Alcor Member Profile: Keith Lofstrom

Alcor Member Profile
From Cryonics November-December 2012

By Chana Phaedra

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Keith Lofstrom


Keith Lofstrom intends to be around for a very, very, very, VERY long time. It is this hope — frequently treated as an assumption — that occupies his mind and shapes his every day endeavors. And with such little time to spare under the current circumstances, Keith’s endeavors are plentiful, varied, and carried out with passionate enthusiasm and an all-consuming haste.

Keith Lofstrom
Keith on a visit to the Nobel museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

“I am primarily a futurist, as in ‘the way to predict the future is to invent it,’ Alan Kay, sense,” Keith explains. “If a cryonicist wants to live millennia because a few decades are too short to accomplish audacious goals, then immortality is necessary for such accomplishments. One person can build a cathedral, an ocean liner, or an interstellar spaceship, given enough time.”

Motivated by a “checklist of things I worry about,” Keith was able to breathe a small sigh of relief upon signing up with Alcor in 1992. “Checking cryonics off the list allowed me to quit worrying about doing what I can to make it to the future,” he says. This gave him the freedom to turn his attention to those items most important to him — like how to build the infrastructure to support humanity into the far distant future.

A project Keith calls Server Sky represents his most ambitious attempt to get some of that infrastructure in place as soon as possible. Server Sky is an engineering proposal to place billions of micron-thin satellites into medium orbit around the earth, forming a massive computation and communication network powered by a tiny fraction of the 384 trillion terawatts the sun wastes on empty space [see Keith’s article below].

Intimately related to Server Sky is the Launch Loop [also discussed in Keith’s article below], a system proposed by Keith for launching objects into space orbit using a moving cable in a long tube attached to the Earth at two ends and suspended above the atmosphere in the middle. Launch loops gently accelerate large vehicles into Earth orbit or beyond electro-mechanically, inexpensively, without rockets.

If these ideas seem rather well thought-out, it’s because they are. With a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering at his disposal, as well as a life-long fascination with taking things apart and figuring out how they work, Keith is well-versed in working out ways to bring seemingly far-futuristic endeavors to ground in the here and now.

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953, Keith obtained his master’s degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1974. He designed analog and digital integrated circuits for Tektronix from 1972 to 1991 and helped found I-Cube Design Systems, producing crossbar routers for the early internet. He has consulted for other startups as well, producing sound chips for toy trains, video imaging chips for projection displays, precision timing circuits for testers, and analog test standards. Currently, Keith is running another startup, Siidtech, which licenses integrated circuit identification technology.

An avid consumer of science fiction throughout life, he credits Arthur C. Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise with giving him “a lot of ideas about what is and is not feasible.” An unguarded approach to idea generation is characteristic of Keith’s general style. “One of the reasons I’m interested in cryonics,” he explains, “is that it allows us to start looking at any problem from a different perspective. If you look at the brain from the perspective of cryonics, for example, you will learn more about neurology that can be beneficial to fields other than cryonics. Even if cryonics comes to bust, if we learn enough about neurology we may still come to immortality in another way.”

Another reason Keith dreams of successful resuscitation from cryopreservation is more personal. “I have raging tinnitus,” he explains. “Continuous loud noise 24/7, exacerbated when listening to friends in loud places and straining to hear.” He emphasizes that, though it does not exist today, the technology required to eliminate his tinnitus, such as “serious brain rewiring or even robotic molecular-scale reconstruction of cochlear mechanisms,” are the same kinds of technologies needed to resuscitate a cryopreserved brain.

“If I am cryopreserved, I expect I will be reanimated with fully functional hearing, and I will hear silence for the first time in my life, and be able to listen to my friends as easily as they can listen to me. My blind or mobility restricted friends will be able to share other activities with me. [This is] something to look forward to.”

Keith describes himself as a “voracious reader with interests in space, physics, business, medicine, history, futurism, and computation.” He is active in Portland’s linux and open source community and hosts dirvish.org for disk-to-disk backups. Physically, he enjoys walking and hiking for cardiovascular health and, when weather permits, is currently rebuilding a 600 square-foot greenhouse on 2/3 of an acre of soon-to-be garden and orchard and freerange-chicken habitat.

Keith Lofstrom
Keith Lofstrom hiking in the red rock near Sedona, Arizona.

Keith Lofstrom
Investigating a mysterious tree fungus discovered during the Sedona hike.

And though Keith’s primary pursuits involve electronic and mechanical puzzles, that doesn’t stop him from thinking about the biological problems at hand. “Right now, I think the biggest challenge in cryonics is the sheer magnitude of the task of preserving 1015 synapses with nanometer precision over a wide temperature change,” he says. “Not everyone has been preserved well enough and it may take some extra special ‘magic’ to get them back. And it’s quite likely that we won’t be able to.”

