Desperate Search at Sea for Microsoft Researcher
A Turing award-winning scientist who leads Microsoft Research's eScience Group, and whose seemingly spontaneous innovations have touched nearly every aspect of technology, including financial databases, astronomy, and geography in a career that spans four decades, remains missing at sea since having signaled home from his sailboat last Sunday night.
US Coast Guard search vessels and aircraft have thus far been unable to locate any trace of the 40-foot craft belonging to Jim Gray, age 63, who set out alone for the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco on a personal mission to scatter his mother's ashes.
In a 2000 research paper co-authored with Gordon Bell, Gray explored the notion of utilizing digital technology within reach of development within the coming decades, to extend certain facets of one's own life and experiences through digital communication - in effect, leaving behind digital remnants of oneself after death.
Gray is described as a capable swimmer who was very safety conscious, and who equipped his ship with only the optimum safety and communications equipment, although no signals have been picked up from his boat, Tenacious, since late Sunday. A sailing Web site is tracking the latest information, showing maps of the search region, along with recent photos of Gray and his boat, and enlisting other sailors' help in the search effort.
In the preamble to their paper for Microsoft Research, Gray and Bell wrote, "Digital immortality, like ordinary immortality, is a continuum from enduring fame at one end to endless experience and learning at the other, stopping just short of endless life. Preserving and transmitting your ideas is one-way immortality: allowing communication with the future. Endless experience and learning is two-way immortality: allowing 'you,' or at least part of you, to communicate with the future in the sense that artifact continues to learn and evolve. Current technology can extend corporal life for a few decades. Both one-way and two-way immortality require part of a person to be converted to information (cyberized), and stored in a more durable media. We believe that two-way immortality where one's experiences are digitally preserved, and which then take on a life of their own will be possible within this century."
It is way too early to be discussing immortality with respect to Jim Gray; he has some decades of work left to do. BetaNews extends its hopes and prayers to Gray and his family for a safe and quick recovery.