X-Message-Number: 11454
From: "Leon Dean" <>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 22:08:18 GMT0BST

Many people do stupid things, as they scared of death.  

I have been a fan of Cyronics since reading James L. Halperin's amazing
book 'The First Immortal'.  I consider myself to be reasonably
scientifically competent and am not at all religious.  

What I want to write about is, is what we are doing right?  Could Cryonics
be the most selfish and dangerous science in the world today?  

Beside all of the scientific doubts, everyone reading this must believe
that there is a real chance of being frozen after death and then being
awaken at some point in the future, when science has reached the point
where this becomes possible.  When we awake we do not want to die again,
obviously, and so we hope, when we are re-animated, the technology will be
available to sustain us indefinitely, we will become immortal.  

As cryonics stands today, a few die-hard people are frozen each year and
the world ignores it.  Tomorrow a few more people are frozen and the world
takes more notice.  Then an animal is frozen and successfully revived, a
few more people take notice.  Then, if the cyronics dream comes true, a
person will be successfully revived.  

What will happen to the general population when this happens?  We all know
that religion is really all about fear of death.  With death not an option
all these religions will crumble and people will not want to die any more,
they will want to be frozen and then become immortal. So instead of a few
people being frozen each year, millions will be frozen each year.  

When the technology comes along that will enable these people to be
revived and become immortal, we will have millions of normal low
intelligence shopkeepers, thieves, muggers, killers, taxi-drivers etc, and
we would have them for ever.  

How could we punish a killer?  What's 25 years to an immortal? Should we
kill them?  Would the people who read this what to deny someone something
that we want so badly, life.  So what would we do?  

We would have a static population.  No one would be born and no one would
die.  I am a great believer of humanity and have faith in what we could
become, but at the moment we suck!  We wage war, we kill each other -
thousands of times each day.  We rape people, we steal, we waste the vast
majority of our lives on drinking and fighting, talking about sport and
sleeping.  We annihilate hundreds of other species and are doing out best
to destroy the very planet we are on.  As a species we are
evil....................at the moment.  

I sure many of you read science-fiction.  The stories of us evolving into
something greater than what we are, of turning into beings that are the
essence of humanity, its creativity, its wonder, but this will be
impossible if we all live forever.  We could be a static population of
imbeciles, tearing ourselves apart, dreaming of what we could have become.


Of course, after writing all of this, I will probably be frozen. as I
am scared of death.  

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