"How is he?"
"He's dead."
-- The movie Top Secret