X-Message-Number: 2862 Date: Fri, 8 Jul 94 01:28:58 CDT From: Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Revival Jeff L. Davis asks in SCI.CRYONICS why people of the future would bother reviving thousands of cryonics patients. Kitty te Riele asks on CRYONET about the risks of experimentation and/or abuse of cryonics patients by people of the future. The answer to both these questions is essentially the same. Maintenance of cryonics patients is not automatic; being frozen is not like being adrift in a spaceship waiting for someone/something to help you. Care of cryonics patients is very a much a "hands on" process, requiring continuous human supervision and monetary expenditure. If you are still frozen a hundred years from now, it will be because an organization(s) *cared* about keeping you frozen the whole time. This same, necessarily-caring organization will be the one responsible for your revival if it ever becomes possible. A perhaps even more powerful point can be made. As medicine advances, and increasingly severe injuries (like freezing injury) can be successfully treated, 20th century cryonics patients will begin to look more and more like injured people than cadavers. They (like all people in suspended animation) will be accorded legal rights as people. After all, if your technology can heal an astronaut straight- frozen after his spacesuit failed on a moon of Jupiter, it's pretty hard to argue that 20th century cryonics patients aren't real people with rights as well. As to finances, cryonics organizations all make an effort to keep expenses below patient care fund growth so that a surplus will eventually be available for revival. Adequate funding for revival is the one uncertainty over which you personally have the most control. It's why you should always arrange funding as far above minimum that you can, especially if you join an organization with individual accounting. --- Brian Wowk P.S. To Kevin Brown: I did not see Jeff Davis's message on CRYONET. Does SCI.CRYONICS still automatically cross post to CRYONET? [ Brian, thanks for your reply to Jeff Davis (and Kitty te Riele). The sci.cryonics -> CryoNet connection never was automatic, although the CryoNet -> sci.cryonics one usually is, provided the Subject line contains "SCI.CRYONICS" or "CRYONICS.SCI". (This message abviously is an exception. It was trapped rather than forwarded automatically because my software isn't smart enough to determine for _certain_ which mailing list it was intended for. I'll forward it to sci.cryonics manually.) As for Jeff Davis' message, I sent a private reply to him but didn't forward his message to CryoNet because the topic had been covered two times before. By sending email to me () with the Subject line: CRYOMSG 29[14689] 30[13456789] 31[0246] 867 87[0125] you can retrieve about 50KB of past messages on the topic "Motivation for Reanimation". (I didn't have time to summarize, so I just gave the above list of messages to him.) Perhaps I should have sent my reply to sci.cryonics at that time too? - KQB ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2862