Greenhill 2009

1/8 Arnav

Perms
THE 1AC IS A SLOW EXPERIMENT; EVEN IF IT FAILS TO LIBERATE US, IT
IS BETTER THAN THE NEGATIVES FAST REJECTION AND OVERDOSE,
WHICH LEADS TO COLLAPSE AND DEATH
Gilles Deleuze, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris; and Felix Guattari, psychoanalyst,
1987, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 160-161
You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small
supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the
circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep
small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality.
Mimic the strata. You dont reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. That
is why we encountered the paradox of those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they
had emptied themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently
and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism. There are, in fact,
several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but
nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always
swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too
violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the
plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying
stratifiedorganized, signified, subjectedis not the worst that can happen; the worst that can
happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on
us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the
opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of
deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and
there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all
times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight,
causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO.
Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole diagram, as opposed to still signifying and subjective
programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the place
where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within which we are held;
gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there
that the BwO reveals itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of
intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into
other collective machines. Castaneda describes a long process of experimentation (it makes little
difference whether it is with peyote or other things): let us recall for the moment how the Indian forces
him first to find a place, already a difficult operation, then to find allies, and then gradually to give
up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment lines of experimentation,
becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For the BwO is all of that: necessarily a Place,
necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools,
people, powers, and fragments of all of these; for it is not my body without organs, instead the me
(moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form, crossing thresholds).

Greenhill 2009
2/8 Arnav

Alternative Increases Oppression

IN PRACTICE THEIR ALTERNATIVE WILL FURTHER TYRANNICAL
CONTROL AND GENOCIDE
Richard Barbrook, coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster,
8/27/1998, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9808/msg00091.html, accessed 3/3/03
Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically joined this attack against the concept of historical progress. For them, the 'deterritorialisation' of urban society was the solution to the
contradiction between participatory democracy and revolutionary elitism haunting the New Left. If the centralised city could be broken down into 'molecular rhizomes', direct
democracy and the gift economy would reappear as people formed themselves into small nomadic bands. According to Deleuze and Guattari, anarcho-communism was not the 'end
of history': the material result of a long epoch of social development. On the contrary, the liberation of desire from semiotic oppression was a perpetual promise: an ethical stance
which could be equally lived by nomads in ancient times or social movements in the present. With enough intensity of effort, anyone could overcome their hierarchical brainwashing to

rhetoric of unlimited freedom contained

a deep desire for ideological control by the New Left vanguard. While the nomadic fantasies of A Thousand Plateaus
were being composed, one revolutionary movement actually did carry out Deleuze and Guattari's dream of destroying
the city. Led by a vanguard of Paris-educated intellectuals, the Khmer Rouge overthrew an oppressive regime
installed by the Americans. Rejecting the 'grand narrative' of economic progress, Pol Pot and his organisation instead tried to
construct a rural utopia. However, when the economy subsequently imploded, the regime embarked on ever more
ferocious purges until the country was rescued by an invasion by neighbouring Vietnam. Deleuze and Guattari had claimed that the
destruction of the city would create direct democracy and libidinal ecstasy. Instead, the application of
such anti-modernism in practice resulted in tyranny and genocide. The 'line of flight' from Stalin had led to Pol Pot.
become a fully-liberated individual: the holy fool.<21> Yet, as the experience of Frequence Libre proved, this

DELEUZE AND GUATTARI'S BELIEF IN TRANSFORMATION THROUGH

FREEDOM FROM DIALECTICAL OPPOSITION FAILS THE FIGURES AND
INSTITUTIONS WHICH COULD CREATE THIS FREEDOM ARE
REAPPROPRIATED BY CONTEMPORARY OPPOSITIONAL POLITICS,
FORECLOSING EXITS FROM THE EXISTING POLITICAL SYSTEM
Mann, Prof of English at Pomona, 95 (Paul, Stupid Undergrounds, PostModern Culture 5:3, Project MUSE)
Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging work cannot protect
itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becoming-ruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the
stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and
rerouted by the very people who would take them most seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground's critical
apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth spaces, war-machines, n - 1s, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn about like tattoos on the stupid body

The nomad is already succumbing to the rousseauism and orientalism that were always
invested in his figure; whatever Deleuze and Guattari intended for him, he is reduced to being a
romantic outlaw, to a position opposite the State, in the sort of dialectical operation Deleuze most
despised. And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid subterranean figure. It is perhaps true that
Deleuze and Guattari did not adequately protect their thought from this dialectical reconfiguration (one is
reminded of Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation of him as a proper Catholic), but no vigilance would
have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is evidence that, in real time, virtual
models and maps close off the very exits they indicate. The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of
flight, smooth spaces, BwOs, etc., are at one and the same time theoretical-political devices of the
highest critical order and merely fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for writing, and thus
perhaps an instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the distinction between criticism and fantasy. In
without organs.

Deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or
less hegemonic formation, but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only had the proverbial
nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid,
colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g., "cyberspace"). What is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the
model but the fantastic possibility of nonlinear passage, of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. In the strictest sense, stupid
philosophy. Nomad thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital (the political philosophy of
the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise). It is this very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see oneself
projected past the frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped,
entirely reterritorialized in advance. To pursue nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic
and no project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself. It is not yet time to abandon work that so deeply
challenges our intellectual habits as does that of Deleuze and Guattari, and yet, before it has even been comprehended, in the very process of its comprehension, its fate seems
secure. One pursues it and knows that the pursuit will prove futile; that every application of these new topologies will only serve to render them more pointless. The stupid optimism of
every work that takes up these figures is, by itself, the means of that futility and that immanent obsolescence. One must pursue it still.

Greenhill 2009
3/8 Arnav

Deleuze Bad (General)

DELEUZIAN PERSPECTIVISM COLLAPSES INTO NEOCONSERVATIVE
SUPPORT FOR THE STATUS QUO BECAUSE IT DOESNT PROVIDE A
SOLID POINT OF CRITICISM OF OPPRESSION
Zerzan no date
[John, primitivist, The catastrophe of postmodernism, the Athenaeum Reading Room, www.evansexperimentalism.freewebspace.com/zerzan01.htm, acc 1-15-05]
The dilemma of postmodernism is this: how can the status and validity of its theoretical
approaches be ascertained if neither truth nor foundations for knowledge are admitted? If
we remove the possibility of rational foundations or standards, on what basis can we
operate? How can we understand what the society is that we oppose, let alone come to
share such an understanding? Foucault's insistence on a Nietzschean perspectivism
translates into the irreducible pluralism of interpretation. He relativized knowledge and truth
only insofar as these notions attach to thought-systems other than his own, however. When
pressed on this point, Foucault admitted to being incapable of rationally justifying his own
opinions. Thus the liberal Habermas claims that postmodern thinkers like Foucault,
Deleuze, and Lyotard are `neoconservative' for offering no consistent argumentation to
move in one social direction rather than another. The pm embrace of relativism (or
`pluralism') also means there is nothing to prevent the perspective of one social tendency
from including a claim for the right to dominate another, in the absence of the possibility of
determining standards.

Greenhill 2009
4/8 Arnav

D & G Exclude Women

D & G EXCLUDE WOMEN
Alice Jardine, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, 1984,
http://substance.arts.uwo.ca/44/04jard44.html, accessed 2/21/03
"sexuality itself" which is the
ultimate, uncontrollable becoming, when it can manage to escape immediate Oedipalization. ("Sexuality
passes through the becoming-woman of /the/ man and the becoming-animal of the human" [MP, p. 341].) But also because, as "introductory power,"
"Woman" is both the closest to the category of "Man" as majority, and yet she remains a distinct
minority. D + G explain that the notions of majority and minority here should not be opposed in any purely quantitative way: "Let us suppose that the constant or standard is
Why then do D + G privilege the word woman? First, as they explain through a series of unanalyzed stereotypes, because it is

Manany white-male-adult-city-dweller-speaking a standard language-European-heterosexual (the Ulysses of Joyce or of Ezra Pound). It is obvious that "the Man" has the majority,
even if he is less numerous than the mosquitoes, children, Blacks, peasants, homosexuals . . . etc." (MP, p. 133). The problem is not to gain, or accede to, the majority, but to become
a minority; and this is particularly crucial for women if they desire to remain radical, creative, without simply becoming (a) Man: The only becoming is a minority one. Women,
regardless of their number, are a minority, definable as a state or sub-set; but they only create by rendering possible a becoming, of which they do not have the ownership, into which
they themselves must enter, a becoming-woman which concerns all of mankind, men and women included. (MP, p. 134) The woman who does not enter into the "becoming woman"
remains a Man, remains "molar," just like men: Woman as a molar entity must become woman, so that man as well may become one or is then able to become one. It is certainly
indispensable that women engage in molar politics, in terms of a conquest which they conduct from their organization, from their own history, from their own subjectivity: "We as
women . . ." then appears as the subject of the enunciation. But it is dangerous to fall back upon such a subject, which cannot function without drying up a spring or stopping a flood.
The Song of life is often struck up by the driest women, animated by resentment, by the desire for power and by cold mothering.... (MP, p. 339) That is, woman (with her obligatory
connotations: "transparent force, innocence, speed," [MP, p. 354] is what Man (both men and women: "virility, gravity," [MP, p. 354]) must become. There must be no "becoming man"
because he is always already a majority. "In a certain way, it's always 'man' who is the subject of a becoming.... A woman has to become woman, but in a becoming-woman of all of

