X-Message-Number: 21985
From: "Rafal Smigrodzki" <>
References: <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #21973 - #21982
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 11:22:19 -0400

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "CryoNet" <>

. I did read years ago that a 'think tank' somewhere came to the conclusion
that
> the standard of living in the United States in the year 2050 will be only
marginally better than
> the standard of living in China today, The reason: depletion of oil! What
will this entail for cryonics.
> Probably not much, except that progress in all fronts may slow down and
fewer people out there
> who could afford cryonics. Thank you Mark Plus for your interesting notes
over the past several
> days.

### Think tanks are notorious for being able to come up with any prediction
you ask them to. Depletion of oil is such an irrelevant issue, with
essentially unlimited availability of cheap energy from other sources, that
even assuming there is no technical progress whatsoever (a hopefully quite
unreasonable worst case scenario), its disappearance would not change our
lifestyle at all.

The true risk for cryonics might be financial instability due to the
progression of political involvement in the economy (in effect, a shift
towards a central command-and-control structure). We shouldn't get
distracted by trivia.

Rafal

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