X-Message-Number: 21260 Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 17:55:11 -0800 From: "John Grigg" <> Subject: Re: Trouble on the horizon for Alcor? Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 12:48:55 -0800 From: spike66 <> Subject: Re: Trouble on the horizon for Alcor? To: Reply To: John feel free to cross post this to cryonet. John Grigg wrote: > ... > > The author of this article is stuck in very conventional > modes of thought. Of course he is, however those who are stuck in conventional modes of thought are those who cause the most trouble for Alcor. I had some ideas which I think can help everyone to win. Please read on. > Alcor is much too expensive and time > intensive to be a cold storage mausoleum. Alcor should look into becoming exactly that: a mausoleum. Let it get whatever legal status a mausoleum has. Let it sell itself as just a mausoleum. {They might already do this.} That the bodies are frozen is immaterial to the fact that these are hallowed grounds, with human remains present, etc. Let Alcor get the same superstitious benefits that any cemetery enjoys. > Meanwhile, no one with close ties to Williams was allowed access to the lab > as Williams' body hung suspended in a giant cylinder. > > Hamon couldn't accept that. OK, this seems like an easy one to solve, without running up the cost too high. Make dewars that have the right dimensions to allow the patients to lie horizontal, just like they would in any cemetery. I can't imagine this would be all that technically difficult. Get plaques that say Here *lies* the Splendid Splinter, etc. Allow the same access as an ordinary mausoleum would allow. Let us deal with superstition the way a surfer deals with waves: dont fight it, ride it. Seems to me you could even place the corpsicles in "coffins" of sorts, smaller than the traditional ones, custom fit so as to not use up a lot of room in the dewar. Then if the proles get jiggy about several bodies sharing the same dewar, one could argue, no, each has its own coffin. They share the same liquid nitrogen in the same sense that everyone in the cemetery shares the same soil. If it makes people feel better, we could even place the dewar underground, so the families could imagine their ancestors are buried. Please indulge me in one more comment on upside-ism. As one who has talked to a number of innocents about cryonics, I can assure you that these minor points do matter. Those of you who are trained in christian lore, recall that when the Apostle Peter was to be crucified, he asked to suffer the ignominious fate of being hung upside down. This practice was intended to heap further shame upon the prisoner in his final hours, but Peter requested this because he felt he was unworthy of the honor of being crucified in the same manner as Hoerkheimer Christ. Be that as it may, Alcor really needs to rethink the upside down posture, even if it makes sense from a technical point of view. And failing the coffins in the dewar bit, perhaps us a body bag, so as to satisfiy the squicked yahoos that think that it matters. {Again, they might already be doing this or something equivalent, but it did not come out in the hysterical news article.} It is in the best interest of all of us to protect Alcor and its sister organizations from these kinds of criticisms raised by uninformed or misinformed proles, for we all know we have an inexhaustable supply of these kinds of people, and plenty of lawyers with nothing to do and plenty of news organizations eager to print all the news thats fit to sell papers. spike _____________________________________________________________ Get 25MB, POP3, Spam Filtering with LYCOS MAIL PLUS for $19.95/year. http://login.mail.lycos.com/brandPage.shtml?pageId=plus&ref=lmtplus Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21260