Man is always the subject of any becoming, even if "he" is a woman. A woman who
is not a "woman-become" is a Manand a subject to that extent and to that extent only. Woman is never a
subject but a limita border of and for Manthe "becoming woman" is l'avenir de l'homme tout entierthe future of all
Mankind. For D + G, She is what the entire world must become if Man men and womenis truly to
disappear. But to the extent that women must "become woman" first (in order for men, in D + G's words, to
"follow her example"), might that not mean that she must also be the first to disappear? Is it not possible that the process
of "becoming woman" is but a new variation of an old allegory for the process of women becoming
obsolete? There would remain only her simulacrum: a female figure caught in a whirling sea of male configurations. A
silent, mutable, head-less, desire-less, spatial surface necessary only for His metamorphosis? Physicists
mankind" (MP, p. 357). That is,

say: Holes are not the absence of particles, but particles going faster than light. Flying anuses, rapid vaginas, there is no castration. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux
Most important theorists have a repertory of exemplary fictions, fictions that they call upon frequently to interact with their specific theories in creative if predictable ways. Between the
scene of Lacanian psychoanalysis and that of Lol V. Stein's ravishing, for example, the privileged rapport is one of repetition: for Lacan, Marguerite Duras understood and repeated
his teachings without him.19 Or, between the invagination of Derrida's ecriture and that of the narrator in Maurice Blanchot's L'Arret de mort, what is privileged is the process of mime:
for Derrida, Blanchot understood his writings with him, inseparably. 20 D + G's exemplary fiction writers include Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, Pierre Klossowski, and Michel Tournier
to mention only a few. What all of these writers' texts share with those of D + G is the surface quality of their figures: the privileged modality of relationship between the configurations
of Deleuzian becoming and those of fiction is allegory. This is made most clear through Deleuze's essay on Tournier's 1967 novel, Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique. 21 There it is
no longer a question of whether Duras's Lol, as hysterical body, is or is not a subject of narrative; of whether Blanchot's J. and N., as organs of a hysterical text, are or are not simply
new angles for modernity. For here it is a question of Speranza, a true Body-without-Organs: a woman who is not a woman but a female figure (an island), a space to be unfolded,
molded, into new configurations for the metamorphosis of Man. In t, we first stumble across Robinson just after he has been shipwrecked on his island. Finding himself completely
alone, the Only and perhaps Last Man on this island, he first succumbs to depression, evasion, infantile panicleaving himself exposed, helpless. For Deleuze, this signals Man's
first steps outside of intersubjectivity: "What happens when others are lacking in the structure of the world? There only reigns the brutal opposition of the sun and the earth, of an
insupportable light and an obscure abyss . . ." (LS, p. 355). To avoid loss of self, however, this twentieth-century Robinson first tries the old solutions. He creates for himself a task: he
spends months, perhaps years, perhaps even decadesthe length of time does not matterbuilding a new boat-structure in which he might escape. But once the vessel is
completed, it is too large, too heavy, and too cumbersome for him to push to the sea towards freedom. Robinson succumbs, once again, to the deepest depressionand, indeed,
abjection: He kept eating, his nose to the ground, unspeakable things. He went underneath himself and rarely missed rolling in the soft warmth of his own excrement.... He moved
about less and less, and his brief movements always brought him back to the wallow. There he kept losing his body and delivering himself of its weight in the hot and humid
surroundings of the mud, while the noxious emanations of the stagnating waters clouded his mind. (VLP, p. 38) Haunted by his lost sister (the one who died young), his mother
(sometimes cold but always self-sacrificing), his wife (left behind in old England), Robinson-the-Man has a brush with what the Man calls insanity. And so, as a Man, Robinson
decides that he must henceforth master both himself and the island if he is to survive. He sets about building a kingdom: he creates a calendar; he invents a way to write; he builds a
house, cultivates the land. He names the island Speranza and realizes that now, in time and mastery, she is his slave. Woman is, therefore, no longer absent from Man's adventures,
even though he remains outside of inter-subjectivity: Besides, it seemed to him, when looking a certain way at the map of the island which he had sketched approximately, that it
could represent the profile of a headless female body, a woman, yes, seated with her legs folded under her, in a posture within which it would have been impossible to sort out what
there was of submission, of fear, or of simple abandonment. This idea crossed his mind, then it left him. It would come back. (VLP, p. 46)22 In spite of various humiliations,
depressions, and disappointments, Robinson continues his mastery over Speranza. A decisive step is the introduction of time into this one-Man kingdom with a kind of primitive clock.
In the "future," Robinson succumbs to his former states of abjection within the space of Speranza only when that clock of progress stops. Slowly, however, and in spite of his frenzied,
productive activity, Robinson realizes that his relationship with "himself" is changing. His "self," in fact, can no longer exist in a world without the Other. Robinson is ready to lose his
Self, his Manhood: "Who I? The question is far from being pointless. It isn't even insoluble. Because if it's not him, it must be Speranza. There is from here on a flying I which will
sometimes alight on the man, sometimes on the island, and which makes of me, in turn, one or the other" (VLP, pp. 88-89).

