X-Message-Number: 32789
Subject: Marketing cryonics
From: David Stodolsky <>
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2010 13:04:05 +0200
References: <>

On 22 Aug 2010, at 11:00 AM, CryoNet wrote:
>> 
>> What's needed: bring more females into the debate.
>> 
> I'm a bit of a lurker on cryonet but always follow discussions. You suggest 
> that material directed towards women and anti-aging might be a good idea. 
> I'm a novelist ... I have sent out two proposals for novels (for women) with 
> cryonics as theme and one suggestion for a book on the lines of 'Cryonics 
> for Dummies'. No publisher or agent will touch either because
> A) they do not have a guaranteed market
> B) because I'm not a well known footballer, chef or politician.
> 
> Chrissie de Rivaz
> 

Unpackaged, cryonics is pretty much empty of a social component. Women are 
generally less attracted to physical technologies and more interested in the 
social aspects and implications of technologies. This is apparent from the 
Badger data. Women tended to reject cryonics because, it meant the loss of 
contact with family members, friends, etc. when waking up in the future. A major
benefit from life extension technologies was perceived to be prevention of 
these types of losses. It could be an interesting exercise to show how a future,
including cryonics, could support the social relationships that are often lost 
due to ageing, disease, etc.


If you want to sell a book including cryonics to women, cryonics will have to 
play a secondary role. For example, a plot of the family relationships that 
develop when a suspended husband reappears and wants his 'old' wife back, who in
the meantime has remarried could be interesting.




> 
> Cosmism, a philosophy of life based on the works  Hugo De Garis and offered
> by dss in the above message, seems to me to be a very poor choice for
> catagory shifting.  In this philosophy, de Garis in postulating millions of
> deaths in a Terminator like scenario, projects and reverses his own fear of
> death onto our machines.....Paranoid and a poor matrix in which to embed a
> life affirming technology such as Cryonics.


I haven't read much of De Garis, but what I have seen doesn't present a coherent
philosophical picture. It strikes me more like free association under 
techno-infatuation. I don't see any important relationship between it and the 
cosmism discussed by philosophers today or in the past:

http://sites.google.com/a/cosmism.info/cosmism/what-is-cosmism



> 
> This assumes two things
> 
> 1. a package that **includes** cryonics
> 2. that it is accepted by the population
> 

> "the package" would have to contain a lot of material that is pertinent to the
Chinese situation and the ruling party's ideology. I don't see how this could 
be created except by Chinese academicians.


The Party ideology is pretty much irrelevant as far as I can see, since it tends
to be empty of material relevant to individual existential concerns. We 
wouldn't see the resurgence of religion, if Party ideology could fulfill this 
role. However, any packaging of cryonics for the Chinese market would have to 
employ the local knowledge of Chinese academics or others who study Chinese 
society.

> 

> On the basis that the Chinese ideology still owes a lot to the Communist 
Party, it would seem sensible to listen to the views of a spokesman for the 
Communist Party. This is from Radio Moscow in the 1980s:
> http://www.cryonics.org/media/moscow1.htm
> http://www.cryonics.org/media/moscow2.htm
> http://www.cryonics.org/media/moscow3.htm

> These broadcasts rather suggest that although the Communists seek to extend 
the "lifespan of the species as a whole" (by which I think they mean average 
lifespan) and are willing to consider researching anti-oxidants and so on, they 
regard cryopreservation as being specific to individuals and therefore not 
worthy of consideration. 

> -- 
> Sincerely, John de Rivaz:


SU and China diverged ideologically, so I doubt if much from the SU CP would be 
relevant even at that date. 


The view expressed above is directly opposite of that of Russian Cosmism, which 
played a key role in the early days of the SU and in their space program. The 
reduced expectations expressed may more reflect the disintegration of the Soviet
System, which was already apparent, even though the total collapse didn't come 
for about a decade. 



dss


David Stodolsky
  Skype: davidstodolsky

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