X-Message-Number: 22893
From: "David Pizer" <>
Subject: We are alone
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 13:32:08 -0800


The other day I mentioned that in my bioethics class at Arizona State University
they made me feel like I thought I might know what it felt like to be a Jew on 
the way to the death camp.  After reading some comments from the Venturist 
Discussion net I want to modify that a little.  The people who run the bioethics
movement now actually think they are preventing ways to extend your life a long
time, or attempts at physical immortality, to help you, by helping the human 
race (which you are a part of).      Actually I now would say they made me feel 
like a Jew in a boxcar being sent to the Death Camp by a well-meaning Nazi.  
"Here, let me help you up David, watch your step getting into this box car, I 
would want you to hurt yourself on you way to your (final) destination."


I know that examples like this are inappropriate in normal discussion and I 
would not try to make this point outside this forum.  But taking this bioethics 
class has opened my eyes to just how much opposition there is to cryonics and it
is not just from uneducated people who don't understand how the science might 
work.  The people running the bioethics movement now are mostly well educated 
people (a lot of them are college professors) who understand about cloning, stem
cells, nanotechnology, they know it might work and they are creating powerful 
arguments against physical immortality (although they don't call it that yet) 
that will convince other people to support their views against our goals.  My 
point in this present campaign is just to make as many as my cryofriends aware 
of the potential challenge to us, (by powerful opponents) as we get big enough 
to attract more attention.


We need a powerful explanation, similar to the one Brian Wowk came up with years
ago when we still thought cryonics was the technology of reviving dead people 
in the future, and Brian said something like, frozen people are not dead people 
- their cells are alive - if they get reanimated in the future, then they never 
were dead.  That worked wonders in our favor.  Now we need something along that 
line to support physical immortality, which is the honest position for most of 
us to take.

David Pizer

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