Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu (daniel mocsny) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Beyond active shields Message-ID: Date: 27 Jun 89 05:01:50 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Univ. of Cincinnati, College of Engg. Lines: 52 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , mtuxo!ems1@att.att.com writes: [ about emergency mind backups ] > You're assuming the Beacon needs to send a complete backup. It perhaps > wasn't clear from my earlier posting, but the "latest update" I foresee > will be an incremental type, just a record (mind-diff ?) of the changes > since your last update was sent, probably a week ago. Transmitting 1 > week's worth of experience by Beacon is a lot more achievable than > trying to send the experience of an entire lifetime. How much does > someone change in 1 week? Exactly. And why bother to save that week? Or even one day? Just have your brain backed up every night while you sleep. That way broadcast bandwidth isn't any problem, as you can use your regular optical fibers that carry your daily gigabytes anyway. One way to cut down the transmission would be to compress the data. Perhaps experiences have a compact fractal representation. If we had LOTS of CPU time to throw away, we could have a central site running its own simulations of everyone and their lives. If the model learned, it could continuously refine its performance based on the daily backups. Eventually it should be predicting future experiences with some accuracy, especially if everyone else's experiences in the same localities were coming in simultaneously. That way even if you got blown away without backing up in a week or so, the simulation could probably piece you back together by extrapolating forward from your past and by interpolating with its other knowledge of events in your area. I can see a great story line here (but it must surely have been done already). Imagine someone who keeps getting blown away and restored, and each time the destruction is serious enough to delete the memory of how death occurred. The protagonist knows that (s)he keeps getting killed and losing the memory of the week or so leading up to it, but (s)he can't figure out how the enemy is getting away with it. You have a situation where the protagonist is investigating her/his own death in a desperate attempt to prevent it from recurring. If the adversary can take out a bigger chunk of time with each killing, the protagonist dies in stages back to infancy. (That wouldn't work, but it's a cute idea anyway. Maybe the killer attempts to corrupt your backups too.) The attacker cannot permanently kill the protagonist, but (s)he may be able to chisel away all memories, and so eliminate the present form of the protagonist. Dan Mocsny dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu [I recall a novel by Jack Vance along these lines entitled something like "To Live Forever"... There is also of course the famous Null-A series by van Vogt. --JoSH]