OK, I know I’ve been all over the cryonics stuff like Michael Moore on a plate of double cheeseburgers, but I hear you all asking–just what the heck does all this have to do with space?

First of all, space may offer a solution to a problem faced uniquely by cryonicists. As the Ted Williams (and the earlier Dora Kent) case shows, a cryonics patient in suspension is not necessarily safe from interference by others.

Storage in space could prove a solution to the “peasants with pitchforks” problem. A suspension repository in orbit or on the lunar surface could be designed to be passively cooled, eliminating the requirements of power for refrigeration, or the topping up of liquid nitrogen, reducing the chances of thawing due to natural disasters or business problems. And it would put the patients safely out of reach of most who, for whatever reason, would attempt to deliberately thaw (and thus destroy) them.

In addition, as more people sign up, it might present another market for space transportation, which is badly needed to reduce the cost. I wrote on this subject extensively for Cryonics magazine over a decade ago.

But there are other relationships between space and cryonics.

One of the concerns that’s often raised by cryonics, and by life extension in general, is the population problem implied by new people being continually born, with few dying.

The problem, if it is one, is not immediate. Our home planet is capable of supporting many times as many people as it currently does at a comfortable living standard, given adequate technology, and rational governance (the latter being a commodity unfortunately still in short supply in much of the world). And I think that fixing the bad government problem is a much more ethically desirable and otherwise worthwhile approach than throwing up our hands at the problem, and instead murdering the millions who might like to live longer (which is what forcing someone to die prematurely surely is).

The biggest problems from a resource standpoint are water, and energy. But given affordable energy, the water problem is easily solved with desalinization of ocean water. And it would be foolish to bet that we won’t come up with affordable new energy sources in the future (improved nuclear fission plants, nuclear fusion, more efficient solar and energy storage, etc.).

Also, there’s no shortage of land, and won’t be for a long time, considering how much of the planet is still relatively empty of people.

But sometime in the next few centuries, assuming that we don’t stop breeding (not necessarily a good assumption) on a mass scale, we will run out of room on this planet.

Fortunately, the rest of the universe is almost unlimited, in volume and critical resources. If we do become essentially immortal, space settlement will provide a safety valve for the additional population, and in fact, it may allow us to actually depopulate the planet, and use it as a vast park, in which to breed diverse wildlife and enjoy scenic vacations.

Another problem often postulated by opponents of long life is that people will become bored. That may be true of some–even many. But while many people seem sanguine about the prospects of dying as they approach the ends of their lives, it isn’t clear whether this is because of boredom, or because the currently-inevitable infirmities of advanced age have made living tiresome and unpleasant, and even excruciatingly painful.

It seems likely to me that, in most cases, their enthusiasm for life would be dramatically increased if they were given twenty-year-old bodies (and matching hormones) again, particularly if they were chronologically older and wiser, and thus knew much better what to do with them. In a world of rejuvenation, the old saying about “youth being wasted on the young” would no longer apply.

It will, of course, depend greatly on the individual. As I wrote once in a letter to The Economist, for Joe or Josephine Sixpack, who comes home from work each night and sits in front of the television drinking beer, three score and ten will seem plenty. But for a Leonardo or Leonarda da Vinci, a lifetime of centuries might still seem all too brief.

But for those who like to travel, longer life will offer more opportunities to visit new places, and in the future, most of those new places will be off planet, so for many, space offers a solution to the boredom problem as well.

Space and extended life go hand in hand. The universe is so vast that we will require many human lifetimes to explore it, at least as individuals. And it offers new ecological ranges for the increased numbers of conscious beings that will result from advances in technology. And finally, unfortunately, at our current rate of progress, I occasionally think that I’m going to have to live several hundred years just to have a chance to get off the planet, at least if the government stays in charge…

When I saw Godzilla a few years ago (the new one, based in New York), as we left the theatre, I commented to a friend on the physical improbability of it. The beast was made out of flesh and bone, yet when it brushed skyscrapers as it ran through the canyons of New York City, it tore off huge chunks of concrete and steel from them, with no apparent damage to its own body.

But even more of a problem is the thermodynamics. When you consider how much power it would take to move that much mass at those speeds, and then consider how large the body was, with a very high mass-to-surface-area ratio, it seems impossible to cool it. The thing would basically cook from the inside out.

This is one of the limits on the size of warm-blooded animals, particularly if they’re very active. We now believe that dinosaurs were warm blooded, but we have no reason to believe that they moved particularly fast, at least, not the large ones like apatasaurus.

Anyway, den Beste has a similar, and entertaining, series of posts about an upcoming movie featuring fire-breathing dragons, and how they’d be no match for modern weaponry.

In a huge technological breakthrough, Alcoa has announced the development of a non-stick aluminum foil.

