Re: opposite of relativistic time contraction

: IsaacKuo <mechdan@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
: Also, there are nagging questions about whether the resulting being
: is the same person as the one who got visciously murdered earlier.
: Me?  I'd rather not have my molecules scrambled around the
: universe by some contraption.  Maybe these god-like aliens have a
: similar philosophy about continuity of identity.

Does freezing and thawing preserve identity?
How about living through many years of trans****t; food will end up
replacing lots of your mass; are you the same person?  The atoms in
the food are just re-arranged to fit into a template by digestion and
incor****ation into tissue, so is that different than having the template
be more etherial (and thus robust) than just accreting onto pre-existing
gelled goo?

Thing is, hooman beans are "really" "just" dynamic patterns in a vague
cloud of atoms, which are dispersing and accreting all the time.  Making
the dynamic pattern occur in a robust information store for a while seems
no more traumatic to the process than freezing.

But still, as you say, the spacebats may have a religious taboo or
something.
Or the passengers might, and the spacebats just indulging them.


Xref: the scene in Creatures of Light and Darkness where Anubis and
Wakim discuss the nature of death.  Or life: same thing, sez Anubis.
Includes the query, if you are frozen, and never revived (but could have
been), are you dead, or not?

See also: The Steel General, also from CoLaD.
He always fights for lost causes, and most often loses.  But even if
he is smashed to fragments and scattered across the galaxy, his followers
eventually recover them, and "assemble the engine again" so to type.
Plus, he's got a nifty (iirc) six-legged horse, every stride of which
covers twice the distance of the stride before.

Or consider Francis Sandow's zippo lighter.  Which he had for so long,
he had had long since replaced every single part of it, multiple times.
"This is my grandfather's axe.  My father replaced the head, and
I replaced the handle, but it's my grandfather's axe all right."

    "It is said that the Steel General's horse could cir***navigate
     the universe in a single stride, if given a sufficient warmup run."
                       --- factoid from CoLaD


Wayne Throop   throopw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
   http://sheol.org/throopw