X-Message-Number: 31394
From: Mark Plus <>
Subject: Alcor's problematic "Notable Quotes" page
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 20:57:36 -0800


I realized recently that this year marks the 40th anniversary of the first 
manned landing on the moon. 


The irony strikes me, for the Apollo missions did not lead to any follow up in 
manned space travel. Nobody anticipated that we'd send men to the moon just a 
few times to establish dominance over the Soviet Union (which had apparently 
already renounced its moon ambitions by then), and then stop progress in the 
technology indefinitely. The last Apollo mission, Apollo 17, visited and left 
the moon in December of 1972, and nobody has traveled beyond low Earth orbit 
since.


Which means that people today aged 40 and younger have no memory of the moon 
landings, so the Apollo program to them lacks the emotional significance it has 
to those of us who remember watching the moon missions on television. From 
hindsight it also looks technologically pointless.


Yet Alcor has a webpage titled "Notable Quotes" which references the statements 
of space travel skeptics as an apparent "argument" for cryonics:

http://alcor.org/notablequotes.html


The implicit reasoning seems to run along the lines of, "Prestigious 'skeptics' 
have dismissed both cryonics and manned space travel. Events have discredited 
the space travel skeptics. Therefore (?) events will dismiss the cryonics 
skeptics as well."

This almost looks "fractally wrong," but I'll make a stab at analyzing it.


First of all, the two situations have nothing to do with each other. The 
discrediting of the space travel skeptics implies nothing about the feasibility 
of cryonics.


Secondly, as I indicated above, the Apollo program didn't lead anywhere. Does 
the forced
comparison imply that Future World would try to resuscitate only a few

cryonauts as an expensive, government-funded, prestige-generating stunt, and 
then lose interest in
saving the rest after the stunt has served its purpose?


And thirdly, the U.S. has a median age of a little under 40, so more than half 
the current population has no memory of the moon landings. Why try to connect 
cryonics to an event which happened so long ago that it no longer sounds 
"futuristic," or even believable according to the obsessives who engage in moon 
landing denialism? (I guess denialism suggests the analogous idea of cryonics as
a hoax or scam.)


Indeed, why try to connect cryonics to any model of futurology which might sound
weird or absurd in a few years, like That '70's/'80's/'90's Transhumanism, or 
its current incarnation, Singularitarianism?


I hope when Alcor finally gets its act together under its "trophy CEO," it will 
try to reframe cryonics in a way that appeals to younger people who don't find 
their fathers' futurology so compelling. ("Jeez, Dad, you expected to have a 
flying car driven by a robotic servant by now? And nanoassemblers in the 
basement to make whatever you wanted? And a cure for aging? What the hell were 
you thinking?")  Eliminating or substantinally rewriting that "Notable Quotes" 
page would help. 


I suspect the increasing hostility towards cryonics that I've observed lately 
derives in part from the perception that it comes from an exercise in bad 
futurology in the 1960's, much like the propaganda back then about the imminent 
conquest of space following the moon landings. Connecting cryonics with today's 
mainstream scientific and medical research will go a long way towards distancing
it from the paleo-future and restoring its respectability.



"Around 2010 the world will be at a new orbit in history. . .  Life expectancy 
will be indefinite. Disease and disability will nonexist. Death wll be rare and 
accidental -- but not permanent. We will continuously jettison our obsolescence 
and grow younger." F.M. Esfandiary, "Up-Wing Priorities" (1981).
http://www.box.net/shared/static/ay9lub60ha.pdf
http://www.scribd.com/doc/10948503/Up-Wing-Priorities


Mark Plus



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