Posts Tagged ‘Antarctica’
“Before beginning, plan carefully”*…
The marvelous Matt Levine on one of the vexing challenges facing those who preserve themselves cryogenically…
See, if you go to a regular trusts and estates lawyer, she will ask you questions like “if your spouse and children die before you, whom do you want to inherit your estate,” but if you go to a science fiction trusts and estates lawyer, she will ask you questions like “if your frozen head cannot be attached to a fresh body and reanimated in 200 years, but your consciousness can be cloned in a computer simulation, would you like your estate to go to the cloned consciousness or stay with the frozen head?” Meanwhile I suppose if you go to a regular financial planner, he will ask you questions like “how much equity risk are you comfortable taking between now and retirement,” while if you go to a science fiction financial planner, he will ask you questions like “where are you most comfortable investing for the next 200 years, given that you will not be able to change your asset allocation decisions during that time, because you’ll be dead?”
When you are a kid, science fiction is fun because it imagines amazing futuristic technologies. And then you grow up and you realize that what’s really fun are the legal and financial technologies that are called into being by those physical technologies: Sure sure sure reviving a frozen head is great, but how does the frozen head get a credit card? Bloomberg’s Erin Schilling reports:
Estate attorneys are creating trusts aimed at extending wealth until people who get cryonically preserved can be revived, even if it’s hundreds of years later. These revival trusts are an emerging area of law built on a tower of assumptions. Still, they’re being taken seriously enough to attract true believers and merit discussion at industry conferences.
“The idea of cryopreservation has gone from crackpot to merely eccentric,” said Mark House, an estate lawyer who works with Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s largest cryonics facility with 1,400 members and about 230 people already frozen. “Now that it’s eccentric, it’s kind of in vogue to be interested in it.”
He and others are trying to answer questions that at times seem more like prompts in a philosophy class.
Can money live indefinitely?
Are you dead if your body is cryonically preserved?
Are you considered revived if you have only your brain?
And if you’re revived, are you the same person?
So many good legal questions — “House considers the revived person to be different in the eyes of the law, in part because a person can’t be the beneficiary of their own trusts” — but also great financial ones.
Here’s one: Should you buy Bitcoin for your long sleep? The argument for Bitcoin is that you can hold it, indefinitely, without relying on anyone else: If you put 10 Bitcoin in a wallet and only you know the private key, and then you die and get frozen and come back in 200 years, no one will have taken your Bitcoin, legal rules about inheritance and perpetual trusts don’t matter, and you don’t need some succession plan for the trustees and financial advisers who will take care of your assets. You just have to make sure you remember your private key as you’re dying. Legal rules can change, human institutions can change, but your Bitcoin is immutable.
The argument against Bitcoin is, of course, what if people stop valuing Bitcoin? Putting your money in Bitcoin is a hedge against change in other human institutions, but it puts a lot of eggs in the basket of one human institution, “treating Bitcoin as money.” It’s a bit weird to bet that that’s more permanent than anything else.
More generally, what is money anyway? “It may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world,” says OpenAI to its investors, and what if OpenAI gets to artificial general intelligence before anyone gets around to unfreezing the heads? You might be leaving your future self all the wrong stuff…
Very long-term planning: “Cryogenics Law,” from @matt_levine via Ingrid Burrington’s wonderful newsletter, “Perfect Sentences” (in this instance, “Sure sure sure reviving a frozen head is great, but how does the frozen head get a credit card?).
* Marcus Tullius Cicero
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As we chill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that the coldest (natural) temperature ever recorded on Earth was registered by the research station at Vostok, Antarctica: -128.5 degrees Fahrenheit (-89.2 degrees Celsius).
We might also note that today– July 20, 2024– is the date on which the action in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower begins: “…in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed…”
“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils”*…
In a recent experiment, “a group of domesticated birds were taught to call one another on tablets and smartphones.” They enjoyed it and made new friendships. [Schuyler Velasco]
The US Defence Department earns $100m/year operating slot machines used by soldiers on their bases. [Gabby Means]
Some corrupt Mexican police are now using card terminals to make collecting bribes at traffic stops more convenient. [Daniela Dib]
Fashion models in China are cutting prices to compete with AI: “If designers using AI charge 800 yuan, I’ll do 600. If they charge 600, I’ll get down to 500. There’s no other way out. I’ll fight till the end.” [Andrew Deck]
Only 28 books sold more than 500,000 copies in the US in 2022. Eight of them were by romance novelist Colleen Hoover. [Jason Colvato]
The average US fridge uses 3–5 times more electricity than an entire human being consumes in Nigeria. [Daisy Dunne & Simon Evans]
Since 1986, Nepal’s timezone has been 5 hours and 45 minutes ahead of GMT. [Sam Enright]
A selection from Tom Whitwell’s always-illuminating annual list: “52 things I learned in 2023.”
