X-Message-Number: 13771
Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 23:36:33 +0100
From: Phil Rhoades <>
Subject: The failure to get reanimated - a 3rd possibility

David Pizer wrote a timely and thought provoking note, part of which was:

>Let's look forward:  It is a hundred years, or so, in the future, people
>are immortal. They feel they don't need cryonics so they don't want to run
>a cryonics company, but the frozen dead people have not been reanimated
>yet.  The problem is that there may be NO dedicated people to work in
>cryonics because traditionaly the only reason people have worked in the
>movement is because they felt they will need the services themselves.
>
>So there are now only two possible reasons why someone who is alive (and
>immortal themselves) might help reanimate frozen people - because they have
>a loved one in suspension they want back, or because they might get money
>for reanimating the patients.

There might be a 3rd reason - people who were alive a long time ago are 
likely to be valuable for a social reason - a living history.  Even today 
older people are quizzed for their "oral histories" - my experience here 
(Australia) has mostly been that current generations have been interested 
in the memories of previous generations of migrants of various ethnic 
extractions concerning their arrival here, their struggle in an alien 
environment, their changing culture etc. Presumably in the future we won't 
need the oral extraction, we will just be able "dump" great tracts of 
memories into hardware - I'm sure these "real" documentaries are going to 
be more interesting than a lot of written fiction - and the older they are 
the more valuable they will be. Of course this assumes that people are 
reanimated with memories intact.  Also, there is always the problem that 
memories are "coloured" with time and may not represent previous events 
quite accurately but I think they will still very sought after.

R&LL,

Phil.

Philip Rhoades

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