X-Message-Number: 11205
From: 
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 15:52:13 EST
Subject: Where are the lottery players?

More interesting to us than "Where are they?" (the ETs) is "Where are
they--the lottery players?"

Last week Alan Greenspan remarked on the "lottery" phenomenon, whereby people
will pay "unreasonable" prices in a formal lottery, or in certain sectors of
the stock market, if the potential payoff is very large. And in the early
Sixties, when cryonics was getting started, there were dire warnings of hordes
of desperate oldsters and other dying people showering money on cryonics
companies for even the tiniest chance of cheating death. 

Of course that didn't happen, for several reasons. One is the perception that,
in a formal lottery or in the stock market, there are guaranteed to be some
winners, whereas in cryonics perhaps no one will win (disregarding the psychic
reward of dying with hope, or buying hope for a loved one). 

But that perception--that perhaps no cryonics patient will be revived--is
wrong. No reasonably informed person can doubt that, sooner or later, we will
achieve suspended animation (and before that, cryostasis procedures with
damage that is clearly reparable in principle), and that some people will
require it as their ambulance to the future.  Maybe EVERYONE now alive will
need it, if the anti-senescence breakthroughs are delayed that long.

This is just another way of saying, yet again, that our tide is coming in,
with almost every advance in science and medicine providing us more
credibility. But we need to improve our efforts to correct the public
perception, and make it clear that there WILL be winners in the cryonics
lottery (possibly even all winners). 

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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