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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7207