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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12517