X-Message-Number: 5922
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Cryonics will not go away
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 1996 22:22:21 -0800 (PST)

Hi guys!

One issue which keeps arising in this discussion is that of whether the people
of the future will revive us.

As someone who believes that SOME form of cryonics will be with us into the
indefinite future (there will always be SOMETHING which can go badly wrong.
Think about it) there is a very easy answer. I do not expect to be revived
by some faceless person who just happens to think reviving me would be a fun
thing to do. I expect to be revived by those who belong to a descendant
of my cryonics society. They will revive me because if they did not, they 
would cast doubt on their own future revival when they too someday got into 
serious trouble.

Nor does this pact between generations require any specific technology. 
Someday suspension patients may be stored out past Neptune, where it is 
naturally the right temperature. Or someday the method of storage will become
something quite different, a highly evolved embalming. Or some method of 
storing the DAMAGED person in a computer (if one of your disks somehow
gets trashed today, and the information on it is important enough, you 
may save it in the hope that someone will come up with a program able to
read it... in fact, some people specialize in doing that even today). It
is not really the method which is important, but the social compact.

If we want to live indefinitely long (or forever, not to put too fine a 
point on it) then we'll have to understand that the probability of suffering
some kind of accident from which the technology of the day cannot recover 
you will NEVER go to zero. Not only that, but someone who expects to live
for 600 years, and all his or her friends, will not be happy to discover
that due to some accident their life may be shortened to only 400; and when
someday we can multiply those numbers by 10 or 100, the unhappiness will
remain.

Right now, it is essential, and not just a side issue, that cryonics
societies do whatever they can to support and promote research leading to
revival. It is that support which shows that they are serious about their
goal and will carry it out when they can. And when we do learn how to 
revive some suspension patients, the cryonics societies of THAT time will
find that reviving those patients is also essential, because it once
more demonstrates that they fulfil their promises whenever they can. 

In some ways cryonics societies are like life insurance companies: they too
were very hard to get started, and for a long time few people would join...
for the good reason that buying a life insurance policy requires that
the buyer trust the seller to pay up, though that payment may be decades in
the future. And the best proof that the insurance company would pay up 
consists of it actually paying up for others, and that this be seen by
possible customers. We cannot yet revive people, but we can demonstrate our
serious work on the problem. When we can revive people, we will find that
we must ... or lose all the trust which we have built up before then. 

Cryonics is one of the main tools we can use to attain very great longevity.
It is not just a means to get to a wonderful future (not that the future
will not be wonderful) but a means to survive even the accidents which 
may happen to us after 600 years, or 6000, or 60000.

			Best and long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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