14 replies to this topic

[walpurg]

It would make sense for cryonics orgs. to preserve as many endangered species as possible. We should work to rescue other life-forms from oblivion, as well as ourselves. Not only are all life-forms on the planet connected and interdependant (Gaia hypothesis), but we also owe these other points of consciousness and feeling - having brought them to the verge of the void - as well as unborn future generations, who have not yet sprang from non-existence, from our animal loins.

Life-extension must provide for all earthly life, otherwise our struggle for long-life may take us through a century of mass-extinction, only to find ourselves still alive but on a dead rock with only rats, maggots, and domesticated animal for company.

I expect there would be many practical difficulties though. Aside from financial issues (who would pay for it?**), we'd have to aquire the last few individuals of an endangered species (difficult, as they'd be very expensive, very rare, or in someone else's charge) - we'd also have to keep up with the present rate of extinctions and habitat despoilation:

"By conservative reckoning, the planet loses three or four species an hour, eighty or more a day, thirty thousand a year - the highest extinction rate in 65 million years." (Richard Ellis "No Turning Back - the life and death of animal species" 2004 Harper Collins p357)

If cryonicists are ever revived, we might find the spores in our frozen hair, and the undigested meat or plant matter in our stomachs, or even some of the microbes preserved in our bodies, more valuable than our own commonplace lives.

(**Why bother with this? We can just take their DNA and clone them later - indeed, preparation for this project is underway.

http://www.google.ca...red genes&meta=

But I do not think this is enough. It will preserve the biological lineage of present species (those that are rescued anyway), but they would be born without their original habitat, or even given that, they will have no living culture, no older generation from which to learn vital knowledge and copy important behaviours. Many re-introduced species without this guidance quickly become endangered again because they do not know how best to survive. This is why I think it is important to cryopreserve individual animals and not just species DNA.

Imagine what would happen to human babies raised by non-human intelligence too remote to understand - these infants would have no real language and no cultural inheritence. In the wild they would probably die, and all human history would have been wiped out, save for any surviving record.)

[caston]

It may also be better to practice nanotech based rebuilding on animals before we know we are ready to defrost and attempt to rebuild a human.

[maestro949]

It's a good point walpurg. I fear this more than I do terrorism, meteors, avian bird flu or drug-resistant strains of killer viruses and bacteria.

That we may be destroying the biological diversity faster than evolution can restore it's balance may be the most signifcant threat to the existance of humanity and the biological diversity we so rely on. While life on earth has rebounded time and time again through natural disasters, high order mammals have paid the most according to the archaeological record. Big ole dinosaurs were just one of many millions of species that went extinct during the last mass extinction. Most mammals did not make it through. I fear that few will make it through this die off. Humans may but only because we can take control of our own biology and evolution.

[walpurg]

That we may be destroying the biological diversity

"May be"!?

Humans may but only because we can take control of our own biology and evolution.

If we take "take control" of evolution, then why are we creating this period of mass-extinction? Extinction is the flip-side of evolution. I do not see control, I see a natural disaster in the form of a rapacious and irrational primate.

[John Schloendorn]

I'm afraid these conservation issues are harder to solve than by just freezing a bunch of animals. It is not just a matter of "monkey" or "no monkey". Most species, especially those currently threatened, require the dynamic adaptation of a diverse gene pool to a slowly changing environment in order to survive. Intra-species biodiversity gives them the potential to adapt to non-catastrophic changes of the surrounding biosphere over time.

Catastrophic habitat changes are just as dangerous for this delicate process as direct killing of the individuals. Even cryopreserving hundreds of a species' members may not be able to rescue the dynamic processes of diversity and adaptation that underlie most species' survival.

[maestro949]

"May be"!?

Who's to say things wont stabilize after some period of time? The oil's got to run out someday

If we take "take control" of evolution, then why are we creating this period of mass-extinction?

We haven't taken control of evolution but that's the direction we are heading. We will be able to reintroduce extinct species if we collect and save enough of their DNA.

Extinction is the flip-side of evolution. I do not see control, I see a natural disaster in the form of a rapacious and irrational primate.

Yeah, we probably should have stayed in the trees but there's no going back now. We just have to see how this plays out and hope for the best

[walpurg]

I'm afraid these conservation issues are harder to solve than by just freezing a bunch of animals.

I agree. I feel that my idea is better than nothing, but I don't really expect it to take-off anyway. My expectations are posted below is response to maestro.

The Gaia hypothesis is probably our best model to aim for if we want life-extension for the biosphere (& thus ourselves). Modern individualism and the failures to abstain from animal killing and exploitation are probably the reasons for our narrow anthropocentric approach in believing we can have "immortality" while we grind up the lives of everything else for our use (some of which may be justified, but most of which is not).

The current ignorance of the Holocene extinction is similar to death-denial in the individual - only it is taking place on a mass scale, driven forwards by the implacable needs of socio-economic systems, partially erected to protect our fragile sense of togetherness and selfhood.

It all seems doom and gloom I'm sure, especially whern I have no easy answers. No doubt it would be easier to reject the psychological theory on which these posts are based, but one cannot deny the reality - the statistics, the corpses and wasteland - that are evident if you simply look.

[walpurg]

Who's to say things wont stabilize after some period of time? The oil's got to run out someday

Only part of the picture my friend. Poor farmers who must feed their families encroach daily on the shrinking non human life-forms. Poverty is more fundamental a problem, and wars in Africa and South America are bringing untold species to their knees. Just think of the recent Lebanese oil spill (resulting from Isreali aggression) as a small example of how great the problem is.

We haven't taken control of evolution but that's the direction we are heading. We will be able to reintroduce extinct species if we collect and save enough of their DNA.

Like I've said, this isn't enough. John Schloendorn's post made that point even more pertinent.

