X-Message-Number: 15851
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 08:04:26 -0500
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: it's your friends who will revive you

Hi everyone!

A comment on what David King said in his message. It's hardly original
but still needs to be emphasized. Perhaps future publicity for cryonics
should emphasize the point more strongly.

David King raises the possibility that in the future, even if the means
to revive people exists and is well-known, only a few people will be
revived.

This problem assumes 2 things unlikely to be true. First, you would not
be revived by society in general, but by your cryonics society or its
descendant. Cryonics societies will play an important role not just in
freezing people but also in reviving them. Second, the need for cryonics
societies isn't going to disappear for a long long time. 

Why should your cryonics society bother to revive you? Because its
members expect to be someday preserved and know that the only way they
can promote revivals is to revive those former members whose revival has
become possible. (A cryonics society which failed to do this would 
quickly lose its living members and as many suspended members as possible).
Among other reasons why they will revive you is one simple fact: some 
of them will be your former friends, who will clearly want to revive
you (given that you provided the funds). Some may even be your relatives.
The fact that they may have lived for 300 years before your particular
revival becomes possible does not affect their interest in reviving 
you at all.

Moreover, even if its common now to think that cryonics is a purely
temporary issue, it cannot be a temporary issue. Sure, we may find means
to deal with whatever medical inabilities and conditions led to your
suspension, but that does not mean that we will learn to deal with
ALL such medical conditions. The problem here is that as we  go on
into the future, we'll discover (or even invent) NEW conditions which
leave you temporarily unfixable. Anyone who refuses suspension basically
gives up one major way we might live for a very long time: even without
aging, we'll still get sick and require suspension. Sure, we will get
sick less often, and require suspension less often, but we'll still be
subject to dangers. And those dangers won't be easily describable 
right now, any more than radiation poisoning could be easily described
to someone of the early 19th Century. But all our history suggests
that we'll have such dangers, and want to survive them. Cryonics, or
any more advanced form of preservation, deals with the problem that
we cannot cure everything at any given time. 

You have no chance of immortality at all unless you not only sign up
for cryonics now, but also keep your arrangements AFTER you are revived.

		Best wishes and long long life for all,

			Thomas Donaldson

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