Greenhill 2009
5/8 Arnav

A2 Life is Carbon
THE AFF IS WRONG THE HUMN BODY ISNT LIMITED TO CARBON, BUT
IS SILICONIC IN THE MACHINIC WAY IT EMERGES FROM
INTERSUBJECTIVE FLOWS LIKE COMMUNICATION AND CAPITAL,
INDICATING MEANING TO LIFE BEYOND THE MATTER THAT COMPOSES
US
Beddoes no date
[Diane J., Material gadget, Breeding Demons: A critical enquiry into the relationship
between Kant and Deleuze with specific reference to women, Transmat,
www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Beddoes/BD7s4.htm, acc 1-15-05]
Deleuze notes that biologists have often questioned why life is effected through carbon,
rather than through silicon, and goes on to say that la vie des machines modernes passe
par le silicium (the life of modern machines runs through silicon).[377] This is where
becoming-women moves, where money released from capital moves, where life becomes
non-organic, nature becomes a thinking machine, infinities of tiny demons leap, effecting a
co-ordinated and fluid movement, eroding the statues of power, the historical . Becomingwoman moves towards becoming-imperceptible, but women do not dissolve or disappear in
that movement: it is rather than life itself becomes mobile, because it is not longer in the
womb nor arranged in the organisms which emerge from them, but instead becomes a
movement, a cycle that turns on its hinges. Humans are no longer the privileged class, but
the surrogate reproductive machinery of a machinic phylum which is passing across into a
different base, in a movement which effects the conjunction of teleology and mechanism,
and transforming the nature of intelligence.

HUMAN IDENTITY IS MORE THAN CARBON ITS CODED BY

COMMUNICATION FLOWS, THAT RECOGNITION IS NECESSARY TO
RESIST CAPITALIST ALIENATION
Brassier 2001
[Ray, Doctoral candidate at University of Warwick, Alien Theory: The Decline of
Materialism in the Name of Matter, Doctoral Thesis, April, www.cinestatic.com/transmat/Brassier/ALIENTHEORY.pdf, acc 1-14-05//uwyo]
Yet it is a failure which transcendental scepticism may yet help
circumvent through the Alien-subjects unilateralising force-(of)-thought; an
intrinsically sceptical force which constitutes an instance of a priori cognitive
resistance to those epistemic norms and informational codes via which a
triumphant World-Capitalism maintains the structural isomorphy between
material power and informational force, thereby ensuring its quasitranscendental
dominion over all cognitive experience. A transcendental
scepticism agrees with eliminative naturalism: human beings are simply carbonbased
information processing machines. But it also recognises the necessity of
cross-pollinating that assessment born of evolutionary reductionism with
transcendental insight; an insight which consists in radicalising and generalising
Marxs identification of the material infrastructure as the ultimate determinant
for the ideological superstructure315: World-Capitalism is now the global
megamachine determining a priori the cognitive parameters within which the
phenomenological micromachinery of organically individuated sapience
operates. By acknowledging the fact that political intervention can no longer

afford to ignore this insight; by recognising that empirical agency alone is

incapable of circumventing capitals all-encompassing universality as WorldCapitalism, transcendental scepticism constitutes an instance of a priori
political resistance.