Yeah, we probably should have stayed in the trees but there's no going back now. We just have to see how this plays out and hope for the best

You're right.

[walpurg]

"Doesn't separation inevitably mean eradication? Isn't containment (as in a national park that's too small to support a viable population) just another word for captivity? Is it possible to separate Homo sapiens from the dangerous inconvenience of alpha predators - around a lake, along a river, in a forest anywhere on the planet - without separating those predators from the habitat they need for a continuing existence in the wild? Can we have them at all if we're unwilling to suffer among them?" (David Quammen "Monster of God" 2003, p136)

And it seems that we are not willing. So the mass-extinction continues - for sport, for McMeat, for impoverished farmland, for the Chinese medicine market, for bloodlust, for "progress", for many reasons which point to the pinnacle we have placed ourselves upon.

We don't like things to be bigger and strong than us, so we destroy them if we can, like we did the prehistoric megafauna. Ernest Becker realised this, and wrote a book about the nature of our destructiveness:

"...man wants above all to endure and propser, to achieve immortality in some way. Because he knows he is mortal, the thing he wants most to deny is this mortality. Mortality is connected to the natural, animal side of his existence; and so man reaches beyond and away from that side. So much so that he tries to deny it completely. As soon as man reached new historical forms of power, he turned against the animals with whom he had previously identified - with a vengeance, we now see, because the animal embodies what man feared most, a nameless and faceless death." (Ernest Becker, "Escape from Evil", p92)

I think the current psycho-political climate will continue to be poisonous to most non-human life and complete the current Holocene extinction event. This is why I see cryopreservation as a good option for environmentalists to push - which they probably won't. I expect that convincing them would be just as hard as covincing the public of cryonics.

Besides, I expect that the expense of a white-whale sized cryostat. - even for an infant - would be extreme... storing a few viable couples of any species larger than a person (gorilla, rhino, elephant) would be very difficult.

Truly, I have no hope of seeing the last few tigers in a cryostat., and I have bearly any hope that they will continue to live much longer than a few more dcades. So many other life-forms have a much closer deadline. As we finish them of, I suspect we bring our own species to it's biological limit - and we will have destroyed thios present era of life as thoroughly as any asteroid, volcana chain, or tsumani for the sake of our wish for meaningfulness and security:

"... men are truly sorry creatures because they have made death conscious. They can see evil in anything that wounds them, causes ill health, or even deprives them of pleasure. Consciousness means too that they have to be preoccupied with evil even in the absence of any immediate danger; their lives become a meditation on evil and a planned venture for controlling it and forestalling it. The result is one of the great tragedies of human existence, what we might call the need to 'fetishize evil,' to locate the threat to life in some special places where it can be placated and controlled. It is tragic precisely because it is sometimes very arbitrary: men makes fantasies about evil, see it in the wrong places, and destroy themselves and others by uselessly thrashing about. This is the great moral of Melville's Moby Dick, the specific tragedy of a man driven to confine all evil to the person of a white whale." (Becker, p148)

"...a king serves the same function for his people that a shepherd (such as biblical David, in his obscure years before Goliath) serves for his flock: ridding them of the menace of predators. What distinguishes this tradition from mere livestock guarding is that the slaughter is preemptive, not reactive. The good ruler, like the bold shepherd, devotes himself to exterminating predators whenever and wherever they can be found. It's a paradigm of valorous leadership that traces back through some of the earliest masterworks of literature and some of the most durably resonant myths. Killing monsters, on one pretext or another, is something that has always allowed heroes to seem heroic." (Quammen, p255)

"The tragedy of evolution is that is created a limited animal (on a limited planet) with unlimited horizons... It seems that the experiment of man may well prove to be an evolutionary dead end, an impossible animal - one who, individually, needs for healthy action the very conduct that, on a general level, is destructive to him." (Becker, p153)


Thrre is no proposal, no call to action - this is it. We are aware of our inevitable death and work to postpone it, and some of us are aware of our inevitable extinction - but what can be done?

[John Schloendorn]

Thrre is no proposal, no call to action - this is it.

I think transhumanism makes a decent first draft of just that.

[maestro949]

I don't disagree walpurg. I just don't see any way to put the genie back in the bottle. The quest for knowledge, desire to survive, compete, act selfishly, succumbing to fear, aggressiveness are all rooted in our biology. Advancements in technology and so called progress is a natural continuation (symptoms have you) of evolution, not some evil force or collective agenda. Our brains evolved the way they did probably because of instincts to compete not just against other species but against each other. The written record repeatedly tells of one group of humans committing genocide against another group of humans this probably continues hundreds of thousands of years into the past thus shaping who we are today.

IMO the only way out of the spiral we are in is to accelerate the technological march we are on and get to a point where we can gain mastery over our biological weaknesses that are causing us to collectively destroy each other and our ecosystem.

[walpurg]

John and maestro - I essentially agree with you both, but believe that transhumanists are not doing enough to address our human-intiated mass extinction.

I feel that presently we are puppets to our nature, our lived psychology, and I can only hope that we do not meet the ultimate limit - but somehow transcend it. I think this hope is as old as we are.

[caston]

I have skipped over most of this. Please remember that we have greatly improved the standard of living for human beings. The sky is blue not red.

If you want to test cryonics on animals (which is going to get animal lib groups a bit angry) then that is fine and I quite encourage it. Don't try to justify it to yourself by saying that humans are destroying the planet.

[walpurg]

Caston - you missed the point. You will find it in the writing you skipped.

[Santos]

...good point! ...and there is really not very difficult because it could be preserve eggs or his equivalent, and not neccesary adults animals. It would be interesting to create a bank of the actual living animals; maybe it will be a lot of new worlds for give life in the future! (in the near future I wait!)