X-Message-Number: 20243 From: Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 15:57:55 EDT Subject: Re: CryoNet #20233 - #20239 Regrading the inevitability of progress, I stand by my previous post, but my comments have been misinterpreted. It is quite possible that our present very fragile cryonics movement could be wiped out by malevolent forces at any time. We have no reason to be sanguine about that! However, in the long run the essential ideas of cryonics will not be erased from human memory. Once written and recorded, then widely disseminated, it is essentially impossible to stamp out ideas, even though it has been tried often enough. If our ideas are sound and based on an ever-expanding knowledge of science with its accompaniment of assorted applications, as I believe it is and will continue to be, then the movement will be revived and will eventually achieve success. Unfortunately, that is cold comfort [pun intended] for present-day cryonauts, both stored and prospective, because we are vulnerable, like any fringe group with radical ideas, to legal and non-legal challenges. Our frozen members have moral and symbolic value to us even though most of us probably suspect that many or all of them are actually doomed because the circumstances of their demise and the fact that our past and current know-how is so limited. My guess is that our future will not be secured until it is clearly demonstrated that whole organs of some complexity can be frozen and then thawed for re-use, most likely in the burgeoning transplant business for which it would be a huge step forward. Once those people are in the game, there will be a great expansion of both knowledge and applications for what is thankfully now a widely accepted and established socio-technical system [I saw a recent NOVA piece which clearly demonstrated this. Transplant medicine has come a long way. We, of course, will be on the periphery of all this, but the plausibility of our premise will shoot up and some establishment types will begin to come over. Then, perhaps, whoever remains frozen will be safe to be preserved very long term in their current state, however inadequate that may be. Now back to the question of 'progress' per se. Without meaning to sound too pompous, I have given a lot of thought to that subject and am in the middle of drafting a book on that very subject, tentatively entitled "The Forward Function." Others have written extensively on this subject before me and I recommend, in particular a fine, hugely researched but very readable tome by C. Owen Paepke, entitled "The Evolution of Progress" Random House, 1993. Paepke ignores cryonics, no reference to Ettinger, but it is still a hell of a good source. He is also far too pessimistic for my taste, not, in my opinion, seeing where his own research path has to lead. There was no doubt a long period in human pre-history where nothing much happened. For literally millions of years, a time frame which is hard to grasp, we were,simply what our genes dictated even though we were a very successful adaptation which managed to spread out from Africa and populate almost all the land surface of the earth before we made anything we would now call progress. Of course, there must have been an evolution of both language and social organization and probably many extinction of particular languages and social organizations along the way. That all began to change when we started to build permanent structures and started making records of what we did to pass on to future generations. Since then it has been a fairly continuous upward treck, punctuated at times with horrific wars, famines, and plagues. It is not a straight line function by any means. However, it is not nearly as discontinuous as some of you seem to believe. Take the middle ages, for example. Years ago at Harvard I took a course in the history of science from I.B.Cohen, at that time the reigning guru in that field. One thing I took away from his course was how much advance their was , particularly in technology, during the so-called "dark ages." One huge advance was the development of the first universities in Italy, France, and England. Perhaps another key item was a great advance in ship building and navigation which allowed for world-wide exploration and trade by the end of the fifteen century, but there were many other inventions and transfers of knowledge made possible by extended travel, especially from the far east which had good paper and movable type as well as the infamous gunpowder. Once we had printing and wide distribution of printed items, there was no stopping the rapid advance that followed. I am not sure there was any one key item because knowledge and invention went from a trickle to a stream to a torrent in the last five hundred years. Regarding the acceleration of progress, I haven't quite figured out how to document what I strongly believe to be true. In the mid 1980's I ran a project where we studied the early development of the personal computer, its all-important user interface and the internet, all efforts largely mounted in universities and funded by the Department of Defense. I am astounded now at the spead with which the Internet later took off from its origins almost as an academic toy dreamed up by computer nerds [the idea was to simply fugure out how one mainframe computer at one university could communicate with another of a different make and standard at qanother university.] Since then I have also become aware of the incredible advances in bio-tech which really have their origins in the Watson-Crick discovery of the double helix [only 50 nyears ago, a mere twinkle in time]. I will not go on with my 'proof' here but I think the record, if we could possibly summarize it, would clearly demonstrate my point. Now back to cryonics. One of the burdens we bear is the skepticism of our fellow humans about progress in general and science-technology progress in particular. The prevailing ethos among both liberals and conservatives is that in the long run we are DOOMED, so that the founding premise of cryonics that there will be a very bright future for human kind which we want, somehow to be a part of, is pie in the sky. Religious people may be 'optimistic' that there will be a day of judgement or something but it has no earthly connection. The secular humanists, on the other hand, are mostly consumed by a vision of the limits of growth and a fear that 'advances' in science and technology will lead to a relentless environmental degradation and untold future horrors [e.g. Kevin Costner's 'Water World.] Science fiction mostly reflects these negative stereotypes. All I can say, folks, is that these visions of the future have no basis in history. It is onbly when we look backward that we see an ever-declining level of human life quality to the meanness, unpredicability, and brevity of our pain-and-huger filled lives. Sorry for the long post Ron Havelock, CI member, hopeful for my long term future but with plenty of doubts, not about the future but whether I and my current fellow cryonaurts will be able to get there. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20243