X-Message-Number: 30231 From: Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 07:03:07 EST Subject: Re: CryoNet #30225 Timothy Leary predicted "immortality" by n... From: Mark Plus <> Timothy Leary, who had cryonics arrangements for several years until he cancelled them before his death in 1996, predicted in his 1977 book "Neuropolitics" that we'd have "immortality" or "eternal life" (his words) by now. Scroll down to pp. 150-51: Leary has never been someone really serious on such subjects, He was more a LSD snifer than anything else. The real problem is not with media oriented predictions, playing on such number as "the year 2000" and similar 21 st century miracle, it is ablout looking at realistic look of the fact. For example, I have unpacked recently my cristal ball to see the future of hypersonics flight. It seems the scramjet is now taken seriously, the first flying demonstrator, the X51A must be tested soon, may be 2009 - 2010. There may be a recoverable platform in 2012. The first cuise missilewith ram-scramjet motor and speed up to mach 5 - 6 may be at the 2015 horizon. Now, when to hope for a London to Sydney 2 h travel? Studying the economics, of the project (The European Space Agency has put $15 millions in paper cutting on the subject) I think it is very unlikely that such a plane will be built in the 21st century. A supersonics Conconde successor would be in order in the 2040 at the sooner, a transonic may be built in the 2025 at the earliest. Cryonicists today might want to distance themselves from these embarrassing predictions of attaining "immortality" by the first decade of the 21st Century made by Leary, Robert Anton Wilson and F.M. Esfandiary. But the fact remains that for many years we hobnobbed with these bohemians, read their books, invited them to speak at our conferences and liked the fact that the promoted cryonics. We even had turkey roasts at Leary's home. Today some of us have apparently switched fan allegiances to living prophets of "immortality" like Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey. But how embarrassing will their forecasts look in another 20-30 years? Mark Plus New names, same idea with poor study of the background society, economics and technology. Progress is not an automatic conveyor belt, if you want something, work and pay for it! I am interested in amateur rocket science, I think a pintle injector must be put on the shelf, so that any amateur individual or group can pick it up and use it in their desing. I have received the machine-tool for producing the mold for casting the main element, I don't bother to predict when that piece will be produced by the mere advance of progress. I don' want to wait. Happy new year. Yvan Bozzonetti. Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=30231