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A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

littlebrown.co.uk

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Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#251

Post by nawitus »

mikeash wrote: post #222
nawitus wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. You can look it this way: life after rewarming can last for hundreds of years, easily a thousand as medical technology will have advanced at that point. People are currently willing to pay $100k in medical bills to extend their life by about one year with 50% chance, which means that the cost is $200k per year. Cryopreservation also costs about $100k (slightly more in real life I guess, I'm round…

> The 1% success rate is rather pessimistic, too. Where do you get that? From what little I understand, 1% seems highly optimistic, given how destructive the freezing process is at the moment.

It's my own estimation based on the evidence I've seen. There's plenty of detail when you look at neural tissue using a microscope: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm...

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#253

Post by crapshoot101 »

john_i wrote: post #34
stefantalpalaru wrote: post #27

Terrible news. If you're not familiar with Iain's work you owe it to yourself to drop everything and start reading the Culture series[1] right now. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

I absolutely love the Culture series. Although it doesn't delve into the Culture universe proper, Use of Weapons is one of the best books I've read. Would highly recommend checking out this book. The two narrative flows and the conclusion at the end, wow, just wow. Definitely very sad news.

Use of Weapons is maybe the best (or at least top 5) sci-fi novel I've ever read. Amazing stuff - and a turn that genuinely changes the whole story.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#254

Post by philwelch »

nova wrote: post #180
reasonattlm wrote: post #36

Another person that might be cryopreserved [1], but probably won't be, much like the 150,000 who passed in the last day or so [2]. Many sorts of terminal case can actually lead to better quality cryopreservation under present legal restrictions [3], in comparison to the drawn out and uncertain end of aging, precisely because they are more rapid and certain in time. (Or might be plastinated [4] in the alternate histor…

I feel you. The deathism of this thread, on a site read by technically-oriented people, where problably many agree with the computational theory of mind really makes me lose hope in the human kind. It's not thinking that cryonics is not worth it. That's a reasonable position. I'm undecided myself. It's that response, that fighting death is somehow unethical or naive. That Death is Good, Part of the Cosmos, Don't You…

I love people like you, who claim so fervently to be rational but still hold onto this childish, egotistical hope for immortality.

To put it bluntly, any machine becomes harder to repair over time, and some machines become so out of date as to become worthless except as curiosities anyway. People are no different. What would we ever do with 100 million nineteenth century people? The 23rd century should have as little use for us.

Galaxies die and so do we.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#255

Post by anigbrowl »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #249
jbattle wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this - I read Consider Phlebas and was very underwhelmed by it. Just now I struggled to remember much of the plot even though I read it less than a year ago. I'll check out some of your other recommendations.

> I read Consider Phlebas and was very underwhelmed by it. Huh. Same here. I've only read CP and I honestly could not tell why everyone is so excited about Banks. Okay then, I'll add a few more titles to my wish list. Thanks!

Consider Phlebas is more of a literary novel that happens to take place in the future. I like all of Banks' work and thinkSwombat's suggested reading order above is spot on, but I also think Consider Phlebas is by far his best work.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#256

Post by philwelch »

richardjordan wrote: post #181
SkyMarshal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes we'll never colonize other planes/satellites/space stations and expand beyond earth.

Sadly I think we squandered that chance. We had one cubic mile of oil. We're half way through it. The rest is being burnt off at record rates. This was a one time energy bounty. We're mining ores with tiny percentages of what we want in them nowadays and at increasing energy cost. We had a bounty of natural resources that we could have focused to get off this planet and become an interplanetary species. I suspect we…

There's no such thing as an interplanetary species, barring some startling developments in physics. At the timescales it takes to travel to other solar systems, populations of colonists would be separated enough to speciate, especially given the radical differences in environment and the genetic drift of the early colony ships anyway.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#257

Post by philwelch »

reasonattlm wrote: post #223
venus wrote: post #44

This is horrible news. We are all poorer today, all of us. Banks is an inspiration to all who read him - of what could be, what can be, what is to be. Cancer has claimed a terrible toll in my life. Three in my immediate family and counting, the countdown very fast for one of them. And now it seems to have turned its unwelcome gaze to my intellectual treasures. I hate this disease, I despise it so much it's hard to ex…

The 300 was far from useless - it was in fact the vehicle that enabled the Methuselah Foundation to do any of what it did: gain enough social proof and funding to invest in Organovo, boost SENS research far enough to gain funding from Peter Thiel and others, ultimately enabling it to spin off into the SENS Research Foundation, work behind the scenes to make the research community much more accepting of aging research…

Do you write any comments other than to promote your blog?

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#258

Post by xenophanes »

michaelochurch wrote: post #207
droithomme wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salaries in the life sciences are no where near where you think they are. Lots of people with biology degrees are making less than theatre majors. Even if you have the more elaborate title of "biochemist", salaries are around $45k, not the $125k you are expecting to earn. http://www1.salary.com/Biochemist-I-Salary.html Starting salaries are around $35k. If you are working for a non-profit foundation (ie: cancer resea…

See, that's my exact point. I didn't say that they make $125k (that's about average for a half-decent VC-istan programmer) because I knew scientific salaries to be low (I'm surprised to hear that they're that low) and they shouldn't be. Those salaries should be at least 3 times higher. You should make more working on scientific research that helps everyone than you'd make ($100-150k for typical programmers) writing y…

> Those salaries should be at least 3 times higher.

Why? What about supply and demand? Do you mean salaries shouldn't be determined by supply and demand, or demand "should" be higher?

If demand for these skills should be higher, but isn't, that is an opportunity for entrepreneurs. Your or anyone else, if correct, could make a killing using these skills at low prices (salaries). The more people who do that, the more the prices of their skills rise.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#259

Post by roc »

khafra wrote: post #193
roc wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But by the time you've physically perfused the brain and frozen it, substantial cell death would have begun. So if we have to freeze until the scanning/storage tech arrives, we'll have a compromised source, at best.

Yes. Whether or not the most substantial damage occurs with apoptosis when oxygen is re-introduced, there will uncontroversially be a lot of damage even in the best case cryonic vitrification. Also uncontroversially, there will be substantially less damage than would occur with cremation or burial. Even the lesser amount of damage may be too much. Cryonics is a bet that it is not.

But is there a scientific basis to prefer this bet to, say, death-bed religious conversion?

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#260

Post by engtech »

brazzy wrote: post #183
engtech wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, more money is needed. 41% of deaths are due to cancer. It really is one of the biggest problems we have as a species and we should spend more effort on it rather than the things we do spend effort on. But I wholeheartedly agree that rather than trying to be a billg and earn money to fund philanthropy, the world needs more researchers.

> 41% of deaths are due to cancer. That's not even true if you look only at rich countries - cardiovascular diseases cause more deaths. The amount of effort, let alone money, spent on cancer research is already obscene compared to what is spent on other serious problems.

You're right. When I was looking at news articles this morning, I came across the 41% number, but that is obviously wrong or geo-specific.

cancer.org states that 15% of deaths worldwide are due to cancer, with 50% being spread amongst other non-communicable diseases.

http://www.cancer.org/research/infographics/rising-global-ca...

"In 2010, 65% of all deaths worldwide were due to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) like heart disease, lung disease, diabetes and cancer. 15% of all deaths worldwide, nearly 8 million people, were due to cancer alone. The number of deaths worldwide from cancer dwarfs the number of global deaths from malaria and HIV/AIDS, as is projected to exceed 13 million by 2030."

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