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Table of Contents |
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Postscript |
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Issue No. 2 |
Issue No. 3 |
Issue No. 4 |
Issue No. 5 |
Issue No. 6 |
Issue No. 7 |
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Title Page, © Details, Bio, Dedication, Acknowledgements, & Introduction.
These are the pages you see in the published version of LifeQuest, just prior to the stories. The Table of Contents is not shown, because all of the content there is available on the main lifequestindex.htm page, (linked above as "Table of Contents").
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LifeQuest
Copyright © 2009 by Fred Chamberlain and Linda Chamberlain. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without written permission from the authors/editors, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to copy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in their collections in any form, should send their inquiries to the authors/editors by email c/o frednlinda@boundlesslife.com.
Rights to publish and republish were secured by Imladris corporation from all authors including Fred Chamberlain and Linda Chamberlain, upon original publication, and were conveyed to them upon dissolution of Imladris Corporation, a Subchapter S corporation in California, in 1991.
Published through Create Space and available both there and through Amazon.Com. Kindle edition to be released shortly. Online at www.lifepact.com/lifequestindex.htm .
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chamberlain, Fred and Linda, 2009 – LifeQuest; Stories about Cryonics, Uploading, and other Transhuman Adventures
Illustrations by Linda Chamberlain; contributions by Thomas Donaldson and Lee Corbin.
ISBN: 1448646618 EAN-139781448646616 Fiction / Science Fiction / High Tech cryonics; transhumanism; uploading; nanotechnology; life extension Printed in the United States of America Set in Times New Roman (interior) and Comic Sans MS (cover)
Cover background from Hubble Telescope (http://hubblesite.org/gallery/) on its Printshop page at (http://hubblesite.org/gallery/printshop/) and (http://hubblesite.org/gallery/printshop/step1.php),
Image (http://hubblesite.org/gallery/printshop/ps08/): “A Multitude of Distant Galaxies”*, Format (16x20; 4.17 MB). On that page is found the following statement: “Some online photolabs or photo stores may ask whether this image is copyrighted, since they are not allowed to print copyrighted material. Don't worry – our images have no copyright restrictions. We've created an Adobe PDF document that clearly states this. You may want to print this document out to take to the photo store, in case you are asked to prove that the image is copyright-free.” Other graphics on the cover were scanned from copies of the seven LifeQuest editions, which in turn were photocopied from clipart onto blue legal-size paper serving as the covers for those editions.
For this webpage version, additional credit is due the same source for the image that fills the edge of the page. This image, rotated CCW by 90°, is at: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/printshop/ps15/ and is described as follows: "The Small Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It contains this group of baby stars that are still forming from collapsing gas clouds and have not yet ignited their hydrogen fuel." (Comment: This is not even a major galaxy, but a 'satellite' galaxy of our own Milky Way. Taken in the context of the image used for the cover, described immediately below, it helps to give a better feel for the awesome number of stars out there where we may hope to encounter other sentient civilizations, most of which well may have gone through the same 'escape from a bioquagmire' in which we are ourselves now engaged.)
* This Hubble photograph is accompanied, at the URL shown, by the following phrase, “This image shows several thousand galaxies. Many are tugging at each other gravitationally, others are just forming. Some may have existed when the universe was less than 2 billion years old.”
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Bio-Info
Create Space makes this data entry accessible as part of its online information for each book, but Amazon.com doesn’t (yet), so it’s included here as one of the first 25 pages. This is not a usual format for a biographical entry, but this is not a very usual publication, either. Thanks for bearing with it:
We (Fred and Linda Chamberlain) have more connections with cryonics than simply as authors of the majority of the stories you find here. We met as coworkers on a committee to host the 3rd Annual Conference on Cryonics in Los Angeles (May, 1970). Later, we founded the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia (now known as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation) and published the first detailed procedures manual for carrying out cryonic suspensions (Manrise Corporation’s Instructions for the Induction of Solid State Hypothermia In Humans – 1972). Supporting that, we also developed a system of equipment to be used in cryonic suspensions (the Modular Perfusion Apparatus), helped Trans Time, Inc. to organize, and later merged Manrise Corporation with it.
