X-Message-Number: 309
From att!CompuServe.COM!71750.2413 Thu Apr 18 20:32:48 EDT 1991
Date: 18 Apr 91 20:05:06 EDT
From: "Russell E. Whitaker" <>
To: <>
Subject: Insert subject here...
Message-Id: <"910419000506 71750.2413 EHE21-4"@CompuServe.COM>

To: >INTERNET:

18 April 1991

Excerpted from Alan Batie's last posting:

>As long as overcrowding isn't an issue, I agree that #1 is sufficient.  If
>overcrowding does become an issue, I think you'll see violence against the
>storage facilities.

Easily solvable.  Move to Nevada.  Overcrowding is a local, urban 
phenomenon.  We'll probably have resuscitation well before we 
exceed the so-called "carrying capacity" of Earth.

>At the risk of starting an emotional debate relatively unrelated, I don't
>agree with #2 ethically, and find the thought of legal versions of the
>concept (and derivatives) frightening.

I couldn't agree more.

>#3 will likely result in favoritism over who gets reanimated first, which,
>now that I think about it, it isn't something I've seen discussed.  I think
>I implicitly assumed that it would be first in - first out.  Is there
>something in the contracts about that?

There is not - and can not be - ANYTHING  in the contracts about that.  Try 
doing that for any present-day type of chronic care, upon admission.  Who's 
to say I won't NEED a longer hospital stay? 

Less metaphorically, let's simply recognize the reality that the conditions 
of any two suspensions will simply not be the same.   

And the first in/first out business: extremely unlikely.  It would be poetic 
to have Bedford emerge first, but he's going to need much more repair 
than the average guy suspended today, or tomorrow.  I wouldn't be 
surprised if someone suspended a few decades down the road is treated first.

>#3 also brings up the reverse thought: forward time travel, as in
>Heinlein's "Door Into Summer".  Another book (whose title and author
>I've forgotten) had a concept about a group of people in stasis fields
>whose lives were spent flitting through time, spending a while here,
>a while a few years later and so on. 

I think you're referring to Vernor Vinge's *Marooned in Realtime*.  It's 
great SF.  The timespans these people time-tripped through were 
measured in geological epochs, rather than human histories.  It's a 
fairly recent book, and still in print.  I'd recommend starting with the 
first of the series, *The Peace War*, moving to the intermediary 
novella, "The Ungoverned", and finishing with MiR.

Russell E. Whitaker


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