X-Message-Number: 22896
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 06:46:50 -0500
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #22891 - #22894

TO Dave Pizer:

The real issue, it seems to me, is that of whether we should bother at
all with bioethicists. We're unlikely to convince these people of the
virtue of our plans; so just how seriously are they taken by society
at large? By bioscientists who might do something about our problems?

Do you think any ordinary person, when faced with his dying mother,
would listen to a bioethicist tell him about the merits of death?

TO Randy Wicker:

What you say is all very well, but how old are you and what are the
health problems from which you currently suffer? For that matter, how
often have you barely escaped death by accident? (One thing to remember
is that even if the average lifespan is X, then that fundamentally
means not that you will live to over the age of X, but that you have
only a 50% chance of living over the age of X --- as the suspension
of several recent younger cryonicists shows).

Moreover cryonics is no more a Ponzi scheme than life insurance is
a Ponzi scheme. You buy life insurance when you're healthy, and hope
that the companies providing it will not have gone out of business
when (NOT IF) you become unhealthy because no body continued to
buy it when they were healthy.

As for inflation, given that the cryonics society is taking care of
you, it will be able to continue to do so with a probability similar
to that in which a life insurance company will be able to pay off.
After all, the price of suspension will grow less over time even if
the number of suspension patients remains constant.

If you really don't want to accept cryonics, that's fine with me. I'd
feel sorry, but know that I was feeling sorry because of how I would
feel in your position and not of how you feel. And if there were some
way to convince you otherwise, which there never is, then I'd do it.
And if in your last breath you still think we're engaged in a Ponzi
scheme, so it will be.

           Best wishes and long long life to all,

                 Thomas Donaldson

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22896