X-Message-Number: 14329 Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2000 08:00:09 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: the future of cryonics Hi everyone! A quick summary of my own argument that acceptance of suspended animation will take some time (much longer than Paul Wakfer seems to think): The analogy with heart transplants just begins to show the kind of reaction to expect. The situation I alluded to, that most conditions could take much longer than just a few years to see serious cures, remains (unfortunately) true. Not only that, but the possibility of suspended animation for ANY condition is not going to escape people. Even now most doctors would not consider the possibility of someday treating AGING, as a simple case. To go into suspended animation because you're growing old would not be seen favorably by many people. That becomes especially true if it requires different medical techniques which now are looked on with uncertainly and (in some cases) horror. Imagine someone saying that we'll be able to totally cure your old age by moving your personality into another young body. (Note that I said PERSONALITY here, not brain). Even genetic modification of your body would be looked on by too many as an unfavorable activity possibly to be forbidden; real immortality, of course, would require exactly such modifications. Moreover as cryonicists we suspend many people who do not come to us in the best possible shape... bluntly, they are seen as "dead". Would normal (or even radical) hospitals provide suspended animation for such people? Not only that, but many people would not want to awaken in a future even 1 year away, and may simply delay their suspended animation until they fall (unexpectedly?) into just that class of "dead". If we take the kind of long view which those of us who are suspended and later revived would take, the period most people would take to come to terms with suspended animation will seem relatively short... perhaps only a century. But to those living through that period, it will look quite long. How many people will refuse suspension before it finally becomes popular? Again, medicine and doctors often present a new development as if it is close to a complete cure, when if we look at what's actually being done we have only a step towards that complete cure. Cure of severed spinal cords looks as if it will happen relatively soon, but the day in which we not only can get some nerves in severed spinal cords to reconnect, but can get ALL OF THEM to reconnect will be much farther away. It's not that it won't happen, but for suspended animation we don't want anything partial if waiting longer gives us something complete. And so those cures available in only a year may start looking at best quite lacking. So these are some reasons to expect adoption of suspended animation (or in the case of someone with what is now considered a REALLY serious condition, suspension) will take some time and not develop at any rate close to instantaneous once we can do suspended animation. The more radical a medical technology, the longer it will take for general acceptance. When we really consider what could be done in more than a year, we begin to raise some quite radical possibilities. And we're not going to be able to hide those possibilities behind the smokescreen of medicine. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14329