So, do you use the non-sticking side on the inside, or the outside, of your foil hat? Will it block the mind-control beams better?

The plot thickens.

Here’s an image of the petition filed by the executor of the will. Note that it says that the daughter who wants to thaw and burn Mr. Williams was estranged and cut out of the will. So if, as this story indicates, the family is in negotiation, just what’s being negotiated? Is she perhaps extorting the other two siblings for a cut of the estate in exchange for allowing him to remain in cryostasis?

[Update at 7 AM PDT]

Natalie Solent has weighed in on the frozen soul issue as well (as is apparently the rule with blogspot these days, the permalink doesn’t work, so just go to her site). She basically agrees with me.

Rand Simberg’s picture of there being a storage facility for the “pending” souls is amusingly literal, but has the right idea. Don’t worry. God won’t be caught napping.

It had started off as a prank, but when Major Elyse Livesay discovered (during her solo space walk, no less!) the tarantula that the boys in the crew had slipped into her spacesuit, she knew that while in space no one could hear you scream, it was damn sure not for lack of trying.

That’s one of the many entries, simultaneously wonderful and appalling, in this year’s Bullwer-Lytton contest. I led with it because it was space themed. Never let it be said that I get stuck in a rut–I am the darned rut.

Here’s the contest winner:

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

It wouldn’t have been my pick. If you have the time, and need some side-splitting humor to provide a little break from our War On Terrorism that seems to be more of a War On Common Sense, when it should be a War On Islamism, go read them all here.

And to think that Brendan O’Neill thought that bloggers were bad writers…

The contestants to this contest are geniuses, indeed prodigies, of bad writing. We could all take a lesson from them.

(Thanks to Dave Trowbridge, who needs not thank me for the blogroll addition–it was long overdue–for the link.)

There’s an article over at abc.com detailing the travails of the International Space Station and Shuttle programs. There are a few quotes from spaceblogger Mark Whittington.

Not much new here, at least to anyone who’s been reading my weblog for a while, but it’s nice to see these things in the mainstream press. The reporter still doesn’t get it, though–she’s reporting it as though this is all a surprise, and news.

If plans for the space station crew aren’t expanded, the panel concluded, “NASA should cease to characterize the I.S.S. as a science driven program.”

Newsflash guys–NASA has lied about that from day one. It has never been a science-driven program.

“Congress needs to own up to what it had intended to do,” he says. “If they really want a space station program, they have to fund it.”

They did fund a space station program, which is all they ever wanted. Programs create jobs and constituencies.

What they’ve never cared about (and still don’t really, at least not at the expense of other things that they care about) is actually having a useful space station.

There’s an article over at abc.com detailing the travails of the International Space Station and Shuttle programs. There are a few quotes from spaceblogger Mark Whittington.

Not much new here, at least to anyone who’s been reading my weblog for a while, but it’s nice to see these things in the mainstream press. The reporter still doesn’t get it, though–she’s reporting it as though this is all a surprise, and news.

If plans for the space station crew aren’t expanded, the panel concluded, “NASA should cease to characterize the I.S.S. as a science driven program.”

Newsflash guys–NASA has lied about that from day one. It has never been a science-driven program.

“Congress needs to own up to what it had intended to do,” he says. “If they really want a space station program, they have to fund it.”

They did fund a space station program, which is all they ever wanted. Programs create jobs and constituencies.

What they’ve never cared about (and still don’t really, at least not at the expense of other things that they care about) is actually having a useful space station.

There’s an article over at abc.com detailing the travails of the International Space Station and Shuttle programs. There are a few quotes from spaceblogger Mark Whittington.

Not much new here, at least to anyone who’s been reading my weblog for a while, but it’s nice to see these things in the mainstream press. The reporter still doesn’t get it, though–she’s reporting it as though this is all a surprise, and news.

If plans for the space station crew aren’t expanded, the panel concluded, “NASA should cease to characterize the I.S.S. as a science driven program.”

Newsflash guys–NASA has lied about that from day one. It has never been a science-driven program.

“Congress needs to own up to what it had intended to do,” he says. “If they really want a space station program, they have to fund it.”

They did fund a space station program, which is all they ever wanted. Programs create jobs and constituencies.

What they’ve never cared about (and still don’t really, at least not at the expense of other things that they care about) is actually having a useful space station.

Other people are starting to pick up on the theme, first put forth by Jay Manifold (at least as far as I know, in the blogosphere) that asteroid impacts are a larger danger than they appear, because of the possibility of even a small one being mistaken for a nuke and setting off a war.

Wendy McElroy has a good column today taking a position that I’ve long shared. The state should butt out of marriages, except to enforce contracts that the couple agrees to themselves. The current one-size-fits-all mentality is a cause of much social dysfunction.