X-Message-Number: 7229
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #7206 - #7216
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 09:55:21 -0800 (PST)

HMMM!

Yes, Paul Wakfer has a strong point. I personally hope that more CRYONICISTS
will carefully think over the issues involved in cryonics research and then
choose to donate money to one or all of the efforts to do such research.

About "too many people": various proposals have been put about. I too doubt
that either cryonics or immortality will cause or increase any existing or
future problems of overpopulation. What I say here will be a bit repetitive
to some, but at its very worst immortality would add a fixed number of people
to the population, while OVERpopulation really results from exponential 
growth. It is a given, I hope, on all sides that human birth rates will need
to be brought down. One fact (slowly developing if only because human birth
rates are already low compared to, say, mice) is that even in poorer countries
the birth rates are now falling. I doubt very much that we will reach the
kind of crowding some people thought we would end with by 2050. No parents
no matter how much they lack education wish to produce children only to see
them starve... or die in other ways. This is a truth that educated people,
with their supercilious attitudes to the uneducated, have consistently failed
to see. And by current accounts, rate of growth is falling.

As for the fixed number added by cryonics and immortality, lots of means
exist to deal with it. One nice feature of freezing is that people can remain
in storage for a LOOOOOOONG TIME. They can wait not just until their medical
problems are solved, and means exist to bring them back, but until conditions
are right for them to be revived. Not only that, but if we think of fixed
numbers rather than exponential growth, we don't lack for space at all!
We live in a solar system, NOT on a planet. And all the other places and 
potential orbits for places in our solar system are empty of people. (Yes,
any finite volume no matter how large can be filled by exponential growth,
but neither immortality nor cryonics will cause any exponential growth).

I must also add that I personally would put very little weight on claims
that nanotechnology (whatever that may be) or superhuman/transhuman beings
of the future will be at all relevant to this question of "crowding". Much 
more pedestrian processes than nanotechnology will work and are now working
to prevent excess population (even peasants have brains, and use them). More-
over, whatever resources are needed to make revivals successful and the
time of revival appropriate will grow just as they've been growing in the
past. Economic growth doesn't REQUIRE nanotechnology or any particular
technology, and a corollary of such growth is that many things we have now
will become less expensive compared to the wealth of average people of the
time.

As for super/transhumans being so altruistic that they will revive us, sorry,
I just don't see it. Whether or not we change ourselves in other ways than
immortality, we are unlikely to change into "moral" beings. Real altruism,
which isn't done for any kind of possible future return, just doesn't win
out by natural selection (and don't believe that natural selection won't
be acting on us just as it has before and still acts, and will act in the
future). Yes, as primates we do have brains and can engage in acts such
as trade and other forms of reciprocal altruism; our societies are founded
on such acts. Cryonics societies themselves are instances of reciprocal
altruism, and that is the only way they are likely to survive. (We work
to bring back others because by doing so we ultimately help work toward
our own revival. Stripped of all the technology, cryonics works for the
very same basic reasons that life insurance works).

And we will most likely be revived by a cryonics society or its descendants,
regardless of how super/transhuman its members will have become ...
not because they have simply become nicer, but because they too
will use cryonics as ultimate insurance against accidents and breakdowns
which no one AT THAT TIME knows how to fix. Just like us.

			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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