X-Message-Number: 296
From att!CompuServe.COM!73337.2723 Sat Apr 13 02:06:42 EDT 1991
Date: 13 Apr 91 01:08:09 EDT
From: Brian Wowk <>
To: <>
Subject: Reply to Alan Batie
Message-Id: <"910413050808 73337.2723 DHJ23-1"@CompuServe.COM>

To: >INTERNET: 
 
        There are at least three powerful reasons why suspension patients  
will be revived by "people of the future". 
 
First and foremost: They are ALREADY being cared for by an organization that 
                    is dedicated to their revival.  This is why I put "people 
                    of the future" in quotes.  The "people of the future" 
                    are here today.  Suspension patients are not just being 
                    thrown into the future, and into unknown hands.  They 
                    are being carried into the future by an organization 
                    with the self-perpetuating cross-generational purpose of 
                    reviving the patients it care for. 
 
Second:             Medicine of the 22nd century will be very familiar with 
                    treating "severe, long-term, whole body frostbite" 
                    (space suit failures in the outer solar system, etc.) 
                    Cryonic suspension patients will be no worse off than 
                    many of the contemporary patients it treats. 
 
Third:              This point is related to the second.  Suspension patients 
                    would be revived by any decent, life-valuing society 
                    that could reasonably afford to do so.  This is the 
                    "anthropic" argument for revival.  If the future is not 
                    one in which human life is held in high esteem, neither 
                    suspension patients nor civilization itself will survive. 
 
 
        As to whether "death is a good thing for the species"; you can bet 
this piece of nonsense won't get much mileage in a culture where disease and 
aging have been eliminated by nanotechnology. 
 
                                                    --- Brian Wowk 

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