X-Message-Number: 29366 From: "marta sandberg" <> Subject: My journey to cryonics Part III Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:39:12 +0800 I knew that Helmer needed to rest a lot so I had bought a couple of books to have something to do when he slept. One of them was 'Engines of Creation' by Eric Drexler. The first book on nanotechnology. It hit me like a sledgehammer blow. With my background in mathematics (and a keen interest in science in general) and the practical mind-set of an engineer that I had absorbed from Helmer, I recognized that this was not a pipedream. It was a blueprint for something that would happen, and it was starting right now. I alternated from abject fear to incredible hope. My world has changing; new frightening/tantalizing possibilities were opening up. Then I came to the chapter on cryonics. Drexler had very cunningly sneaked up on the subject. First, he talked about the medical possibilities of nanotechnology. He dealt with emergency medicine, outlining how in the future it would be possible to stabilize a body with nanomachines to suspend all life signs until the patient could be bought to a hospital where real healing could take place. Finally, he asked how far away that technology was. His answer. . . you can divide the problem into two parts - stabilizing the patient and healing the patient. We can do the first part right now by freezing people and then wait for medicine to catch up with the problem of healing them. WHAM. I was stunned. It made sense. There must be a catch... All in all, it was a wasted holiday. I never got around to catching a single trout. Helmer and I did some gentle nature walking when he was up to it. When he slept or rested, I read and thought. This time I was ready to accept cryonics. A lot had changed since the last time I became thought about it. To begin with, I knew I was mortal. There are few things that can bring that point home to you quite as forcefully as sitting beside the man you love and hearing a machine breathing for him. Whoosh...click...whoosh...click... Knowing that in a few hours the doctors will turn the machine off and he will stop breathing. I think that most people avoid cryonics because they don't like making arrangements for their own death. In the same way, they never quite get around to writing out a will or telling their family where the life insurance deeds are kept. Well, I knew I was mortal and so was Helmer. I also knew that death is a complex thing, not the on-off switch that I had imagined. When the doctors said that Helmer was dead, they had been right. His body was not functioning and it was totally shut down. Even with the most extreme and painful methods, they could not elicit the slightest response from his brain. Most of his other systems had also quit. No life signs, nothing happening. One by one, I watched how they quivered back to life. I had developed a gut feeling for the difference between 'information death' and 'functional death'. That is one of the hardest things to grasp about cryonics. And now the final hurdle (to me) was solved. Whenever I had read about cryonics before there had been a lot of vague hand-waving about 'future medicine' that would solve all the problems that cryonics created. But apart from a lecture in inevitable progress of technology, there had never been any solid blueprint given for how this might happen. Deep in my soul, I am a very practical person and I couldn't become excited about cloud castles. Nanotechnology was real. It built its dreams with solid atoms in provable ways that any biochemist would appreciate. That I could believe in. _________________________________________________________________ Advertisement: Your Future Starts Here. Dream it? Then be it! Find it at www.seek.com.au http://a.ninemsn.com.au/b.aspx?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fninemsn%2Eseek%2Ecom%2Eau%2F%3Ftracking%3Dsk%3Ahet%3Ask%3Anine%3A0%3Ahot%3Atext&_t=754951090&_r=seek&_m=EXT Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=29366