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