* Hector Berlioz
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As we live and learn, we might recall that on this date in 2013 Metallica played a concert in Antarctica, making them the first band to perform on all seven continents.
“Ice contains no future, just the past, sealed away”*…
From her new book, Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks—A cool history of a hot commodity, Amy Brady…
Despite more than 150 years’ worth of study and experimentation, no one really knows why ice is slippery….
Nineteenth-century Americans used ice to store perishable foods in amounts that astounded visitors from Europe, where an ice trade had yet to be developed. Apples, for example, became so commonplace in the young republic that visitors coined the phrase “as American as apple pie.”…
By WWII, the burgeoning industry of electric refrigeration was catching up to the ice industry, and companies like the Southland Ice Company were forced to rethink their business plans. Southland began selling kitchen staples like milk and bread alongside their ice. The combination became so popular, the company extended its hours to keep up with demand, and within a few years renamed itself after its new hours of operation. The 7-Eleven was born, and convenience stores today still sell ice…
Between WWII and 1975, the amount of electricity refrigerators consumed grew by more than 350 percent. Today, a look at energy use around the globe reveals that the cooling industry (refrigerators, freezers, and air conditioners) accounts for almost 10 percent of all CO2 emissions…
Six more cool facts at “10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Ice,” from @ingredient_x in @Orion_Magazine.
* Haruki Murakami
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As we chill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1982 that record low temperature of -117 F was recorded in Antarctica. That record was broken the following year, also in Antarctica, at -128.6 F– a mark that stands to this date, as Antartica has been warming… leading Dr. Brady to ask, “in an age of accelerating global warming… can ice in the freezer and ice on our planetary poles continue to coexist?”
“A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points”*…
This rectangular world map [from the design firm AuthaGraph] is made by equally dividing a spherical surface into 96 triangles, transferring it to a tetrahedron while maintaining areas proportions and unfolding it to be a rectangle.
The world map can be tiled in any directions without visible seams. From this map-tiling, a new world map with triangular, rectangular or parallelogram’s outline can be framed out with various regions at its center.
For more background and other views, visit The AuthaGraph World Map.
* Alan Kay
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As we struggle to keep it all in proportion, we might send exploratory birthday greetings to Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen; he was born on this date in 1778. A sailor, navigator, and cartographer, Bellingshausen was appointed by Czar Alexander I of Russia to lead an expedition that aimed to pick up where Captain Cook (who had died a year after Bellingshausen’s birth) left off, exploring the southern polar region of the globe. Bellinghausen may have been the first to sight the Antarctic mainland, when he saw distant mountains on January 28, 1820. Between February 17-19, he recorded seeing ice cliffs and ice-covered mountains, though he didn’t realize that they were in fact a continental mainland. Similar sightings were also made at about the same time British naval captain Edward Bransfield and the American sealing captain Nathaniel Palmer sailing from other directions, so who was actually the first of them to see Antarctica remains unclear.
(Just as there is some uncertainty as to which of the three mariners was in fact the first to sight the seventh continent, so there is some confusion as to Bellingshausen’s birth date. This is one of the primary candidates.)
“Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell”*…
It’s easy to be pessimistic about the state of the world; but it does pay to stand back, look at the big picture, and check that pessimism against long term data… which is what our old friend Hans Rosling helps people do. A statistician who specializes in data visualization, here he uses snowballs and toys to explain (to the BBC) the state of income inequality:
Special bonus: watch Dr. Rosling disabuse WEF-Davos attendees of their misimpressions about sustainable development.
* Walter Bagehot, English economist (1826-1877)
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As we remind ourselves that regression can be a useful thing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition unloaded the first automobile in Antarctica (an air-cooled Arrol-Johnston two-seater). Shackleton had hoped that the car would speed his progress to the South Pole; in the event, it didn’t perform in the extreme cold.
The expedition’s engineer, Bernard Day, testing the Arrol-Johnston on the Ross Sea Ice Shelf
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