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Some bitcoin enthusiasts have used their cryptocurrency to travel around the world. Others have spent it on a trip to space. But the very earliest user of bitcoin (after its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto himself) has now spent his crypto coins on the most ambitious mission yet: to visit the future.
Hal Finney, the renowned cryptographer, coder, and bitcoin pioneer, died Thursday morning at the age of 58 after five years battling ALS. He will be remembered for a remarkable career that included working as the number-two developer on the groundbreaking encryption software PGP in the early 1990s, creating one of the first “remailers” that presaged the anonymity software Tor, and—more than a decade later—becoming one of the first programmers to work on bitcoin’s open source code; in 2008, he received the very first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto.
Now Finney has become an early adopter of a far more science fictional technology: human cryopreservation, the process of freezing human bodies so that they can be revived decades or even centuries later.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Saturday August 30 2014, @04:16AM
Guess there will be a preference for those that know stuff that people find useful. Like you can ask the question on matters that didn't get written down.
In science pretty much everything is written down. Perhaps the research from a week before the unfortunate flattening by the bus won't be written down; but chances are that someone, more like the researcher's coworker, will continue on this, and the question will be answered a hundred years ago. And besides, what value to science the knowledge of a modern physicist would be a hundred years later? He'd wake up and shout "I know, I know, the Higgs bozon is real!" - will that surprise anyone, as they move him from one room to another on an antigravity stretcher?
One could say (just as you did) that some "people are exceptionally intelligent" and should be revived so that they can continue their service to humankind. But in many sciences 100 years is infinity. Those people, if revived as perfectly healthy humans, still would need to learn everything that was done by generations of scientists while they were cooling their heels in liquid hydrogen. Even a very smart man cannot be very useful without learning all the facts, theories and technologies that were developed during this time. It may take all the rest of their lifetime.
Of course, it's probably possible to find a few people who would be worth reviving - like musicians or artists, for example. But certainly not a bank manager, and not a farmer, and not an engineer. They may want to see the future, but the future has no interest in seeing them. The absolute best they can hope for is being loaded, right in their storage container, onto a generation ship and being fired into depths of space, toward some star. The computer will wake them up - or will try, at least - if the star has a habitable planet. If not, no lives will be lost.
(Score: 2) by umafuckitt on Thursday September 04 2014, @06:03PM
One could say (just as you did) that some "people are exceptionally intelligent" and should be revived so that they can continue their service to humankind.
This is the big lie of the cryopreservation people. To do the sort of thing you're hinting at we will have to revive people *and* make the younger *and* cure them of what killed them. Not going to happen.