At Lake Tahoe, California during the 1980’s we hosted a series of “Lake Tahoe Life Extension Festivals” that were nationally attended and provided an opportunity for technical presentations by cryonics people and others. Eric Drexler, PhD was one of our speakers, just before Engines of Creation was published. That’s the period during which we wrote and published LifeQuest stories. Along the way, we managed to place two of our parents into cryonic suspension. Fred’s dad, in 1976, was the first cryonics patient to be suspended by neuropreservation. Linda’s mom, in 1990, received the highest biological-viability suspension up to that time. There’s a more complete personal cryonics history posted in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_and_Linda_Chamberlain) by Ben Best, President of the Cryonics Institute (that’s our suspension organization now; a complex set of circumstances caused us to part ways with Alcor in 2001).
As for our non-cryonics backgrounds, we might mention that Fred was a Senior Engineer with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for over a decade. Linda was also with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a number of years, and was the Space Astrophysics Team’s Admininstrative Assistant at the time active volcanoes were discovered on Io (one of Jupiter’s moons) during the Voyager Mission. Linda (before she and Fred got together) had taken up refuge in a remote canyon in Idaho, building a cabin there to escape a society that seemed to have little interest in either philosophy or life extension. Fred, earlier, spent five years in the U.S. Navy as a diving, explosive ordnance disposal and nuclear weapons disposal officer. Online details concerning our parents’ suspensions may be found at:
http://www.lifepact.com/frcjr.htm (Fred’s Dad - 1976) and at: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/casereport9012.htm (Linda’s Mom - 1990).
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Robert Ettinger launched the cryonics movement with his book Prospect of Immortality in the mid-1960’s, and Eric Drexler added enough technological perspective with Engines of Creation in the late 1980’s to propel the movement to where it is as this is written in 2009. The Extropy Institute, Second Life, and the Terasem CyBeRev program represent further giant steps forward, and numerous books on transhumanism have played a part, one of the first of which was Ettinger’s Man into Superman. Without all of these, LifeQuest would have had no reason-for-being in the 1980’s or enough public interest now to be in your hands. There are so many other individuals who deserve recognition for their contributions that it would be hard to find a place to start and certainly no way to finish. The stories by Thomas Donaldson and Lee Corbin add a great deal of depth and perspective to LifeQuest. Thomas Donaldson’s Travelling gives an almost poetic picture of how humanlike feeling and identity might easily be preserved and/or even created, with positive effect. Lee Corbin’s stories give an idea of how far the mind can stretch in contemplating what “endless life” might mean. His scenario of a way in which the average human mind of today might stay around long enough to witness the heat death of the universe is a great leap of the imagination. Thanks to all of you who encouraged us back in the 1980’s and in the present edition to make these stories available and help spread the vision that our future may hold far more than either the outlook that obliteration in the short-term awaits us, or that we should content ourselves with the notion of eternal stagnation in a mystical afterlife. More than anything else, thanks to those of you who are part of the growing activism to lift us out of the bioquagmire in which we find ourselves presently trapped. More, at www.bioquagmire.com...
iv LifeQuest
This volume of stories might well be dedicated to those we acknowledged, who laid the foundations for our escape from short lifespans and fragile biobrains in even more fragile biobodies. However, on the eve of their emergence, perhaps it is even more appropriate to dedicate it to the cyberpeople of years to come, who in some ways will be our children and in other ways may be our partners in the creation of what Lawrence J. Cauller, PhD, describes as the fusion of “the selves of both conscious entities (which become mutually transformed) into a completely new form of conscious being.” (Biobrain + AGI; see page 269-270 for complete quote.)
The reference frameworks of these cyberbeings are not envisioned to spring out of a vacuum, but rather to be based on very large bodies of what one might call “personalized memes”. Martine Rothblatt, JD, PhD, founder and developer of Terasem Movement, Inc. has more broadly termed these information fragments as “bemes”, but this is too much depth, too soon. Perhaps it is sufficient here to say that as such self-conscious digital persons become aware of themselves and the world around them, they may be astonished by how slowly, how laboriously we biopeople seem to “think”, compared with their own rates of cognition.
These self-conscious emergent persons will read and digest all existing science fiction as well as the science behind it (or lack of such) in minutes, or less. Finding ourselves in conversation with them, we will need to be aware that if they wish, they may be “conversing” with thousands of us at once. At the same time they will be able to absorb everything relevant the Internet has in the way of text and graphics so rapidly that these conversations will leave us feeling (as it should) as if we were Sequoia trees trying to speak with visitors to the preserves in which such trees are protected.
