X-Message-Number: 24854 Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 10:54:55 -0400 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #24826 - #24839 Lots of things in this Cryonet worth replying too: 1. To Doug Skrecky: If I understand rightly, you live in Vancouver, in Canada, in the area ruled by the only government which forbids cryonics societies totally -- British Columbia. When you say we will all be "dead" by age 110, just what do you mean? Would we qualify as "dead" in your terms if we've been suspended using vitrification, but were first declared "legally dead"? Or are you saying something much stronger, that none of us will be successfully suspended and ourselves and our personalities and our memories will be destroyed before we reach the age of 110? Have you studied vitrification at all? And especially to the point, have you made arrangements with ANY cryonics society? 2. For Mark Plus: You know or should know that if the price of petrol ie. gasoline becomes high enough we'll make it from other things than oil coming out of oil wells. I've mentioned on Cryonet that a company already exists able to make oil from mined tar sands; when it was internationally boycotted, South Africa made gasoline from coal. These are perfectly well established technologies which wouldn't even need much research to implement NOW. And of course thinking longer term, several companies, including several auto companies, have created cars which run on fuel cells, either completely or with a gasoline engine to start up the car. Buses and trucks running on hydrogen already exist. So what is your purpose in raising these silly fears? They do no more than distract some people from supporting needed research for cryonics, most particularly the technology involved with vitrification. 3. For B. Coetzee: When we begin to talk about lifespans of trillions or even billions of years, we find ourselves in the midst of cosmological questions for which we presently have no answer. However, I will point out that literal immortality is logically entirely possible. Instead of having a fixed deathrate, however small (how small we make it determines how long we'll live on average) we can easily imagine a situation in which we have a deathrate which decreases constantly with time. It's mathematically easy to show that with such a decreasing deathrate, some people will live literally forever. How fast the deathrate decreased controls the proportion of people who live forever. There will, of course, remain a large or small fraction of the number of people who die before they reach that immortality ie live for a finite time only. Given this point, some consequences: no one will actually know EVER that they'll live forever. Perhaps they'll find themselves in the unlucky fraction. Again, if we propose to constantly decrease human deathrate, then this means that research to extend lifespans continues forever too. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24854