X-Message-Number: 24770 From: Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 09:48:53 EDT Subject: Ben Bova Dialogue, reuploaded in readable format Hello, Fellow Cryoneters, Thought you would be interested in an email I received from author Ben Bova, and my response. Also, please do not write to him at this email address, I erroneously did, he prefers correspondence coming through his website. Rudi Hoffman CFP CLU Certified Financial Planner Chartered Life Underwriter "Planning Tomorrow, Today" ----------------- Forwarded Message: Subj: Re: Cryonics2 Date: 10/6/2004 10:51:48 AM Eastern Daylight Time From: _Rudicfp_ (mailto:Rudicfp) To: _ (mailto:) In a message dated 10/6/2004 9:37:19 AM Eastern Daylight Time, _ (mailto:) writes: Dear Rudi Hoffman: Although cyronics is interesting, I'm putting my faith in cellular biology and life extension, especially the work going on dealing with telomerase. Thanks for asking, though; I appreciate your concern. And thanks for your kind words about my work. Ben Bova Hello, Dr. Bova, Thanks for your response above. Of course life extension and telomerase research, along with calorie restriction, and other modalities of life extension, are complementary protocols for cryonics, not adversarial protocols. Cryonics is, however, perhaps the only technology or modality which may save your brain pattern should you develop cancer or "die" by accident tomorrow. Most of my friends active in the cryonics community are also aggressively near the "leading bleeding" edge in life extension research, science, and application. They recognize that going into the liquid nitrogen dewar is not an end in itself, but a backup plan complementary to taking advantage of other life extension and preservation protocols. Conversely, not having this backup plan is putting your data at risk. In this case, the data being rather important to us as individuals, since the data is "us." :) As a world class sci-fi writer, you may be interested in perhaps the best hard edged fiction book ever written with a cryonics theme, "The First Immortal" by James Halperin. With your permission, it would be my pleasure to send you this book, which may provide even greater "deep background" and more realistic elements to your future writings. THE great book on the exciting real world "time travel" of cryonics has yet to be written. I am writing THE book on cryonics funding. I would like to see you, Dr. Bova, write THE book based on REAL WORLD and near future cryonics. The vast majority of even highly educated people do not realize that cryonic suspension immediately upon "death" is even an option. And even among this small subset of people who having some notion of the concept, most think it is extremely costly or only for wealthy "whackos." With the magic leverage made available by life insurance, most anyone who lives in America and wants a chance to beat death can afford cryonics services. This means that every day thousands of intelligent individuals have their brain patterns and accumulated wisdom irretrievably lost because they do not KNOW there is an option. I missed the chance to dialogue with Carl Sagan, who is now permanently dead. Another perfect candidate for a high profile cryonics signup has been lost recently, with the death of Francis Crick. You, Ben Bova, have a unique opportunity to help bring about the exciting world of the future you write about. May I send you Halperin's book? Respectfully Yours, Still Hopefully for Centuries, Rudi Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24770