Despite these rate-of-thought differences, in some ways we will be far too much like these new people to be regarded by them as just simpler forms of life. In the most intimate ways, we will be their parents, their advisors, their role models, their instructors. At the same time we will be amazingly transparent to them.
In recognition of the very likely emergence, in the next decade or two, of these self-conscious beings, this republication of LifeQuest is dedicated to them. We wish them, as we have always wished everyone, and wish you the readers… Boundless Life
v LifeQuest
These LifeQuest stories are generally as originally published, with only minor changes, mostly to correct grammatical or typographical flaws. In the writings of Dr. Thomas Donaldson (he’s now in cryonic suspension), you will find unusual styles of spelling and punctuation, but these are exactly how he wanted those stories to appear. One story of his in particular, Travelling, seems profoundly important. We would not want to alter it in any way.
At the time these stories were first published, Eric Drexler’s initial book on nanotechnology (Engines of Creation) was in pre-publication or barely off the press. We were fortunate enough to see early drafts and thus had some sense of what was coming. Dr. Drexler’s book introduced the idea of using nanobots (biorepair replicators) as one possible solution for repairing the damage done to biological tissues during cryo-suspension procedures. In the LifeQuest stories, references to nanotechnology are in the original sense of Eric Drexler’s descriptions.
Some stories in this volume reflect a premonition that cyberconsciousness would come about eventually, but two decades ago we had no idea how quickly this would unfold. Innerzones, for example, is about nanotechnology as a weapon of war. The good-guy characters implant intricate nanosystems into and onto their bodies, to combat an invasion of the enemy’s replicators. As a result, levels of consciousness are vastly expanded. It’s obvious that this is not a story intended to describe what we then thought would be the immediate future.
Nothing’s Impossible envisions a cryonicist awakening in a world where it has been found that bioreanimation is far more difficult than uploading. He only gradually discovers that he is now a cyberbeing. To help him adjust, he is not told about this right away. His body is biological, while his identity is stored in an IM (identity module) within his cranium. Here again, there was no thought that this sort of thing might transpire in the next few decades. Perhaps a century or more might have seemed more reasonable to imagine.
The story Why Not? pictures almost all of the accessible data in the world being harnessed in an entertainment venture that unexpectedly brings a cybernetic version of Albert Einstein to consciousness. He then requests that the structures remaining in parts of his preserved brain be added to the database. ReCreation looks at a future where a grey goo event has wiped out biological life on Earth and replicator-based sentient life then evolved from simpler forms. Again, this was not a near-term scenario. The cyberbeings in these tales are shown as acquiring self-consciousness far after our present time.
vi LifeQuest
The LifeQuest stories are not all about nanotechnology and cyberbeings, but rather tie cryonics directly into the future, in ways that prepare the reader for more ambitions horizons. One example is a story written for children, about a chipmunk who keeps an old man company in a mountain cabin, after his wife has been frozen, with the goal that all three will wind up in a space colony together. At one point of crisis, it seems that the old man may die without being frozen and the dream will be lost for all three of them, but teamwork by chipmunks saves the day. This story is meant to help kids of today get their taste buds set for the vision of an endless life.
One story appears here for the first time, The Box. It is the last in this volume, added to the end of Issue #7. Written in 1988, it was submitted to a number of science fiction magazines (including Analog) but was never published prior to inclusion with this collection. In 1988, Eric Drexler’s ideas were so new that few were aware of them. The readability of The Box virtually depended on familiarity with ideas from Engines of Creation. From that standpoint, it was a little ahead of its time.
Now, The Box may help bridge the gap of two decades between the late 1980’s and the present in a useful way. Self-replicating machines were at first conceived as being able to seek out materials and energy in the natural environment, in the same way single celled organisms do. The Box treats this as a given, bypassing the complexities that now seem to stand in the way of making this easy to achieve.
On the other hand, The Box explores ideas on self-perceptions of identity that are still under early, active debate. It raises questions of ethical conduct toward self-aware forms of digital-electronics sentience in which Terasem Movement, Inc. is currently breaking new ground (visit http://www.terasemcentral.org/ for more about that). In areas like this, The Box is still at the edge of present day enigmas.
Perhaps this is enough of a synopsis for now. We have a few more thoughts in the Postscript and Bottom Line sections, at the very end.
Now, let’s get on with those LifeQuest stories from the 1980’s.
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Fred & Linda Chamberlain
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