X-Message-Number: 15233
Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2001 10:46:04 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #15226 - #15230

Robert Ettinger writes:

> The 21CM workers now have gone beyond VS4 to alkoxylated compounds, and for
> all I know beyond those, so all of the above is somewhat moot.

Yes indeed, we can agree on this: The work which you are denigrating is
now moot--i.e. irrelevant. So, why bother to denigrate it? Surely you are
not so mean-spirited that you want to belittle vitrification research just
because your primary competitor can offer vitrification to its members,
while your organization cannot?

Philip Rhoades writes:

> point of unsustainability - tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal
> habitation didn't do this - if you like they had a more "socialist" system

It is foolish to laud aboriginal cultures uncritically. The spread of
primitive people through the Americas coincided with the extinction of
several species. Slash-and-burn policies are inflicted primarily by
peasants rather than large corporations. There is every evidence that
primitive people would cause more environmental devastation if they were
empowered to do so, and one of the world's worst polluters, the old Soviet
Union, did it under a regime of centralized social planning. While the
capitalist system has racked up its own score of environmental disasters,
large corporations today are kept in check by the knowledge that they can
be sued. Such powerful checks and balances to not apply to large
government agencies.

> - the US with about 5% of the world's population consumes about 20% of the
> worlds resources - how does this scale up?

> Why does it have to be India or Africa? Most of the world's environmental
> problems are caused by first-world countries - so if you want to resort to
> these silly population arguments then I would say that the world would be a
> lot better off with 100 million fewer Americans than 100 million fewer
> Africans.

The United States produces a higher ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide than
the global average, largely because its managed forests are a more
efficient generator of oxygen than rain forests--known as "jungles" before
they were romanticized--where decay processes cause oxidation. The US is
in fact doing more than most nations to reduce global warming, purely as a
result of its topography.

As for the population issue, a high birth rate is always a more powerful
determinant of population growth than a lower death rate, because when
people have more children, those children have children, tending to create
an exponential growth rate. For Shift magazine last year I wrote a piece
describing my interactions with population groups, none of which had ever
considered the possible effects of a lengthened maximum lifespan. In fact,
so far as I could determine, no population scientist has ever modelled a
future in which maximum lifespan exceeds its current level. Since a
population simulation is a fairly easy program to write, I did it myself,
using the cohort-component method. I found that the net growth caused by a
gradual doubling in maximum lifespan could be balanced easily by a
continuation of the trend toward lower birth rates.

You are of course aware that all over Europe, the number of children per
female lifetime has fallen well below replacement level (as low as 1.2 in
some nations). No centralized system was required to enforce this. People
have chosen freely to have fewer children as their economic situation has
improved in conjunction with lower child mortality rates--often enabled by
capitalist regimes. Third-world nations also have seen sudden reductions
in birth rates, as they pass through the "demographic transition" toward
smaller families.

For life extensionists, most of whom live in nations where birth rates are
low, population is not an issue. For cryonicists, it has never been an
issue. The maintenance of a cryopatient for many decades costs less than,
say, the maintenance of a terminal cancer patient for one week, and uses
resources that are relatively plentiful.

--Charles Platt

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