X-Message-Number: 22788 Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 11:12:58 -0800 Subject: Mummification From: Peter Merel <> Hi Ian, Cryonicists are gamblers. We're betting that science and civilization and the cryonics orgs will last long enough to develop a technology to revive us. We have some ideas about what that technology might be - molecular nanotechnology is the most popular expectation, but simple protein engineering might be enough. Or some other technology - we have a ten millenia window of opportunity because cosmic ray damage is expected to scrub the information stored in vitrified brains after ten millenia. Now we sign up knowing there's a risk we might die suddenly and not get suspended in the first place. Or that the cryonics orgs will suffer business reversals and legal upheavals that would cause them to thaw the brains and destroy the information therein. Then we'd lose the bet. And that's the game - if you don't bet you can't win. People interested in mummification, on the other hand, are not gamblers. They're mystics. They believe that by some kind of sympathetic magic a ritual embalming procedure involving pulling their brains out through their noses will give them access to some kind of supernatural afterlife. And they might be right. And so might the christians hoping to get into heaven. And I might flap my arms and fly to the moon. But none of those things seem like something a gambler can assess in terms of money and odds. So we cryonicists are about as likely to consider mummification as the physicists are to consider the flat-earth theory. And that's as sensitively as I can put it :-) Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22788