X-Message-Number: 19923 Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 05:01:54 -0700 Subject: reply to Michael Shermer From: Arthur Naiman <> > This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. --B_3113269314_3944918 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Dear Dr. Shermer, I thought Steve Harris was altogether too easy on you for your flippant dismissal of cryonics (recently forwarded to me by email). Your defrosted strawberries analogy reminded me of the one some guy used to put forward on talk shows years ago; he'd state, quite authoritatively, that if you froze people and defrosted them, you'd end up with nothing more than hamburger. I always thought that was an interesting choice of metaphor, since virtually all hamburger comes from steers who were conceived with frozen sperm. In other words, if what this guy was saying were true, there'd be no hamburger for him to use in his analogy. (A sperm isn't a human being, of course, but then 2002 isn't 2102 either. If it were, there'd be no need to preserve people to get them to 2102.) As a historian of science, you must know that there's a long tradition of people saying things are impossible for no better reason than their own lack of scientific imagination. Only weeks before the Wrights first flew at Kittyhawk, a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins published an article that purported to show scientifically that powered human flight was "utterly impossible.' Only a year earlier, the chief engineer of the US Navy wrote that heavier-than-air flight was "absurd." You excoriate cryonics as some sort of religion (particularly galling to most cryonicists, who are passionate atheists) but you yourself seem to belong to the Cult of Hysterical Pseudorationalism (as I like to call it), which operates on the principle that if we don't understand how something works today, it must be nonsense. It's hard to imagine an approach more inimical to the scientific method. Arthur Naiman --B_3113269314_3944918 Content-type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19923