X-Message-Number: 1721
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: cryonics: #1718-#1719
Date: Sun, 7 Feb 93 21:26:20 PST

Hi. Some comments about Death Penalty and Cryonics:

First, the main reason jails are so crowded is the US's War on Drugs, which
of course is becoming a defeat. Adding cryonics to the mix will be unlikely
to help anything. (Of course this "War on Drugs" has had many other highly
negative effects, but I won't discuss them here because they aren't very
germane).

Second, a practice of suspending people guilty of crimes, expecially since
there's some quite vocal people saying that someday they will be revived,
is likely to spread to even minor crimes. To suspend someone, a grave and
serious act, should not be brought up as a cure for too many people in jail.
Even if revival were guaranteed, that would make suspension a kind of exile
similar to deportation to Australia in the last century--- when people guilty
of quite trivial crimes were removed from their family, friends, and whatever
property they had and sent off to the other side of the earth. There is, after
all, a notion of civil rights that all such practices violate.

Third, as someone who aims to be suspended myself, I can see that suspending
criminals would create a situation in which (reasonably) law-abiding people
would be easily confused with murderers ---- not good.

After all, our heads will look much the same in our cryocapsules.

Fourth, right now the main need of cryonics is to get research support and
donations to improve the process, both keeping patients with more security and
finding ways to suspend them with less damage. It would hardly help us get
donations for this purpose if we were also arguing for the ability to revive
lots of criminals.

However, the proposal does dael with one problem which those who don't like
the death penalty come up against constantly: just what is to be done with
someone we find completely incorrigible, for whom all attempts at cure have
failed. But I think that suspension is premature here: ultimately, what might
be done with such people is not to kill them but to suspend them in a spaceship
equipped with automatic devices to care for them indefinitely, and automatic
guideance, and send them far away not only from our Galaxy but even our own
Local Group --- to be revived ALONE someday in the far far future somewhere

else in the Universe, where they will have to learn how to survive for them-    
selves. But I'd also suspect that by that time people with such a degree of
incorrigibility would be unlikely to be nearly so frequent as they are now.

				Thomas Donaldson

PS: By getting the right listings for sci.cryonics you can find answers to
your questions about its present state. You might send a message to kqb to
find out just where to look.

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