X-Message-Number: 34 From arpa!uvacs.cs.virginia.edu!cfh6r Tue Oct 25 20:58:04 EDT 1988 Received: from uvacs.cs.Virginia.EDU by uvaarpa.virginia.edu id aa19100; 25 Oct 88 20:57 EDT Received: by uvacs.cs.virginia.edu (5.51/5.1.UVA) id AA11112; Tue, 25 Oct 88 20:58:04 EDT Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 20:58:04 EDT From: "Carl F. Huber" <> Posted-Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 20:58:04 EDT Message-Id: <> To: 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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=34