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 ]

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