X-Message-Number: 28891
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Re: Postponing "the future" to the 22nd Century (2Arcturus)
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 09:00:19 -0800

In Cryonet #28875, "2Arcturus" writes:

>Also, some of the key developments are in areas that weren't expected and 
>that
  aren't obvious. Bigger bandwidth availability isn't like flying cars and
  trips to Mars, but accelerating computing power is paving the way to a
  different sort of future. People may see only in broad categories like
  'gadgets', but this obscures the qualitative leaps forward. 20 years ago
  virtual universes would have drawn a blank stare from most people, now it 
is
  the quotidian topic of TV news features ("Should commerce in Second Life 
be
  taxed?").

Eh, I have a "yuck" response to that. I'd rather go out and do things in the 
physical world, though my current job situation makes that difficult.

I also have to wonder if the retreat into the Matrix signals defeat in 
trying to keep the real world fit to live in.

Maybe at my age (47) I have trouble appreciating novelty. But in the past 
few years I've explored and integrated new music (jazz), new foods (sushi), 
a new sort of pet (I didn't care for cats until Khan moved in with me, and 
now I've decided I like them) and a modicum of IT that meets my needs, even 
though according to neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky I shouldn't have done any 
of these things in my late 30's and 40's. I'll look at novelty if it I think 
it offers value, not just because other people find it cool or exciting.

>But what continues to work, for which nothing better has been found, will 
>be
  perpetuated, so in some ways we shouldn't expect the future to be 
radically
  different from the past in every respect.

Which illustrates my point: Death continues to "work," and very few people 
see it as a problem desperately in need of a solution. All the technological 
"progress" addressing side issues just produces gadgets you could request to 
have buried with you in your coffin -- high-tech grave goods, in other 
words. If people in the 21st Century have to continue to age and die, 
especially without improvable cryonic rescue, then all the exponentially 
growing tech trends don't matter in the long run.

>Anyway - cryonics may be one of those ideas which (like AI) suffer from 
>arising
before their time. People thought it would be verified quickly, it wasn't, 
and
so they rejected it and consigned it to the trash heap of wishful thinking. 
It
is very hard to change the reputation of an idea once it has undergone
over-expectation and then failure-to-deliver-immediately. Science has 
continued
to move forward toward the idea, but scientists identify cryonics with a
technological abortiveness and infeasibility, so they avoid any notion of
validating it. When it gets done, the inventors will prob make sure not to 
call
it cryonics.

As Steve Bridge has argued, cryonics may have taken a wrong turn early on by 
identifying itself too closely with transhumanist thinking instead of trying 
to frame the procedure as an experimental emergency medical procedure. I 
don't know if cryonics organizations can now recover from the lost 
opportunities over the past generation.

Mark Plus

_________________________________________________________________
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