X-Message-Number: 871
Date: 02 Jun 92 00:45:55 EDT
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: Re: cryonics: #865 - #869

This is a reply to Tim's message about cryonics organizations refusing
to revive their suspendees:

You make an assumption, one essential to your argument, that when revival
becomes possible cryonics suspension will cease to be needed. We can of
course argue about technology (ie. just what technqiues would be used to
do the preservation). But it is central to the cryonics idea that cryonics,
in one form or another, will NEVER cease to be needed. Brian Wowk touched
on this, but it deserves emphasis. Certainly every medical condition, 
fatal or not, NOW KNOWN TO US, will be curable by then. But that does not
mean we might not have many others that either we don't now live long 
enough to encounter, or that result from the medical (or other technology)
of 200 years from now or 400 years or .... etc. The class of "currently
incurable medical problems" will remain, even though its members change
constantly.

This has already happened through history and we have no reason to believe
it will stop. Conditions 200 years from now (say) will differ from those
now; among other ways they will differ is the possibility of accidents of
kinds no one now envisions. Who could have foreseen radiation poisoning 
100 years ago? And if we start making self-reproducing nanomachines, I
promise you that we will wake up one day to discover that some of us have
gotten a new kind of disease.

Of course we live longer lives now than people did 100 years ago, and 
200 years from now people will live even longer lives. But new kinds of
accidents will remain possible, and seen on a scale of thousands of years,
even LIKELY to everyone then living. 

The fundamental reason we will be revived is that those in the cryonics
society of that time will want the same service when and if they too
encounter some incurable conditon for the 22nd century. Not that storage
then will necessarily use freezing: but the method of storage does not
really matter. WE KEEP IN STORAGE THOSE WHOM WE DON'T NOW KNOW HOW TO 
CURE. And the people of the 24th Century, who find those problems of the
22nd so easy to fix, will have yet another set of problems to deal with ...
to infinity.

With this situation, of course, those running a cryonics society of the
22nd century will revive us because if they did NOT do so it would call
into question their own prospects of revival.

				Best
					Thomas Donaldson

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