X-Message-Number: 15856
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 22:30:10 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Re: Motivation

David King, #15846, writes

>Hi, I was explaining my interest in cryonics to someone and they asked an
>interesting question that I couldn't answer. They asked, "What would be the
>motivation for future generations to re-animate me?"


It may be that not everyone in the future will have this interest, but it 
seems a very good possibility that some will (I will even say many). I 
certainly intend to (but someone else who has this interest may have to 
reanimate me!). I don't think we will be that rare. People can be 
interesting. People with memories of the past should be especially so. It 
will be interesting to see into what advanced beings such people develop, 
along with the rest of us. There are many reasons to want to reanimate 
someone, when you think about it. Indeed, it should not be hard to become 
obsessed with this idea. The world of the future will be very different 
from ours today in some ways. Hopefully, such things as the self-sustaining 
life-support system will be available to all. You will be able to do much 
more of what you want to do with your life, rather than being constrained 
to some "daily grind." It should be possible to enhance your powers, 
including mental abilities and ability to feel joy and meaning. In a world 
like that, people will still seek what is rare and hard to get, such as 
living, functioning people of the past. Today there is an organization, the 
Society for Venturism (http://www.venturist.org -- though right now the web 
site is a bit limited), that is determined to see that some people of the 
future (those in the organization, at least, but hopefully others too) 
*will* care about reanimating everyone who can be reanimated.


>... Say a hundred years from now
>the technology and medical knowledge does exist to reanimate us. But people
>a hundred years from now will have their own lives to live and their own
>problems to worry about. They may be running out of places to live on our
>finite globe with an ever-increasing population.


Highly unlikely, in my view. Who would want to overpopulate the earth, in a 
world of plenty with no aging process to worry about?


>  They may be worried about
>feeding everyone. What could you or I contribute to society a hundred years
>from now? We would be so far behind in our knowledge base we would be
>practically useless to anyone.

You should not need "knowledge" in the same way as today--see above. But I 
think you will have the means and motives to acquire it in abundance.

>I suppose we could go back to school and
>"catch up". But the question remains, what would be their motivation to
>reanimate a few hundred frozen stiffs? If we, today, had the ability to
>reanimate people who had been frozen a hundred years ago, besides perhaps
>re-animating a few for scientific and historical research, what would be our
>motivation to reanimate everybody. I can't think of any.


People ought to have a *very* strong motivation to see to it that they 
*don't* have to live in a world of scarcity in which they have limited 
lifespans, intelligence, freedom to do as they please, and ability to feel 
joy, meaning, and satisfaction in life. I expect, when it really dawns on 
people that they *don't* have to put up with these shortcomings, they will 
relentlessly pursue their elimination. What other sort of outcome would 
anybody tolerate, who didn't have to? I also think people will realize that 
they have something major to gain from good relations and harmonious 
interaction with others. This, then, will provide a motive to be 
proactively benevolent, and not simply indifferent or hostile.

Mike Perry
Secretary,
Society for Venturism

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