X-Message-Number: 9772
From: 
Subject: Re: Catch-22
References: <>
Date: Sun, 24 May 1998 14:12:28 EDT

To Tom Donaldson:
In my current financial situation, the ~$100,000 cost of cryonics
might as well be $100,000,000. I am working on improving this,
but that will take time. Until then, signing up is not even an
option for consideration.
I am a member of Foresight Institute, which, for me, is a considerable 
expense (see above). I get nothing from this membership except a
newsletter which I can see for free at my local library on their web
site,
the opportunity to travel 2000 miles to attend gatherings I cannot
afford to go to, and the knowledge that I am supporting research
which is more likely to "pay off" for society than cryonics (and which
would almost certainly be a necessary prerequisite for cryonics,
if cryonics could work). Please note that I consider myself an
open-minded skeptic on cryonics, *not* a debunker. While I doubt
its potential for success, I do not *deny* it, and am quite willing
to correspond with cryonet on the subject.
To Saul Kent:
You suggest that marketing help is what cryonics needs. I would
venture to guess that, in the industrialized world where cryonics
technology is available (US, West Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada,
etc.),
there are, say, one billion adults. At least half that total has probably
heard of cryonics, and a tenth likely knows that preservation is
available in 1998. Of that 100 million people, how many are signed up?
How much more "marketing" do you need? It is not that people have not
heard of cryonics, it is that they do not believe it.
You suggest a successful brain preservation. We can "preserve" brains
right now...but how do we know that it is "successful" until we revive
the brain and ask it how it feels? But that's the very success I proposed
as necessary to cryonics succeeding.
You feel that people will still be dying *and* being preserved even after
a successful revival. Please give me several examples of causes of death
which meet the following criteria simultaneously:
1 Sufficiently severe as to be beyond a medical technology able to cope
with:
  -the cause of death which occurred to a 1998 suspendee PLUS
  -the deterioration in the minutes that it took to get the suspendee
   suspended (bodies begin to show post-mortem changes almost
   immediately) PLUS
  -the damage caused by freezing/vitrifying/whatever PLUS
  -the damage caused by decades or centuries of suspension (this would
   probably be mostly from background radiation...small at current levels
   (I *hope* the background radiation level does not rise dramatically in
   the future!) but it does contribute) while being
2 Sufficiently mild that it is even conceivable that repair *could* be
done
   (a person whose brain was disintegrated by cremation, say, would not
    be restorable)
If condition 1 is not met, there would be no reason for cryonics...the
person
would just be treated with "conventional" 22nd Century medicine. If
condition
2 is not met, then suspension would be pointless. Certainly aging does
not
cause much more damage than suspension...I would say that even a
centenarian
in a nursing home has a more intact body than a "corpsicle"...at least it
still
functions!

   

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