Greenhill 2009
6/8 Arnav

A2 Death Doesnt Destroy Being: 2AC (1/2)

FIRST, EVEN IF DEATH DOESNT KILL BEING, IT DOES ANNIHILATE
CONSCIOUSNESSES THAT ARE COMPOSED OF PRECISE
COMBINATIONS OF ENERGY AND MATTER, MEANING THAT DEATH
EXTINGUISHES THOUGHT PROCESSES THAT PEOPLE ARE ATTACHED
TO, MEANING THAT FORCED DEATH IS VIOLENT AND UNDESIRABLE
SECOND, THIS IGNORES THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION IN CREATING
HUMAN IDENTITY. WERE MORE THAN THE MATTER OF OUR PARTS,
BUT CREATE MEANING THROUGH COMMUNICATIVE PROCESSES,
SOMETHING DESTROYED BY DEATH
THIRD, CARBON ATOMS ARENT THE KEY COMPONENT OF LIFE,
COMPLEX INFORMATION PROCESSING IS, MEANING THAT DEATH
CAUSES ANNIHILATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Tipler 94
[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The Physics of
Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New York:
Doubleday, 1994, 124-5//uwyo-ajl]
IN ORDER TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER LIFE can continue to exist forever, I shall need to
define "life" in physics language. I claim that a "living being" is any entity which codes
information (in the physics sense of this word) with the information coded being preserved
by natural selection. Thus "life" is a form of information processing, and the human mindand the human soul-is a very complex computer program. Specifically, a "person" is defined
to be a computer program which can pass the Turing test, which was discussed in Chapter
II.
This definition of "life" is quite different from what the average person-and the average
biologist-would think of as "life." In the traditional definition, life is a complex process based
on the chemistry of the carbon atom. However, even supporters of the traditional definition
admit that the key words are "complex process" and not "carbon atom." Although the
entities everyone agrees are "alive" happen to be based on carbon chemistry, there is no
reason to believe that analogous processes cannot be based on other systems. In fact, the
British biochemist A. G. Cairns-Smith! has suggested that the first living beings--':our
ultim:ate ancestors-were based on metallic crystals, not carbon. If this is true, then if we
insist that living beings must be based on carbon chemistry, we would be forced to conclude
that our ultimate ancestors were not alive. In Cairns-Smith's theory, our ultimate ancestors
were self-replicating patterns of defects in the metallic crystals. Over time, the pattern
persisted, but was transferred to another substrate: carbon molecules. What is important is
not the substrate but the pattern, and the pattern is another name for information.
But life of course is not a static pattern. Rather, it is a dynamic pattern that persists
overtime. It is thus a process. But not all processes are alive. The key feature of the "living"
patterns is that their persistence is due to a feedback with their environment: the information
coded in the pattern continually varies, but the variation is constrained to a narrow range by
this feedback. Thus life is, as I stated, information preserved by natural selection.

Greenhill 2009
7/8 Arnav

A2 Death Doesnt Destroy Being: 2AC (2/2)

FOURTH, EVEN IF THERE ARE OTHER POSSIBILTIES AFTER DEATH, THE
IDENTITIES THAT WERE ATTACHED TO WILL BE EXTINGUISHED
BECAUSE CONSCIOUSNESS COMES FROM INFORMATION
PROCESSSING THAT REQUIRES PARTICULAR SEQUENCES OF
QUANTUM STATES TO OCCUR
Tipler 94
[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The Physics of
Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New York:
Doubleday, 1994, 221-3//uwyo-ajl]
The Bekenstein Bound follows from the basic postulates of quantum theory combined with
the further assumptions that (1) the system is bounded in energy, and (2) the system is
bounded, or localized, in space. A rigorous proof of the Bekenstein Bound would require
quantum field theory, but it is easy to describe in outline why quantum mechanics leads to
such a bound on the information coded in a bounded region. In essence, the Bekenstein
Bound is a manifestation of the uncertainty principle. Recall that the uncertainty principle
tells us that there is a limit to the precision with which we can measure the momentum of a
particle and its position. More precisely, the uncertainty principle says that the location of a
point in phase space-a concept I defined in Chapter III-cannot be defined more closely thal1
Planck's constant h. Since a system's state is defined by where it is located in phase space,
this means that the number of possible states is less than or equal to the size of the phase
space region the system could be in, divided by the size of the minimum phase space size,
Planck's constant. (I've given a mathematical expression of this argument in the Appendix
for Scientists.) This state counting procedure, based on there being an absolute minimum
size h to a phase space interval, is an absolutely essential method of quantum statistical
mechanics. We have already used it in Chapter III to prove the almost periodicity of a
bounded quantum system. It is confirmed by the thousands of experiments which have
been based on this counting method.9 In high energy particle physics, any calculation of the
"cross section" requires counting the possible number of particle initial and final states, and
the above state counting method is used.lO The cross section, which is the measure of how
many particles scatter in a particular direction when they collide in particle accelerators, is
the basic quantity tested in particle physics. The Bekenstein Bound on the number of
possible states is thus confirmed by the correctness of the calculated cross sections. In
summary, the Bekenstein Bound on the total information that can be coded in a region is an
absolute solid conclusion of modern physics, a result as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.
One can also use the Bekenstein Bound to deduce an upper bound to the rate of
information processing. The time for light to cross a sphere of a given diameter is equal to
the diameter of the sphere divided by the speed of light. Since a state inside the sphere
cannot completely change until a signal has time to travel trom one side to the other, the
rate of information processing is bounded above by the above Bekenstein Bound divided by
this time interval. Putting in the numbers (details in the Appendix for Scientists), we
calculate that the rate of state change is less than or equal to 4 X 1051 bits per second,
multiplied by the mass of the system in kilograms. That is, the rate of information processing
possible for a system depends only on the mass of the system, not on its spatial size or on
any other variable. So a human being of mass 100 kilograms cannot change state more
rapidly than about 4 X 1053 times per second. This number is of course enormous-and in
fact a human will probably change state much, much more slowly than this-but it's finite.

