X-Message-Number: 8723
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #8708 - #8716
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 1997 23:53:28 -0800 (PST)

Hi guys (and girls, and whoever else doesn't fall under those headings):

I believe that Charles Platt suffers from a major misconception about cryonics,
though Bob Ettinger should really be the first to answer him.

NO, we do NOT advocate freezing people now as a means to raise money to perfect
freezing at some time in the future. NOT AT ALL. Cryonic suspension would
remain worthwhile whether or not we could do much research to improve it NOW at
all. It would even remain worthwhile if the total number of cryonicists 
remained at its present low state for centuries.


We advocate freezing people now because we believe that the current knowledge 
ofmedicine and all other abilities that we have bearing upon reviving and
preserving people constitute only the slightest shadow of what they will
someday become. Rather than decide that someone is "dead" (whatever that may
be!) and therefore see that they become truly destroyed and therefore most
certainly DEAD, even as cryonicists see it, we think it is far more modest
and wise to try to keep them around, as well preserved as we can. We can right
now only form the vaguest of ideas about just what doctors of the 23rd Century

or the 24th Century or the 70th Century (remember how in PROSPECT OF 
IMMORTALITYEttinger describes how long someone will last given the physics of 
freezing
in liquid nitrogen?) will be able to do to revive him.

It is this which makes cryonics very much NOT the same as suspended animation.
With suspended animation we know beforehand that we can revive this person.
With cryonics we do not. We preserve the patient because we know just how 
little we really know.

I myself have advocated that we do scientific research to improve our means
of preservation. I do not believe that we, as cryonicists, should be content
to simply wait for the future. At the same time I have said, and said many
times, that cryonics should (and I believe will) continue into the indefinite
future. That is, we will NEVER know all we can know about medicine, the 
universe, or any other subject: not in the 23rd Century, the 24th, or the 70th.
To BELIEVE that you know all of anything is the beginning of stagnation, not
the end of knowledge. And yes, the time between the 30th and the 50th Century
may well be a time of stagnation. So long as cryonics societies survive in 
any form, then they can at least remain awake to all the questions that
remain unanswered in medicine or elsewhere, and ready for the 70th Century 
when it arrives.

I have even said repeatedly that it is CRYONICISTS who will ultimately find
out how to revive these patients. Those cryonicists may not be anyone
now living (though I would like such projects as Prometheus to succeed,
Prometheus won't solve all our problems with suspension). But who else would
even try? But when I talk about reviving suspension patients, I do not mean
just those suspended under the best conditions. I mean every suspension
patient for whom the information required still exists, even if in some
unknown (presently) unreadable form. 

It's easy as we go about our lives to feel pride at the achievements of 
scientists and think that our understanding, even of physics, has come close
to completion. We hear from MDs, from scientists of all kinds, of how well
their theories now explain so many things. At school we learn of some or
all these theories, too, so that thinking in that way becomes almost 
automatic. Yet anyone who seriously reads and thinks about the history of
science should (and I hope will) stop and think: someday ALL of this may be
seen as completely false. Sure, perhaps an approximation to the truth we
NOW know, but only a poor approximation... How can that happen? Because
the fundamental ways we now think about matter, energy, life, all those other
things, are tied in closely with our "knowledge", and stand or fall along
with those theories.  
 
Here is little history of science. You see, Galileo was far from the first
to think about moving bodies and how they moved. Many people before him
were troubled by this problem. But it was Galileo who introduced the notions
of TIME and ACCELERATION, which ultimately helped to explain them within 
our current physics. Explain? Predict. Sometimes, hardly always. And this
happens in medicine too: in the last 20 years we've seen the dogmas that 
nerve cells can never be repaired, and people ischemic at room temperature for 
more than 5 minutes can never be revived, fall into many research questions
rather than remain standard truths. Without the notions of time and 
acceleration the entire theory of simple physics cannot exist. And so long as
we think in terms of the physics we all learned we will fail to see the
physics of the 24th Century, or the 70th.

Or the medicine of those times, either.

WE DO NOT LIVE IN A TIME FUNDAMENTALLY MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE THAN ANY OTHER.
That is the root point which cryonics explicates by cryonic suspension: just
why we freeze pieces of brain obtained from the coroner, or freeze people
found only hours after their "death", or all the other acts which may 
puzzle those who believe in current medicine so firmly. And to really 
convince someone of cryonics, they must come to understand how ignorant we
all are. I hope someday that this will be seen as a common truth that need
not be explained; and when that day happens, we'll find the majority of 
people to be cryonicists. As to when that day might come I cannot say.

			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson

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