X-Message-Number: 20735
Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2002 09:33:34 -0800
From: "John Grigg" <>

Subject: It's good to be rich, rich, rich(especially when promoting life 
extension)!

Yvan wrote:
It was upon a time in the rich familly Ewinger a newborn baby, called Robert. 
The world was comming out of WWI, and petrol started to be an important 
ressource. The Ewinger familly had plenty of it and young Robert had a bright 
future well defined: He will be a business lawer and will use its knowledge 
expand the familly power over all the Texas and beyond.

When at the university yet, Robert Ewinger choose another way: he wanted to 
become a scientist and studied maths more than laws, that was not in the 
familly taste. Then he got a far more strange idea: Live a very long life, 
may be an infinite one. WWII was ending and the petrol business of the 
Ewinger fammilly was booming. Robert saw that he will be death before science 
could make this dream true. So he got another idea: Why not freeze a corpse 
so its decay is stopped? It could then wait for a sufficient science progress 
so that to live again would be possible. Robert wrote a book, then another, 
surrely someone in the state would be interested... Nothing came.

There was only one solution: The fight directly the familly and use this 
money to make things happen. In five years, tens of billions of dollars was 
spent in the cryonics "adventure". 100 000 researchers worked full time in 
the labs of Robert Ewinger, they found some strange things. 1950: discovery 
of the genetic code, 1955 discovery of stem cells able to regenerate an organ 
indefinitely. 1957: Cloning, ... At the dawn of the third millenia a 
young-looking man ponder on his past 80 years of life: Cryonics has succeeded 
but it will be used only for very special cases. For big accidents for 
example, in more usual cases cell control seem sufficient to get at least 
some millena longevity.
(end)


Yvan, I loved your "flight of fancy" in exploring what might have been.  It 
really caught my imagination!  We would certainly be much farther along with 
medical technology had their actually been someone like Robert Ewinger(or would 
we??).  This idea would make for a great science fiction short story or even 
novel.    


I remember Carl Sagan saying in the Cosmos series how had the Persian empire not
conquered and intellectually stifled several Greek colonies along present-day 
Turkey, that the developing concept of the scientific method in those places 
might have taken hold and lead to people having a technology hundreds of years 
beyond what we have now!  Of course we might not have had the corresponding 
ethical development to go along with it and that would be a very scary thought.


I am still surprised there are not at least a dozen men out there, much 
wealthier than even Saul Kent, who are totally dedicated to extreme life 
extension research.  I cringe to think about all the money wasted in this world 
due to greed, mistrust and misplaced priorities.    


I suppose social pressures and a feeling they have already lived the "good life"
to the max stops the super-wealthy from seriously considering such a venture.  
But perhaps in a decade or two we will see some of the planet's aging 
billionaires take a good look at what is coming down the road and decide "it's 
time to move forward in a big way before I die and miss it."  We will see.  

best wishes,

John

 


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