Sometime ago, perhaps 1996, it fell into my displeasure to check out a book at the library. It was titled "The Physics of Immortality".
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/tipler.html
Ironically, it was not so much a random search for random things, but a random search for specific things. This particular thing I was seeking, was "the equation of immortality".
Now, please, accept the apology here, for there will be many uses of "I", for it was during this point in life that "I" was most megalomaniacal, which itself, may have been an excellent motivator for research - highly recommended for those time periods where you are otherwise stumped. Now to continue the "I/MY/ME" rant.
Within this book, I commited the most atrocious of Sins. I wrote comments. Nasty, evil, little biting comments about the erroneous nature of the thesis of the author. I even had the audacity to write in pencil, and may the Gods of science and education forgive me... it was a LIBRARY BOOK !!!
So incensed was I with this work, that I found myself confounding the very principles of Sacrosanct Educational Elitism.
Many years later, looking back in that book registry, we discovered that no one else had actually checked it out since then, not that many checked it out even before my time.
On to the contents, (and after the boring rants, we will go into the meat of the discussion). Turing machines. That's the first thing I remember, now how they worked, I had no idea, but these perfect turing machines were effectively, badly constructed nanocomputers that copied themselves including the blueprints on how to copy themselves. At the time, my enfeebled brain could not possibly concieve of how to do this - how do you store a circuit board within a cicuit board ? it seemed quite paradoxical.
Back then, the principle of Cloning evaded me. Your DNA does it all the time. For one, if you have a computer, most of the computer is only a bunch of copies of similar copies of small peices, repeated over and over. You do not need to store the entire 3thousand + peices, you need only store the 35-300 working models, and then copy those, cloning where necessary.
The second principle is memory transfer. 10110101 etc. In any event, the turing machine was a fascinating deviation from a practicable vantage to immortality. The following principle that tipler approached was the "big bang-big crunch" theory of the universe, a very dark forboding look into Nietzchian thermodynamics, so ghastly that I found it difficult to stomach the nextmillion or so pages.
In hindsight, Tipler seemed to completely evade the Cosmic Jets of blackholes, vaunting moreso the retro vision of a 1970s Disney Film. I felt as if the universe according to Tipler, had been created by the same morose people who braught us "Tron" and in his mind "it was meant to be that way".
Now on to the non Crap version of "the physics of immortality".
The first thing that crosses my mind, when I think about physical, living, breathing immortality, is blood.
Some months ago, we had a very long discussion about what ways physics and genetics could approach immortality, based upon the principle of "what could a human being do, if they still functioned, without blood ?"
First, blood is what carries DNA and Vectors from retroviruses. If you have no blood, then in theory, there is no immediate way to transmit the new cell information, which means you are "locked" into the current pattern.
Second, it is through blood that poisons, and toxins, and diseases are carried. Withhout blood, if you were some how still alive, these chemicals could never transmit through your body, and at best would be localized instances.
Third, DNA is created through the mutation of protiens and fueled by carbohydrates both of which are carried through the bood, which means, if you didnt need blood, you would not grow older, for no new materials would be necessary.
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