X-Message-Number: 7207
From:  (Charles Platt)
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Cryonics Contracts
Date: 21 Nov 1996 13:28:39 -0500
Message-ID: <57270n$>
References: <> <572109$>

Alan \"Uncle Al\" Schwartz () wrote:
> The entire current population of planet Earth would comfortably fit upon 
> the island of Puerto Rico, with elbow room to spare.  Space is no 
> problem.

I am familiar with this Extropian mindset, but unfortunately it is
entirely prescriptive ("how the world should be") and ignores the way the
world is. Urban concentrations of people are notoriously prone to social
breakdown no matter how they're run (or not run). I live in a large city
myself (New York) and I see very clearly that large population densities
simply are not healthy for human beings, probably for deeply seated
evolutionary reasons. The fact that as soon as people get a bunch of
money, they want to move out to suburbs or, even better, they want to buy
a second home in "unspoiled" country, should tell you something about the
way our brains are wired.

I've lived in America for 26 years and have seen significant impact on the
country as a result of population growth during that time. I've also
traveled through Japan, where you REALLY learn what population density
means. I think it's pretty damned obvious that for purely psychological
reasons, forgetting all the problems about feeding people and keeping them
healthy, the world might be a nicer place with fewer people in it.

But is cryonics going to add to the overpopulation of the planet? Hardly; 
at least, not in my lifetime. With fewer than 1,000 people signed up to be
frozen worldwide, and a less-than-exponential rate of growth, cryonics is
totally irrelevant to population density. Even if some magic process made
cryonics provably workable, I doubt it would become a popular procedure.
There are intense psychological barriers associated with making detailed
plans for your own death--even if "death" becomes potentially reversible.

Life-extension techniques will be far more important as a factor affecting
the population of developed countries, probably about 50 years from now.
Even then, however, the impact may be reduced if life extension also
allows fertility extension. I believe many women would put off having
children into their fifties and sixties and seventies if they had a
doubled maximum lifespan, just as they have already postponed having
children into their thirties and forties today.

--Charles Platt
CryoCare


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