X-Message-Number: 10320 Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 11:58:59 -0400 (EDT) From: Charles Platt <> Subject: Fun Well, I'm sorry, but cryonics is not fun. How can it be? We are a small bunch of rebels fighting a dubious battle to avert personal oblivion. Along the way, those of us who are actively involved must witness our friends and acquaintances dying, first-hand. Moreover, we have absolutely no guarantee that our efforts to preserve them are going to work. We could be wasting our time. We don't think so, but we don't know, and we may never know. Having said that, I will agree that with my friends in cryonics, I have enjoyed some good times. This however tends to manifest itself in black humor of the type enjoyed by paramedics. I remember, for instance, driving a cryonics ambulance back to the facility with a friend beside me and a dead person in the back, who had undergone autopsy and a day or so of warm ischemia, rendering his chances of future resuscitation dubious at best. We debated whether he would count as a passenger, enabling us to take the High Occupancy Vehicle express lane on the freeway (minimum: 3 persons per vehicle). This of course was a classic case of humor (?) being used as a weapon against a situation that was so damned awful, it was very hard to cope with. I can recount many similar examples of "fun" if people would enjoy them here, but someone I don't think that's what the original poster had in mind. From my perspective, there is entirely too much "feelgood cryonics" going on already--what I sometimes think of as the Alfred E. Neuman school, where the motto is, "What--me worry?" Often this is an unfortunate byproduct of faith in nanotechnology to save lives under any circumstances. Therefore, I would like to see more realism and less denial in cryonics, which probably means LESS "fun." Outside of cryonics, of course, I have a great deal of fun. Indeed, my life has been primarily a pursuit of pleasure as opposed to drudgery, and I enjoy every day. Currently I have a job that requires me to work less than half the time, and the job itself enables me to travel and meet fascinating people, whom I write about in the style of my choice, for a magazine that values my work. Can't have much more fun than that! But I can think of many other news groups and mail lists that are better suited to sharing this kind of thing. Here, we're stuck with cryonics, and if you think cryonics is fun, I suggest you are fooling yourself. --Charles Platt Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10320