X-Message-Number: 5127 Date: Mon, 6 Nov 1995 20:03:41 -0500 From: "Keith F. Lynch" <> Subject: Re: Government In #5114 (David Stodolsky) writes: > Can reversible suspension be achieved for half a billion dollars? If > so, then this kind of talk makes sense, if you want to be generous. > Otherwise, political moves aimed at capturing government resources > make more sense. Wonderful. So much for years of work trying to convince people that all we want is to be left alone to do our own thing, no matter how bizarre, irrational, immoral, or unlikely to work they might think it is. Since all we are asking of them is to leave us along, they should have no reason to object. Now you propose to throw all that away. You propose that taxapyers should all be compelled to subsidize cryonics. Not only is "capturing government [i.e. taxpayer] resources" just as immoral as a cryonics company stealing liquid nitrogen because they can't afford it, it's also likely to get us shut down for good, like any other gang of crooks. > The only remotely solid numbers I have seen are from Merkle's paper > "Large Scale Analysis of Neural Structures". He suggests $6 billion > for capturing the information in a brain. His proposal (http://merkle.com/merkleDir/brainAnalysis.html) never implied that the information collected would be sufficient to revive or recreate the brain. His proposal is to collect only visual, not chemical, information. Nobody knows whether that's sufficient. > Presumably, reversible suspension would have a higher price tag. Why? We're on the verge of having reversible kidney and heart suspension. We already have reversible suspension for heart valves, sperm, ova, embryos, blood, and bone marrow. Whether it costs so much that nobody but a government could currently afford it, or whether it costs so little that no government could possibly mind the tiny expense, it's still wrong to steal. Can't you just imagine the field day the press would have with it? "Dead white rich people take money that could be spent on poor hungry homeless little orphan girls". -- Keith Lynch, http://www.access.digex.net/~kfl/ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5127