Tf Freewheel simply a tour « // o é Z oon" ‘ , c AUS Figas - 3 8 tion = ~ Conds : 8O man | S. | —§R Transhu : QO the Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition Science Slightly Over the Edge ED REGIS A VV Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. - Reading, Massachusetts Menlo Park, California New York Don Mills, Ontario Wokingham, England Amsterdam Bonn Sydney Singapore Tokyo Madrid San Juan Paris Seoul Milan Mexico City Taipei Acknowledgmentof permissions granted to reprint previously published material appears on page 301. Manyofthe designations used by manufacturers andsellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Addison-Wesley was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters (e.g., Silly Putty). .Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Regis, Edward, 1944— Great mambo chicken and the transhuman condition : science slightly over the edge / Ed Regis. p- cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-201-09258-1 ISBN 0-201-56751-2 (pbk.) 1. Science—Miscellanea. 2. Engineering—Miscellanea. 3. Forecasting—Miscellanea. I. Title. Q173.R44 1990 500—dc20 90-382 CIP Copyright © 1990 by Ed Regis All rights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. Text design by Joyce C. Weston Set in 11-point Galliard by DEKR Corporation, Woburn, MA - 12345678 9-MW-9594939291 Second printing, October 1990 First paperback printing, August 1991 For William Patrick Contents The Mania... .. 2... 2 ee ee ee eee ] ..... oe ke ke ee 10 — Truax Home on Lagrange. .. «© - eee ee te es 44 NH Will Roll .. 2... 2... ee ee + 76 WO Heads Omnipotence, Plenitude & Co. ... ; . 109 F&F Postbiological Man. © 2 2 7 ee ee ee es 144 . an The Artificial Life 44H Show... 2... ee. 177 Hints for the Better Operation of the Universe . .. 207 Death of the Impossible... .....---. '. 238 OANA Laissez le Bon Temps Rouler . 2. s. .. 266 O0O Epilogue... ..... re 280 Acknowledgments . 2.) eee ee ee ee 290 Selected Sources ..... eee te ee ee 291 The Mania ) Then Saul Kent had the suspension team at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Riverside, California, surgically remove the head of Dora Kent, Saul’s mother, from her body, his hope was that she could eventually be restored to life and health, probably even youth. The /ast thing on his mind was that they'd all wind up being investigated for murder. Murder! The thought was entirely ludicrous—not, indeed, that any of them had given even a moment’s consideration to that possibility at the time ofthe event. Afterall, the twoclassical signs oflife, respiration and heartbeat, had vanished minutes before, and so Dora Kent, at age eighty-three, was forall intents and purposes now legally dead. The hope of the surgical team was that at some point in the distant future a fresh, new body could be cloned for Dora Kent from one ofherold cells. Her old brain would then be placed inside the head of the new body, after which her brain would be revived and the patient would comeback to life just as if she had been awakened from a very long sleep. Once she was “reanimated,” in the cryonics jargon, Dora Kent would enter her “second life cycle” (also part of the jargon), and go ontolead a long and prosperous newlife. A very long life, perhaps: she might live for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. She might even become immortal. The Mania 1 Everyone present knew that her eventual resurrection was a long shot, to say the least. Between her death in 1987 and her hoped- for revival at some indefinite time in the future, Dora Kent’s head would remain frozen in a tank ofliquid nitrogen, at a temperature of — 186°C,andnoonein the cryonics business was expectingthat when defrosting time came the patient would just magically spring back to life. Cryonic suspension was clearly a last-ditch measure. “No one wants to be frozen,” Saul Kent oncesaid. “Being frozen is the second-worst thing that can happen to a person. The only thing worse is dying without being frozen.” Nevertheless, it wasn’t as if they were expecting men from Mars to revive Dora Kent. The fact was that their expectationsrested on nothing more than the normal and ordinary progress of science, Just plain science, the plain, old-fashioned, everyday science and technology that had already accomplished so many stupendous feats, things that only a few years previously were regarded as “impossible”: the moon landings, the heart transplants, the gene splicings, and all the other modern miracles. In the waning days of the twentieth century it did not take an especially gigantic leap of the imagination to think that at some point in the future it would be entirely possible to thaw outa frozen brain, implantit in a new