X-Message-Number: 12517
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: for Doug Skrecky, about the future
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 23:23:46 +1000 (EST)

To Doug Skrecky:

Briefly, when I said that SOMEDAY we'll know how to preserve people
without lowering their temperature, I meant exactly that. The question you
should ask yourself about that statement is exactly when that "someday"
will occur. I did not claim nor do I believe that it will come soon
in any historical sense, not to mention soon in the sense of our 
individual lives. Perhaps in 100 or 200 years, perhaps even longer than
that. But still, someday. And because I was talking very longterm, present
technology comes close to being irrelevant.

Why would the people of 2400 be interested in preservation which did not
require any special temperature? Because just as now, they will still
suffer accidents and perhaps even diseases --- and very likely none of
them, either accidents or diseases, would be those we could recognize today.
Think of electrocution, which requires widespread electric power to become
even possible; or radiation poisoning, which again requires some use of
radiation and radioactive elements. Go back in time 200 years and neither
one of these problems even existed or could be imagined.

I do not believe that our technology will stop it's advances, but after a
relatively short time it becomes quite impossible to say just what those 
advances will be. Still, there will be accidents, and possibly events
which we'd now call diseases, too.

And they will happen, just as now we won't have complete control over
the Universe. I'll also say that they may well happen less frequently, but
then if you confidently expect to live for 500 years something which cuts
your life short at 150 becomes a TERRIBLE THING, to be dealt with by 
whatever means we can find. And some evolved form of what we now call
cryonics will be one way to deal with such things. 

			Best and long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson

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