X-Message-Number: 17396
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 11:42:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Timeship

Dave makes some good points about the Timeship project, but they go a bit
beyond my initial statement.

I had not covered the safety issue. This breaks down into two sub-issues.

a) Geographical/environmental safety
b) Sociopolitical safety

I have seen the forms used by Steve Valentine and his consultants, to
assess environmental safety, and they are extremely thorough. They take
every possible risk into account. Of course one may still disagree with
the outcome, but Steve is doing a more thorough site-selection procedure
than cryonics has ever seen before.

Sociopolitical safety is harder to measure. Dave feels that a building
containing cryopatients should be unobtrusive. I tend to agree. But the
alternative theory is that a really imposing building, easily viewed, will
discourage vandalism or hostility by its very obviousness.

During Timeship discussions, we talked to one of the originators of
Biosphere. He said that they had been very concerned about vulnerability,
since the structure of BioSphere is almost entirely glass. All it would
take would be one person tossing one big rock, and the whole experiment
would have been compromised. In practice, however, they had no vandalism
at all, and in retrospect they wish they had situated the project closer
to a major highway, since it now depends on funding largely from tourist
traffic.

I tend to think an obtrusive building _may_ be slightly safer, but this is
a theory that has never been tested before.

As for anyone "forcing" Alcor to move, I find this hard to imagine. I
doubt that any existing cryonics organization will make use of Timeship.
While it will offer the unprecedented ability to vitrify whole-body
patients in large numbers (potentially, more cheaply per patient than any
system applying the process to small numbers), I doubt that any
organization will want its patients to move "off-site" to a separate
location; and I doubt that any organization will want to relocate itself
entirely to the Timeship location, wherever it turns out to be. Of course,
I may be wrong.

--CP

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