X-Message-Number: 7054 From: (JONATHAN PATRICK BAZEMORE) Newsgroups: sci.cryonics Subject: TV Show, Discovery Channel. Date: 21 Oct 1996 21:49:41 GMT Message-ID: <54gr5l$> I saw the TV show mentioned on this newsgroup earlier--I thought it was very well done, and inspirational. There was a representative of Alcor (I think), a gentleman with reddish hair and glasses who seemed very articulate, confident, and had a clear vision of the goals of cryonics. There was also another man who rebutted the critics' arguments very handsomely by saying (paraphasing): "we don't necessarily want to live forever, but we want to live longer, and not to have the ineluctable fate of death _imposed_ upon us." In other words, maybe it will work, perhaps it won't (but I believe it will), but taking the experimental and novel approach increases options, because it turns a formerly lifeless form into something of a hibernating time-traveller, destination unknown. Perhaps the cryonics facilities will be damaged in some future war, or perhaps, more likely, 200 years hence some successful revival experiments will take place. There were two rather pessimistic critics in particular, an American who flatly felt that cryonics wouldn't work (but how could he say, how could he base his thinking on the limitations of future science and technology, when, for all we know, there are no limits? Presciptions seem more amenable here to historical patterns of technological development than proscriptions, considering the how rapidly technology has advanced in the last ten years alone) and one English gentleman who has a rabbit heart and lab apparatus characterized by a profusion of tubes who said, "We should focus more on quality of life issues, rather than the quite bizarre obsession with reanimation." When someone says "quality of life", that usually tells me that they do not believe in life extension, or have been so imbued with highly structuralized, inflexible, rigid, immutable, ossified over-pragmatized scientific thinking that that person cannot see beyond the tenets and dogma of the very tools that should propel them on to newer, transcendental paradigms. Now, others may argue that novel ways of thinking are often attempted more by those who lack a firm grounding in scientific knowledge, and thus they romaticise and exaggerate the capabilities of science, and gloss over basic problems and limitations, ie., the winch that carries the frozen corpus becoming jammed, blockage in the arteries preventing perfusion, etc.--however, I feel it is the people who try new things, with adequate scientific and and medical knowledge, who also have open minds, who are willing to stumble and fall but get up again who will accomplish great things. -Jon B. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7054