X-Message-Number: 10513 Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 08:59:41 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #10502 - #10512 Hi again! To George Smith: While I respect Bob Ettinger a good deal, I specifically do NOT believe literally that "it is never too late to give up hope". Nor do I consider my belief (that if the only thing we have of you is your skeleton then you are dead) to be an instance of hubris. If we take Bob's statement literally, then why even bother to suspend people? We can always hope that some future (unknown) technology will work out how to revive them. Cryonics is not and should not be just about hope. It should be about action: what we can do to keep the information we have about someone and preserve it until we (collectively) can use it to revive them. That is true even if the information is largely unreadable (we cannot now read out all your memories from your brain). Sure, we act because we hope that our action will result in keeping someone alive, but the real emphasis is on that action. Yes, someone can always work out a theory of the universe which will allow us to revive skeletons. And if pressed I would even say that such a theory (if not self-contradictory) may be true. But such a theory remains irrelevant to action unless and until it tells us in DETAIL just what to do to bring someone back from their skeleton, and this detailed statement actually WORKS. I doubt that such a theory will ever arise. The best we might do with a skeleton (IF the DNA has survived, which is not obvious) is to create a twin of you. That would be scientifically interesting but just isn't a revival of YOU. Not only that, but death will never leave us. If you believe skeletons might someday be revived, what about the gases left after you've been directly hit by a hydrogen bomb? How extreme must I get to convince you that death is possible? As immortalists we have taken on the task, not just of avoiding old age, but of avoiding ALL those events which might kill us. And our hope comes out of our belief that we can DO something about those events. (Shelters can be built able to take a direct hit of a hydrogen bomb, too --- not to mention other more advanced notions, such as that of storing our entire memories and personality elsewhere in several places, to provide the needed information for revival). Yes, immortalism is a philosophy with ramifications we have only begun to follow. But our hope comes from a belief that we can act against those dangers, it is not passive at all. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10513