X-Message-Number: 10083
From: Olaf Henny <>
Subject: To Sell Cryonics We Need A Fascinating Future
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 11:54:31 -0700

To Thomas Donaldson (Re: Message #10077):
>To Olaf Henny:
>We want to be suspended because it gives us a chance at living much
>longer. If that is not emotion I do not know what is. 
>
Thomas, when you buy a car, you want transportation, which gets 
you from A to B.  You want seats in it, a heater, possibly a 
radio and a few safety devices.  That's rational.

When a car salesman tosses you casually the keys "to take it for 
a spin", he thinks of none of the above.  He wants you to get 
hooked on the styling, the shiny finish, the smell of the 
upholstery, the look of the dashboard, the smooth acceleration, 
feel the power etc.  He wants you to *take posession* 
vicariously (at first). 

That is emotion.  This is what sells cars.  Otherwise cars 
would not look like they do to day.  They would be simpler, more 
utilitarian.

Back to cryonics:
I am repeating, what I already said in Cryonet #10075:

-  You die, get buried; - you rot
-  You die, get incinerated; - you are ashes
-  You are legally dead, but for a brief while not irretrievably 
   so;  you have a chance to be cryopreserved and revived at a 
   later date.

Now that is entirely rational.  Nobody wants to have his/her 
photo taken beside a shiny new dewar, or expects to be the envy 
of the neighborhood, because he gets his head chopped off for 
neuro-suspension, nor is being cooled down to LN temperatures 
expected to be a particularly enviable sensual experience.  It is 
as rational as going into surgery: "I have to get through it for 
a better, healthier and more extended life". Period.

Now there will hopefully come a time, when it will be en vogue to 
belong to the avant-garde of cryopreservation.  Then you can play 
on that emotion.  

Another emotion would be the excitement of life in the future, 
when diseases are largely eliminated, death held at bay, eternal 
youth practically guaranteed, space-travel developed to the 
extent, that humans can travel to new star systems either through 
the facility of cryonics or because we have learned to utilize 
distortions in space and time to "jump" to new frontiers.  Will 
there be means of travel by cheap teleportation?  Augmentation of 
our mind through incredibly powerful memory chips?  If Ralph 
Merkle's estimate of nanotech being able to cram I megabyte of 
memory into one cubic micron is close, then I would easily have 
room in my cranial cavity for a chip of the size of a small sugar 
grain (1 mm^3), giving me access to an information library of a -
by to day's standard - incredible 1 million GB. (That would make 
me smarter than you, Thomas) :)

I want to be there!  That is emotion!  Now, if you can sell 
cryonics with a pitch, which is based on the excitement of future 
lifestyle, that would be "selling on emotion"

Right now the general perception appears to be one of carrying on 
live as usual after revival, just longer, healthier and 
rejuvenated, but in a society, which has outgrown us by a century 
and which will take a lot of getting used to.  Many of us are 
looking forward to reuniting with our loved ones, but we have 
them now.  There is not anything particularly new and exciting 
about that.

To sell cryonics, we have to sell the *future*.  Cryonics is just 
the necessary unpleasant procedure to get there.  We have to sell 
a future, which we can anticipate like a holiday in a new exotic 
destination.  I am not buying my plane ticket to sit packed in 
like a sardine in the economy class of a jumbo-jet, holding my 
bladder, because there is a line-up for the washroom, -  I am 
buying it to get to the destination, just like I am not paying my 
cryocare provider to spend a century in a dewar -  I am paying to 
get access to a future with some dreamed of- and many undreamed 
of wonders, which I want to experience.  I want to be part of a 
world, so fantastic, that we can now only imagine a tiny fraction 
of it.  *Now that* is the emotion, this enthusiasm is, which 
propels me, NOT the "I-like-living-and-want-to-live-another-5000-
years-if-at-all-possible".

Jim Halperin (are you listening?) is in an ideal position to 
write a follow-up novel "The Immortals" in which he has people 
going through cryonics in the first 1 or 2 chapters and then 
opens up a world, which it is worth going through the procedure 
for, just like the US is worth for young Mexicans to risk their 
lives in the Texan dessert, or what makes the risk of the boat 
people's ordeal worthwhile.

Of course the load should not be carried by Jim Halperin alone.  
We all have our dreams of the future, which of course we are 
reluctant to reveal in front of an audience of skeptic scientists 
and materialists.  I doubt, that Joe Strout's be all and end all 
after having himself uploaded, is to clank around to all infinity 
in his construct.  Charles Platt as a writer of fact and fiction 

like.  All of you scientists do not only have a perspective on 
advances in your own field of expertise, but, I am sure, also 
foster images of hobbies and life-styles, which you could 
contribute, if you were not self-conscious about revealing them.

We could throw all our ideas into one pot and make it available 
for somebody like Jim or Charles to weave them into a novel of 
the near future.  This is something we *can* do.  We don't have a 
whole lot of money for an advertising campaign, but we have 
brains, which are hopefully not just logical an calculative, but 
imaginative as well.  Hell - if we had no imagination, why would 
we want to climb into a dewar? :)

If we want people to follow us into the future, we have to give 
them one, which makes the ordeal of cryo-preservation worthwhile.

Having babbled on long enough, I'll quit now, but I hope I will 
get some reaction to this.

Best,
Olaf
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Tolerance is wisdom's finest fruit
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