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From arpa!uvacs.cs.virginia.edu!cfh6r Tue Oct 25 20:58:04 EDT 1988
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Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 20:58:04 EDT
From: "Carl F. Huber" <>
Posted-Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 20:58:04 EDT
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Subject: Re:  cryonics mailing list #30 - there must be a catch
Status: R

CRYONICS CRYONICS CRYONICS

> In what other ways may cryonic suspension work completely as planned, yet
> the future still come out "wrong"?  Happy Halloween!

Imagine this.
While you are preserved cryonically, the definition of life changes, but 
general ethics remain the same - i.e., murder is illegal, cause for
termination,etc. (of course, to actually succeed at murdering someone, you've
got to be pretty sophisticated)
  Well, time goes on, and population gets to be a problem, so people have to
time-share living space - quite literally.  You have to pay for actual
animation time, whereas deanimation to secondary storage (or whatever) is
relatively cheap, and all but the poorest of the poor can at least afford
that for a while.  But our ethics prevent actual murder, so the poor are stored
indefinitely, for free (welfare state (of being)).  Eventually everyone gets
to be stored for free, and in fact, you accumulate life credits while in
storage.
  But more time flies by, the population experiences a kind of explosion
not fathomable by our meager minds, we reach the physical limits of
reducing the size of information storage units, the current trend of
memory capacity going up and price going down slows, stops, and reverses.
It now gets more and more expensive to be stored, so people have less and
less animation time.  The once free storage become expensive again, until
some other cheaper (free) version of storage becomes technologically available.
  Now lets track the 'life-extenders''(archaic) trip through time.  Being
in a corporeal state gets to be quite expensive, even though in cryonic
suspension.  Fortunately you are grandfathered into some old fashioned law
that saves you, until you are revived, upon which time you cannot afford
any more corporeal time, since you are so far in debt - you need to spend
a few millenia in storage before you can possibly be eligible for reanimation.
During those few millenia, your storage medium again becomes so expensive, that
when you are again revived, you are so poor that you are again stored back into
whatever the state of the art cheap storage is at the time.
  You are not alone though.  Throughout the ages, googles of people just like
you accumulate in storage.  Good ol' human ethics keeps you intact, but your
chances of reanimation get infinitely small.  Sooner or later somethings gotta
give, but until that time, you are the only real meaning given to that ancient
word, "dead".

Oh, well, there are quite a few holes, but that is straight off the top of
my head, in response to the above stimulating question.

Cheers,
Carl Huber

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