X-Message-Number: 22906 From: Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 22:22:32 EST Subject: Living forever and inflation Maybe we don't want to live forever but the beauty of perfected cryonics would be that you could live in an era as long as you liked and when you got bored you could Sleep again for a given number of years or until things changed. So maybe you'd live -- awake -- from 2100-2110, 2300-2320, and 3100-3101... So long as you believe the future will change, and probobly improve, there is no reason to terminate your experience. Could anyone, no matter how tired and disgusted with life, *not* want to at least try out life in 5000 AD? In The Time Machine, Wells had his hero go all the way forward to where the sun was burning out and big crabs controlled the world. This is sensible, since Man has always wanted to explore all the way to the end of things. Of course Well's hero could go back again. Time travel may or may not be possible even in the remote future. But if you get to the end and find the sun exploding and everything bleak, you can still terminate your life then. But why would you do it before? As for inflation and CI, the discussion of inflation is forgetting progress. In 50 years we'll have robotics to do the preparation of the body, or even a production line if cryonics becomes popular. Two million people die every year in the US. Can you imagine preparing and freezing so many bodies *without* mass production? Mass production at minimal cost has always been our thing -- why would we fail to develop it for this? And with volume and time, costs almost always fall. When VCR's first came out they cost around $1100, or maybe $5000 in today's money. Now they cost less than $50, literally a hundredth as much. Or, if you'd budgeted $1100 in 1970, then even with four or five times inflation since then, you'd still have 22 times as much as you needed. We should at least consider this factor when we discuss inflation. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22906