X-Message-Number: 10529
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998 21:59:22 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #10517 - #10524

Hi, Bob and George!

If you aren't actually dead, I'd certainly agree with the saying that
it's always too early to give up. And yes, it is impossible to PROVE
a negative. 

However that gives us almost no guides to action. The number of 
imaginable things and conditions which probably aren't true is vastly
greater than those that are. If we really haven't given up hope for
all those people buried in cemeteries, I've not seen any practical
sign of that hope. How many 18th century graves have been opened so
that the remains can be frozen? How many cryonicists have argued
dthat we'll have a moral obligation to revive such people? 

Bob, when I originally read the line which George Smith quotes, I took
it not as an expression of how we should behave towards others but
as an expression of how WE should behave when faced with "death". And
in that case, I would certainly agree. Not only that, but your book
did not argue that skeletons should be frozen, it argued that we should
be frozen BEFORE we became a skeleton --- a point with which I strongly
agree.

However I continue to feel that I'm on pretty strong ground that 
skeletons cannot be revived as the people they once were. Perhaps they
contain enough DNA to revive a twin --- I don't know. But a twin isn't
the same. And if we ever DO work out how to revive skeletons, then
I'd certainly agree to revive them. For that matter, I believe we should
let individual cryonicists decide the conditions under which they are 
to be preserved. BUT if we are to make any progress at all in reviving
people then we'll need to make distinctions, and decide not to work on
some cases NOW because working on such cases would use up lots of time
and effort with no foreseeable success. And that holds no matter when
NOW happens to be. If that attitude is thought of as giving up hope,
I guess it may be that. Anyone who wants to be stored, even if they
are gotten as a skeleton only, should continue to be stored --- but 
they are pretty far down on my list of conditions we should work on
with the aim of reviving them.

			Best and long long life to all,

				Thomas Donaldson

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