X-Message-Number: 15858 From: Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 01:45:19 EST Subject: Re: CryoNet #15845 - #15850 In a message dated 3/13/01 5:01:29 AM, writes: << Message #15846 From: "BlackShark" <> Subject: Motivation? Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 07:51:54 -0700 Hi, I was explaining my interest in cryonics to someone and they asked an interesting question that I couldn't answer. They asked, "What would be the motivation for future generations to re-animate me?" A few answers come to mind. If relatives are around and have the means to have me reanimated, they may arrange to have it done. A few "stiffs" may be re-animated out of scientific curiosity. But look at it this way. Say a hundred years from now the technology and medical knowledge does exist to reanimate us. But people a hundred years from now will have their own lives to live and their own problems to worry about. They may be running out of places to live on our finite globe with an ever-increasing population. They may be worried about feeding everyone. What could you or I contribute to society a hundred years from now? We would be so far behind in our knowledge base we would be practically useless to anyone. I suppose we could go back to school and "catch up". But the question remains, what would be their motivation to reanimate a few hundred frozen stiffs? If we, today, had the ability to reanimate people who had been frozen a hundred years ago, besides perhaps re-animating a few for scientific and historical research, what would be our motivation to reanimate everybody. I can't think of any. David King Edmonton, AB Canada >> In response to David King, I would say that he has a rather dark view of the future as a place of starving, crowded masses. This and similar views of a negative future and a degeneration of human civilization is utterly incompatible with cryonics and I don't understand how people with such a mind set would want to subscribe to this list. Unfortunately, however, his views are reflective of the vast majority world wide who reject the view of a positive future guided by scientific progress even in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary. These views are abetted by science fiction writers who generally portray images of negative futures as well as malevolent extra-terrestrials. In fact, when most people think they are looking to the future, whether writing fiction or spinning scenarios, they are really looking backward, to Hitler and Stalin, to the great plagues, and the crowded, disease-riden, and smoke-choked streets of London of the Dickens era. My friends, this is not where we are headed, but until we can get larger numbers of people to realize this, we will continue to have a tough time selling cryonics. To David King's other point about nobody caring about us stiffs, I think that advanced peoples will have an enormous interest scientifically and technically in the revival process. Certainly, any reasonably curious person alive today would be very eager to learn first hand from the experiences and thoughts of someone who lived one, two, or three hundred years ago. Anthropologists and historians would have an especially keen interest, and a reasonably enlighted society would have a collective interest, just as various national and international societies now spend millions on such items as the remains of a wooly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost or the many thousand year old traveler discovered in the high Alps not so long ago. However, even apart from curiosity and science, and disregarding any humanitarian concerns [which I believe will increase rather than decrease over time, as I read the historical record], don't forget the Cryonics organizations and their successors. Without them, we won't remain frozen anyway, and with them and their continued viability and prosperity we have a group of people in whom we have collectively entrusted many millions to be guardians of our personal futures. Ronald Havelock, Shady Side, Maryland Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15858