X-Message-Number: 13975 Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 09:47:38 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: working for successful cryonics Hi Eric! I don't know whether my attitude can be characterized as "optimistic", since there are material reasons why one society may choose to do that for another. And I will add that arrangements to do this seem to me something that the 3 main societies should be negotiating about RIGHT NOW ... and they aren't. They do have a partial excuse: there are megatons of issues which cryonics societies must deal with, and they cannot do everything needed all at once. As I suggested in my last message, if this problem really bothers you, then the thing to do is to join a cryonics society and offer to work on just this problem. If each of us looks rationally at our situation, it's clear that lots of things can go wrong. If you really want to live longer, then the thing to do is not to decide that it's too large a task, but instead to get to work on one of the problems ... and by doing so make your own successful preservation just that much more likely. As for the reasons for one society taking over the patients of another which may be failing, the main reason is simple. We cannot preserve ourselves by working alone, and if one society falls apart and LOSES its patients it casts a dark cloud on the others. Incidentally, insurance companies do just the same thing. That's what a Reinsurance Company does. And their reasons are much the same: if life insurance companies go about failing without paying off their clients, then they do their bit to impugn the whole idea of life insurance itself. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=13975