Re: (ReacTor) Five Books About Duplicating Human Beings

James Nicoll wrote:

>
Five Books About Duplicating Human Beings
>
For some reason, cloning or copying people never goes according to plan...
>
https://reactormag.com/five-books-about-duplicating-human-beings/

Stanislav Lem's take on the subject is in one of the Ijon Tichy stories
(The Fourteenth Voyage from The Star Diaries).

On one planet he visits, all inhabitants, and visitors at entry,
are entered into a backup system where their biological and
neurological data are incrementally written to some backing store
to allow them to be recloned from the latest snapshot should they
be killed by a meteorite.

Lem has also written a thematically related philosophical essay
where he discusses transporter cabins and reduces them to a cloning
cabin with integrated suicide function, thus explaining that the
transported person is just a clone, not the original.

(Of course, this was many years before the recent research on
quantum entanglement proved that perfect cloning - as opposed to
transportation (with the original being destroyed in the process)
- is not possible (at the quantum level).

Regards,
-is

--
A medium apple... weighs 182 grams, yields 95 kcal, and contains no
caffeine, thus making it unsuitable for sysadmins. - Brian Kantor