X-Message-Number: 14465 From: Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 13:36:29 EDT Subject: Re: those pesky ET's, Kennita at Worldcon, and Life Extension...and web site! Hello everyone! Mike Donahue writing here.. It seems to me that the reason that there's no other intelligent life out there we can perceive is that they've progressed beyond our state and turned some invisible corner that we can't see yet... whether its uploading or some realm of quantum reality we can't imagine just yet... otherwise, I wanted to comment on two excellent panels at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago... Kennita's panel on cryonics was well attended, and with a sense of excitement and not that unease of skepticism that used to be so common... Many of the attendees asked particular questions about Cryonics procedures, and were very interested in the possibilities. Good job, Kennita! woo hoo! Also, there was a panel on Life Extension that Ben Bova and Dr. Michael Fossel were on. Dr. Fossel had never been to an SF con before. One particularly funny, but telling moment was when a very excited fellow came up and said that they would be able to cure various forms of mental illness with gene therapy etc... Dr. Fossel kind of looked around the room at large and the fans and commented, "Well, sometimes its not a hardware problem, sometimes its a software problem...!" LOL... Well, certainly there's a few sofware problems with our modern society... like the belief we have to die and that its a natural and good thing! Dr. Fossel wrote a book titled "Reversing Human Aging", and is apparently readying a revised edition for publication. He kinda predicts a massive social upheaval and strife when we learn to regenerate the aged... I spoke with him briefly after the panel, and asked him, "Don't you think everything will just get better? I mean, sure, people will have to give up the idea of direct inheritance, and we'll have to let go of a few more fears and hatreds, but don't you think everything will just be easier and better?" He kinda stopped and didn't quite know what to say... But then he kinda nodded a bit. It was VERY encouraging to see SO MANY people at both of these panels. Even SF fans used to shun this sort of thing as crackpot theorizing that made them look bad... so there's always hope. And the last thing, I found a WAY COOL website... If you all know of it, I'm the last to hear of it... www.grg.org. Its a gerontology research Group site with all sorts of links and info on the very latest developments in anti-aging research. Apparently, some company has already tested the new life extending anti-oxidants that were used on the worms on mice, and will publish their findings by the end of the year. Who know? Maybe that will be the start of true anti-aging therapies- if the anti-oxidants work on the mice as well as they worked on the worms! See you all in the third- and fourth millenniums! Mike Donahue Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14465