body, shock it into conscious awareness, andrestore it to normal functioning. In fact, the members of the suspension team had some rather specific notions about the precise science that would be required to accomplish thetask. It was called “nanotech- nology,” and was already on the conceptual horizon. Nanotechnology had been invented back in the 1970s by an MIT grad student by the name of Eric Drexler. As Drexler con- ceived ofit, his invention, when it was perfected (thus far it was still in the idea stage), would give you complete control over the structure of matter. It would make possible the direct manipulation of matter at the atomic level—“atom by atom,”as he described it. This would be accomplished by an armyof robots, each of which was roughly the size of an individual molecule. A big enough collection of these tiny robots would be able to do anything that was capable of being done with matter. They'd be able to take molecules of ordinary carbon—charcoal, for exam-_ 2 Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition ple—and reassemble them in the form of diamondcrystals. They'd be able to take inanimate raw materials and fashion them into living organisms, creating new life from scratch. They'd be able to repair damaged biological cells one by one. In fact, when Drexler had first come up with the idea of these miniature robots back in 1976, one ofthe first applications he’d then thought of was frost- bite treatment. You could send phalanxes of these machines cours- ing through the bloodstream to locate the ailing cells, find out what was wrong with them, and make the necessary corrections. It sounded miraculous even to Drexler, but he kept on reminding himself that this is exactly what biological cells did on a regular basis, every day of the week: they automatically maintained their own metabolic equilibrium, they repaired themselves and each _other, they gave rise to fresh, new cells—and what’s more they did all these things on their own, without any intelligent supervision whatsoever. And so, for example, if the white blood cells—which lacked any “brains’—had evolved the ability to scavenge and destroy threatening bacteria from the bloodstream, then there was no reason why even more complex biological repair capabilities couldn’t be intentionally programmedinto the molecular robots he was imagining. The application to cryonics was then obvious. In the process of cryonic suspension, many of the body’s cells underwent freezing damage and would suffer further injury in the process of thawing out. But as long as the underlying cellular information structure had beenleft reasonably intact, thena fleet ofmolecule-sized robots could get inside the ailing cells, diagnose their troubles, and put them right again. At length Drexler’s little nanotechnological mar- vels would have returned the frozen body back to where it was before it ever died, good as new. Anyway, whenofficials of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation were under threat of a murder charge, their attorney in Los Ange- les, Christopher Ashworth, contacted Eric Drexler and some other forward-lookingscientists to get together a batch of depositions, or “technical declarations,” as they were called, that could be used in court to make cryonics seem less of a bizarre freak show of science, which was how lots of people, including manyscientists The Mana 3 themselves, then regarded it. Drexler was happy to oblige. He was then a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where he was teach- ing the world’s first college course on nanotechnology. “Future medicine,” Drexler said in his technical declaration, “will one day be able to build cells, tissues, and organs andto repair damagedtissues. This, obviously, would include brain tissues suf- fering fromi preexisting disease and the anticipatedeffects of freez- ing. These sorts of advances in technology will enable patients to return to complete health from conditions that have traditionally been regarded as nonliving, and beyond hope,i.e., dead.” So here was a Stanford University scientist—which is to say, a researcher at one of the world’s greatest universities, known to be particularly strong in the sciences—here he was saying that future medicine would be able, in effect, to bring the dead back to life. But in this belief, Eric Drexler was not alone. Chris Ashworth had also gotten similar technical declarations from other like- minded scientists at Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and else- where, all of them supporting the idea that raising the frozen departed was not some lunatic-fringe delusion, but instead a rea- sonable prospect, well grounded in current fact andlikely future advances.