X-Message-Number: 2545
From: Tim Freeman <>
Subject: CRYONICS
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 94 20:42:27 EST

From: Stephen J. Van Sickle <>
>Contrary to dozens of SF stories on
>this theme, I believe that if immortality were handed to them on
>a silver platter, cost and pain free, scientifically proven beyond
>a shadow of a doubt, most people would not accept it.  To do so
>would mean not only destroying many very basic beliefs, but also
>accepting that the loved ones that they have seen die are really, 
>truely gone.

I agree with you so far...

>For this reason, I believe that cryonics will never grow much more
>than an order of magnitude larger than it currently is.

Two disagreements with this:

First, there are 250 million people in the US, and a thousand or so
participating in cryonics.  I don't see any way to make a limit of 10K
people be any more intuitively plausible than 1M people; both are an
insignificant fraction of the population, although 1M people is enough
to make some very strong organizations.

The limit you have in mind is based on the assumption that the the
attitudes of the herd are a constant.  This obviously isn't true; big
changes in the attitude of the herd can happen in a decade or so.
Compare the moods of the 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's.  Maybe the 00's
will be the decade of radical medical technology.

Tim 

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