X-Message-Number: 19766
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 14:04:58 -0700
Subject: Odds and Ouroboros
From: Peter Merel <>

I'm not used to wearing jewellery. I never wore so much as a ring or a 
watch before fastening the Alcor bracelet last week. So I'm not used to 
it yet. It bugs me. It begs my attention when more pressing matters 
should. It's an ugly ring of sliding steel that jangles and wriggles and 
troubles my sleep.

But it has had an unexpected benefit.

The odds of survival, or the validity of assigning odds, or the proper 
parameterization of the odds, or the rationality of taking cryonics as a 
wager or Pascal's wager or betting on the Preakness - really, none of 
these have anything to do with why someone signs up for cryonics. We 
don't sign up to obtain some percentage of certainty of survival. No, we 
sign up to 100% eliminate the certainty of death.

I walked down Coronado beach yesterday, Ouroboros dragging at my wrist, 
watching the scurrying tourists disporting in shallow brown surf. I 
wouldn't want to swim in there. It's cold kelp and kiddie pee water. 
I'll wait until the peaches and paste faces go home in Autumn, and the 
water turns warm and clean, and the beach is shining and empty.

After all, I live here. And Ouroboros means I no longer know how long 
I'll live here.

I might get sucked down into the blue deep and not found for days. More 
likely I'll get squished like a bug on the freeway. Or one of a million 
other ways to die permanent, the same as anyone on that beach.

But also I might not. Unlike all the short-lived suckers basting on the 
strand, I might live a thousand years. Or longer. Ouroboros means death 
is no longer certain at all. I suddenly realized that I really, really 
like that.

So it looks to everyone else like I have this lumpy chain around my 
wrist. But thinking of it as a distinction containing the certainty of 
death, I'm on the open side of it. Life is uncertainty - and that's what 
we pay for by signing up for cryonics.

Peter Merel.

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