Unsurprisingly, Keith feels that improvements in instrumentation are central to moving cryonics forward. Specifically, he thinks the ability to measure and quantify changes in nanostructure during cryopreservation may be essential to optimal preservation of neural structure.

“And if you are preserved well, then what?” he asks. “Let’s say you’re back [from cryopreservation], you’re in some kind of substrate and you want to live a very, very long time. Brains do not have the capacity for infinite accumulation of experience. A frozen brain now might be part of your lifeboat to get there, but the you of 10,000 years later is not going to be the same.”

In the end, Keith is happy to leave the details of cryonics to those scientists and activists who have made it their top priority. That he can contribute to the ultimate goal of facilitating indefinite lifespan in a very different future by focusing on fields outside of cryonics puts him at ease.

“I want to encourage others to enthusiastically pursue their own invention of the future, secure in the knowledge that my corner of the canvas is getting painted as well,” he states. [Some people] make cryonics #1, and rightly so. It must be done and [they] are good at it. What makes us a powerful force is not our popularity or shared focus, but that we cover so much territory. ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’ — and sisters!”

Keith Lofstrom
Keith at Tennyson Downs, on the south end of the Isle of Wight in the UK.


Technologies for an Immortal World

By Keith Lofstrom

We will not be immortal if our world isn’t. Immortalists will not be welcome on a damaged, starving Earth, displacing the limited opportunities for children. We must earn our place in the future with long term vision and the development of technologies that will support us for a very long time. The natural world is necessary to our survival, and only living, active immortalists will have a deep understanding of how nature changes over time, and the self-interested motivation to enhance or preserve it for the long term.

My ambitious goal for the surface of our planet — 10 billion people, 10 kilowatts each, for 5 billion years. That is not possible without massive technological improvement. In 5 billion years, the sun will overheat, a dozen nearby stars will supernova, world-killing impactors will target the Earth, the tectonic plates will lock and the continents will erode away. We will need centuries to develop the tools to thrive in spite of threats and resource depletion — and short term profitability to compete in a short term world.

The keys will be energy and computation. The sun wastes 384 trillion terawatts on empty space. Moving energy use into space allows nearly unbounded growth. Computation transports easily, requiring neither material feedstock nor waste disposal, just electricity and a heat sink. Within 10,000 kilometers of the equator (100 millisecond “ping time”) is an additional one million terawatts of continuous sunlight, ten times what nature uses.

Server Sky proposes to capture some of that power, using arrays of millions of 50 micron thick dinner plate sized satellites, each weighing 3 grams and creating 5 watts of power for computation and communication. Thinsats maneuver with light pressure, are highly radiation resistant, and form into large phased arrays capable of focusing microwave data beams on small ground spots. Terrestrial data centers use nearly 3% of US base load electricity, are growing rapidly in spite of efficiency improvements, and require expensive and vulnerable infrastructure. Locating new data centers in space will be highly profitable, especially for serving rapidly growing markets in the developing world. Server Sky technology can eventually be developed into space solar power, sending electricity as microwaves to receivers on Earth, powering civilization without carbon fuel, or the environmental devastation of (misnamed) “green” energy.

If thinsats are launched by the trillions, the pollution and expense of rockets will be replaced by low cost electrically powered launch systems such as the launch loop. The launch loop is a dynamic structure, magnetically supported by the centrifugal acceleration of an iron rotor moving at 14 kilometers per second inside a vacuum containment. Launch power is removed from the rotor about 50% efficiently, so the 30 megajoules needed to launch a kilogram into orbit can be supplied with a dollar’s worth of electricity. A minimum-sized launch loop can launch millions of tons into orbit per year. There is no existing market for that much launch, but Server Sky can provide one.

Launch Loop

Launch loop technologies are also excellent for moving and storing energy, at much higher efficiencies and energy densities than electrical transmission lines. Rotor ring power loops can shift terawatts of power over 12 hour cycles, or between continents. Storing far more energy than batteries or flywheels, and cheaper and more market-responsive than pumped storage, power loops will aid the transition to a carbon-free all-electric energy economy.

Immortalists are rational optimists — we know the future will be great because that is what we choose to build. With our entrepreneurial and technological skills and a lot of hard work, we will create a future which will welcome us. Even with all these capabilities, the finite Earth cannot support a perpetually expanding human population (either from births or the elimination of death), but a vast and mostly lifeless universe has plenty of room for us, especially if the immortals guide the expansion of life into space.

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