Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sunybcs!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: leech@homer.cs.unc.edu (Jonathan Leech) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Drexler on immortality, source of nano books. Message-ID: Date: 15 Mar 90 21:52:22 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Lines: 18 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu Keywords: In article alan@oz.nm.paradyne.com (Alan Lovejoy) writes: >There are many horrendous obstacles to truly living FOREVER... >But SEVERE energy problems would >confront you in only a few hundred billion... Perhaps there is some extremely >elegant way to escape this fate, but no one has any realistic notion of how. Actually, noted physicist Freeman Dyson did a nice paper on this (whose title and place of publication I of course forget :-); he concluded we can last *much* longer than a few measly trillion years in an open universe. I vaguely recall the figure 10^70 being mentioned. Part of the process involved dismantling large stars and storing their hydrogen for gradual use in efficient, cool red dwarfs, but that was in the very early stages. (Help! Can anyone come up with the reference/more details?) -- Jon Leech (leech@cs.unc.edu) __@/ ``You're everything I ever wanted in a human AND an extraterrestrial.'' - Dr. Steve Mills in _My Stepmother is an Alien_