X-Message-Number: 23346 Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 07:46:53 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #23341 - #23342 HI various! I recently read the message from the gaijin who has lived in Japan for ten years and believes that expatriates may be better candidates for cryonics than others (unfortunately his name was completely unclear, obviously intentionally). I spent more than 10 years in Australia after getting my PhD in math, during which I founded a cryonics group here which still exists. I married an Australian (who is also a cryonicist, although she let her membership in Alcor lapse and has now joined CI --- while I remain with Alcor). One thing that living outside the US gives you is a different view of people in the US, their history, and their behavior. That is, I think, exactly what makes expatriates possibly valuable and more willing converts to cryonics. As for its "unproven" nature, part (though not all) of cryonics' problem is that it will ALWAYS be unproven. We are arguing for the cryonic suspension of those who currently are thought to be simply "dead" --- which means by definition that they cannot ever be brought back to life. It's exactly that idea of "death" that we must argue against. Someday (just like now, in fact) those who were once accounted "dead" will become curable cases and therefore will no longer be defined as "dead". Most important, it's very unclear that we'll ever leave such a situation --- unless not only us, but society itself, abandons the idea of death completely. Sure, we'll learn how to revive some of those "dead", say in 2020. Fine, but what about all the others? And still others who are accounted as "dead" for conditions which now simply don't exist, just like (say) radiation poisoning did not exist in 1850? And if we just work out how to do suspended animation, that will not give us cryonics at all. After all, if almost everyone still believes in "death", then why would we try suspended "animation" at all on those who are "dead"? In my TALES OF SKASTOWE I present a society which (among its other traits) has almost entirely abandoned the idea of "death" and all its implications. This hardly means that people go about ignoring risks, not at all. And for a time in its history, before Skastowe itself, right in our own Solar System, there was an argument (political, social, scientific) on just how much damage a person could sustain before their revival should be considered "useless". Not impossible, just useless both to them and to anyone else. Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23346