X-Message-Number: 22929
From: 
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 10:15:18 EST
Subject: Posterity Paradox

Randy Wicker writes in part:

One thing which puzzles me about those who dream of hundreds, thousands, 
millions cryogenically preserved.
Why do they assume anyone would be interested in reviving them.  Perhaps a 
few special people would
appeal across the ages.  However, if you could go out into a country 

graveyard (even Arlington Cemetery) and bring back all those buried there, would
you 
want to do it?  What about their need for housing, food and jobs?  Don't you 

think a social debate about reviving so many of the dead would lead to a social
debate in which many would argue it was more important to take care "of our 
own", those living now, instead of burdening an overpopulated with revived 
"additional people"?
This has been discussed many times at great length in various venues. I'll 
just note a couple of aspects here very briefly.

Prospective patients rely on the honor and good will of the people in their 
organizations and sometimes their own relatives and friends; and they rely on 
society's interest in maintaining its own viability. This means, among other 
things, that contracts must be honored. 

The "value" of unusual people, or even interest in them, is nonsense in the 
long haul. In the relatively near future, Einsteins will be a dime a 

dozen--maybe they are already, judging by what I read in the journals. Any 
individual 
ultimately has special value only to himself and those near him. The survivors 
will be mostly self-selected--evolution in action, as Larry Niven used to say.

The question of rational values, and of the relation between values and 

ethics, is much too large for brief discussion. But many philosophers have taken
absurd positions, e.g. that potential people deserve as much consideration as 
the living--or even that rocks have rights. (That we can help or hurt possible 

people of the future, and that this should weigh in our decisions, is sometimes
called the Posterity Paradox. "What has posterity ever done for us?")

Robert Ettinger


 Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22929