Greenhill 2009
8/8 Arnav

A2 Life is Meaningless Because the Sun Will

Go Out: 2AC
FIRST, THERES NO WARRANT FOR WHY THE DEATH OF OUR PLANET IN
BILLIONS OF YEARS MAKES LIFE THAT EXIST NOW MEANINGLESS.
EACH INDIVIDUALS CREATES CONTINGENT VALUE FOR THEIR LIFE
THROUGH COMMUNICATION AS DEMONSTRATED BY THE HABERMAS
EVIDENCE AND TO FORCE DEATH UPON THEM BECAUSE OF AN EVENT
IN THE UNFATHOMABLE FUTURE IS REPUGNANT
SECOND, HUMANITY WILL ADAPT TO THE DESTRUCTION OF ITS
HABITAT BY INEVITABLY PROGRESSING TO A TYPE III CIVILIZATION
Kaku 95
[Michio, Prof. of theoretical physics at the City College, NY, Hyperspace: A Scientific
Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension. New York:
Ancor Books, March, 281//uwyo-ajl]
Taking the larger view of the development of civilization, Dyson also believes that, at the
current rate of development, we may attain Type I status within a few centuries. He does not
believe that making the transition between various types of civilizations will be very difficult.
He estimates that the difference in size and power separating the various types of
civilizations is roughly a factor of 10 billion. Although this may seem like a large nuimber, a
civilization growing at the sluggish rate of 1 percent per year can expect to make the
transition between the various civilizations within 2,500 years. Thus it is almost guaranteed
that a civilization can steadily progress toward Type III status.

THIRD, THIS OUTWEIGHS ALL OTHER ARGUMENTS BECAUSE 20 TH

CENTURY GENOCIDE DEMONSTRATES THE SHEER HORROR OF
EXTERMINATING LIFE
Tipler 94
[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The Physics of
Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New York:
Doubleday, 1994, 11-12//uwyo-ajl]
I shall obtain a hold on this future reality by focusing attention on the physics relevant to the
existence and behavior of life in the far future. I shall provide a physical foundation for
eschatology-the study of the ultimate future--by making the physical assumption that the
universe must be capable of sustaining life indefinitely; that is, for infinite time as
experienced by life existing in the physical universe. All physical scientists should take this
assumption seriously because we have to have some theory for the future of the physical
universe--since it unquestionably exists-and this is the most beautiful physical postulate:
that total death is not inevitable. All other theories of the future necessarily postulate the
ultimate extinction of everything we could possibly care about. I once visited a Nazi death
camp; there I was reinforced in my conviction that there is nothing uglier than extermination.
We physicists know that a beautiful postulate is more likely to be correct than an ugly one.
Why not adopt this Postulate of Eternal Life, at least as a working hypothesis? I shall show
in Chapter n that the universe is in fact capable of sustaining life at least another million
trillion years. Specifically, I shall demonstrate that it is technically feasible for life to expand
out from the Earth and engulf the entire universe, and that life must do so if it is to survive.