X-Message-Number: 30222
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: Re: Cryonicist F.M. Esfandiary on the year 2010
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2007 07:35:42 -0800


In reference to my posting of F.M. Esfandiary's 1981 essay, "Up-Wing 
Priorities":

http://www.box.net/shared/static/ay9lub60ha.pdf

In Cryonet #30219, Greg/2Arcturus writes:

>Much of what FM-2030 predicted has come true. 


FM got a lot of the communications forecasts right, but these fell in line with 
what other  futurists  in the 1960's and 1970's anticipated. See, for example, 
the now unintentionally funny video,  1999 A.D.,  filmed in the 1960's:



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7272367397856915541&q=1999+a.d.+video&total=3654&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=8

or,

http://tinyurl.com/yrccfq


However, FM screwed up when he connected these forecasts with the prediction, 
made by many other 20th Century futurists and science fiction writers, that 
manned space exploration would become our civilization's defining activity. In 
reality, nobody has gone beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972, though you can 
always find tinfoil hat-wearing people who argue otherwise. (Even then they 
can't get their story straight: Either NASA faked the moon landings, or else 
we've had an ongoing secret manned space program since the Apollo era, possibly 
based on alien technology recovered from the Roswell saucer crash, that has set 
up bases on the moon and even Mars.) This means that nobody in her 30's or 
younger has a memory of someone walking on the moon in her lifetime, showing 
that the so-called  space age  involving human travel into the solar system 
started and then effectively ended within a handful of years, over a generation 
ago. The Chinese government has talked about sending people to the moon around 
the time many of us will either live in retirement homes or have liquid nitrogen
boiling off our bodies (assuming we can get cryosuspended at all), but I'll 
believe that when I see it happen.


>The traditional family is continuing to crumble, with record numbers of 
divorces and growing approval for arrangements other than traditional marriage 
(despite the massive counter-reaction of the ever-shrinking but shrill religious
conservatives)..
   

I don't necessarily consider this  progress.  Conservatives have an empirically 
defensible case for the value of marriage in proper child rearing. Not only does
marriage tend to provide more financial stability for a family, but the boys of
single moms often turn out worse (for example, joining gangs, breaking the law 
and impregnating the next generation of single moms) than boys who grow up with 
their fathers or other adult male role models to teach them the ways of the male
tribal elders, so to speak. In other words, the boys of single moms seem to 
engage in reckless "tribe-seeking behavior" when they don't have adult men 
around to provide a tribal structure for them.


FM and other  progressive  intellectuals from his era received their educations 
during the ascendancy of behaviorist theories of human nature, so they tended to
overestimate human plasticity when it came to pair-bonding and child 
development. Cognitive neuroscience has changed the look of things lately.


>Nanomedicine may not be two years away, but its development is mainstream and I
would say definitely coming (see latest issue of Scientific American). 
Regenerative medicine work, gene therapy work, and anti-aging work have also 
gone mainstream, something that certainly couldn't have been said in 1981. 


Perhaps, but FM back in 1981 thought that we'd have radical life extension as a 
done deal by now, regardless of the proposed means. So did Robert Anton Wilson, 
who ironically died about a year ago in line with the actuarial prediction of 
his life expectancy. I've seen recent examples where people have recycled 
30-year-old predictions of  immortality  for the generation alive at the time of
the forecast, but projected for the current generation. I turned 48 a few weeks
back, and I don't know how many more 30-year cycles of waiting for  
immortality,   superlongevity  or  actuarial escape velocity  I can endure.


For some perspective on the lack of progress in  life extension sciences,  
consider the speakers at an Alcor conference that occurred back in 1978, 
including FM and Robert Anton Wilson, and notice how many of them have died by 
now:

http://www.box.net/shared/static/vtksoi8t4t.jpg


>FM-2030, in my view, was a prophet of a new era. Like many prophets before him,
he was generally ignored by people who were too dense to understand how the 
future could develop and improve. He especially encouraged people to be 
OPTIMISTIC enough to keep trying and working hard to develop a better future, 
something that many people have largely rejected in favor of PESSIMISM and 
apathy. But the choice is still ours.
   

Calling FM a  prophet  implies that you consider him the founder of a religion. 
FM's  optimism  has to have a strong scientific foundation, or else he looks 
like just another other goofy New Age feel-good guru, and an uncompetitive one 
at that, considering how he has fallen into relative obscurity outside of 
cryonicist and transhumanist circles since his suspension in 2000 because his 
view of the 21st Century looks increasingly wrong compared with the reality. 
Deepak Chopra, by way of a probably bad comparison, comes across to me as a 
blatant quack and charlatan, but he sells more books in a year than FM sold in 
his entire publishing career.


Speaking of optimism, it can also fuel denial. When FM knew his cancer and 
deteriorating health threatened to overwhelm him, he should have gotten into 
hospice care near Alcor instead of continuing to travel.


"There was a time before reason and science when my ancestors believed in all 
manner of nonsense." (Narim on "Stargate SG-1")

Mark Plus

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