X-Message-Number: 26386
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 10:13:39 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: cryonics will never be medicine

For Flavonoid:

I did not join Alcor (the cryonics society of which I am a full member)
even though I did not know whether "cryonics" would work. I joined
Alcor (and before that, ACS, known as BACS when I joined it) because
it provided a chance at great longevity while no other set of ideas
looked to me as if it provided such a chance, --- though many claimed
to do so. To decide against cryonics because it might not work looks
at the problem of death from a totally deluded perspective: you are
choosing annihilation on the ground that cryonics might not work!

Moreover, cryonics will NEVER be seen to work on everyone,  because
there will never be a time in which EVERY "FATAL" CONDITION will
be curable. We have advanced over the last 100 years, quite definitely,
but that advance has also created risks which simply did not exist
100 years ago. Your jet airflight might crash; you might get too
much radiation by a mistake by an X-ray technician. New drugs, 
particularly, can cause pathologies, sometimes in a small enough
number of patients that they're not noticed until use of the new
drug becomes widespread. For that matter, even working in a skyscraper
when terrorists blow it up would be something completely unimaginable
by someone 100 years ago (1905).

If you insist that cryonics work like an ordinary medical treatment,
it never will. I think that because new conditions and threats will
never stop coming, we'll always face an uncertainty about whether
or not we can be revived. At the same time, we'll also live far
healthier and longer lives, but new risks will not disappear as 
long as we keep advancing in the universe. And funny: if we all
retreated into our imagined universes in which everything is lovely
and beautiful and kind, we'd die off even more quickly than if
we continue to deal with whatever threats the universe sends to us. 

Finally, I don't really know if you yourself believe what you're
saying others believe. Perhaps you too have been a member of a 
cryonics society for years. But, unfortunately, I doubt many will
join until they see what I am saying here: that the choice is not
between cryonics and continuing to live your normal life, the 
choice is between cryonics and annihilation.

            Best wishes and long long life for all,

                 Thomas Donaldson

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