X-Message-Number: 10807 Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 07:22:55 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #10800 - #10806 Hi everyone! To Bob Ettinger and others: Let us suppose that 21st Century Med's methods are far in advance of current cryonics methods for suspension. Even so there is a gap which needs to be filled: what about those who have been suspended with the old methods? If we value the ideas of cryonics, then work on means to revive someone who has NOT been suspended with the best methods of the time will still be needed. For that matter, even if we suppose that every cryonics society is now fully trained and able to suspend people using 21st Century Med's techniques, there are always people who will fall through the cracks. (To those reading this, YOU might turn out to be such a person, so don't forget this). It may take to long for the suspension team to get to you, for instance. And sure, you may even have had some treatment, cobbled together with what was available, so that there would be no problem with blood coagulation in your circulatory system and you really could be perfused --- but unfortunately hours afterwards. I too am eagerly awaiting DETAILED reports of the methods and the discoveries made by 21st Century Medicine's research. If it fulfils the promise so strongly suggested, it will be a big advance. Yet cryonics does NOT consist solely of suspending people known to be dying under conditions similar to those of a hospital. It is emergency medicine, in which we do the best we can to preserve someone as well as we can. And I doubt very much that 21st Century Med's methods, as they now stand, can be applied to ALL emergency circumstances. A high percentage, maybe, but hardly all. And wasn't it our idea, in the beginning, that we'd try to save as many as we could? To be a little simple about it, no technology ever goes completely out of use. Horses still have advantages in rough terrain; biplanes are good for crop-spraying, while a jet plane would be disastrous. I suggest that anyone working on cryonics technology continue to do so, at least until the full details of the 21st Century seminar become available to all. Your work may well help save some people for whom that technology could not be fully applied. To Thomas Norton: I see that you have one more doubter, and an articulate one too. I will merely add here that the sources you listed simply aren't sufficient. The best sources are those which look at unmodified data and provide that unmodified data too. The worst are those that merely provide opinions and claim their validity on rumor or common beliefs. If you want to discuss violence in the US (or ANYWHERE) THEN you should use the best sources you can. And if you want to use the internet, unfortunately the best sources are likely to require payment of a fee to use them. If you are a cryonicist, you've already worked out in one area of thought that what is commonly believed must be false. This should tell you to look skeptically at other common beliefs, too. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10807