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.

_________________________________________________________________
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