X-Message-Number: 17232 Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 10:07:43 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: comments on 2 issues discussed Hi everyone! I've finished and sent off the latest copy of PERIASTRON and now come back to Cryonet. For those who have never looked at an issue, I can mail you one issue for $3.00 US; there are 6 issues per year and you can subscribe for any arbitrary number of issues. But as for the recent comments on Cryonet: 1. About religion and cryonics: Religion and cryonics have nothing to do with one another. We see this already when we read about the advances in reviving people with stopped heart and breathing. Right now with suitable equipment and drugs (and the right circumstances) it can be done after 10 minutes, not the 5 or 4 minutes people used to talk about. Where is the discussion of religion when this is done? Basically we looked at the situation and decided that IF someone had been frozen in the right way, then their revival might wait literally for centuries. Even if it hasn't been done in the "right way", it still raises the question of revival. After all, we hardly understand ALL the things that could happen to people. People are not closed systems: what happens to them comes not just from their physiology but from events in the Universe around them. Right now we face a variety of problems such as cancer and heart disease, but there are many others which might arise. Car accidents could not happen until cars existed. Spaceship accidents have only just started. All this does not mention what might happen with the control of living things we will have. I am not talking about aging but about the dangers of existence which everyone faces. (Yes, we can make them less frequent, but if we live longer even events that take 200 years to happen become much closer to us). Religion is just as irrelevant if we don't RIGHT NOW know how to cure a condition as it is if we do ... so long as the condition may someday have a cure. The fact that various religious people argue against cryonics merely tells us that they misunderstand it completely. I include the Pope in this comment, too. 2. What happens to people when they become old? Several commentators seem to accept this as automatic conservatism and lack of interest in new ideas. The basic idea here is that these people are responding as they do because they have lived for a long time. There is another way to see it. They respond as they do because they have little future life to expect. Someone with such a condition clearly will not take up any activities which will take longer than their expected future, and would hardly adopt a new ideology on their deathbed. Unfortunately the examples given of how aged people respond bear little relevance (if any!) to how someone who WILL NOT AGE might respond. The examples given are all of AGED PEOPLE. While I personally believe that someone who does not expect to age will take on a much LESS conservative attitude, and seek out new ideas much more, we have no such person to test this on, right now. I will add, however, that even if as people got older (even without aging) it does not follow that they must inevitably take the conservative approach. After all, if we can fix aging itself, fixing any issues like a refusal to adopt new ideas will become just as easy. More to be said on the recent comments in Cryonet, but that will be all for now. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17232