X-Message-Number: 31479 References: <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #31467 - #31472 Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:41:49 -0400 From: re Message #31467 From: "John de Rivaz" <> References: <> Subject: Re: how many people have never heard of cryonics Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:48:50 -0000 All this discussion about religion declining (or not) and suggestions that if certain people are given lots of money for publicity they could somehow get lots of sign ups seem to miss one thing. How many people are there that have never heard of cryonics? Once someone has heard of it, they can very easily find out more without ever disclosing their interest to anyone. The fact that few people have signed seems to me to be very unlikely to be due to unawareness. John has it completely right. The problem with contemporary cryonics is not that people are unaware of us or even uninterested. There are millions world-wide who know approximately who we are and what we are trying to do. Many would like to believe that it is possible but they don't, and its certainly not because they lack information. They just don't belive it, and why should they? The real problem is that we don't yet have a credible message. Despite the plausibility of the case made best by Ettinger in his original book, it is now 45 years and counting, and we are still unable to revive a single animal organ like a heart or a kidney. Suda's experiments have not been replicated and are now therefore suspect. Cryobiology continues to ignore us and makes progress at a crawling pace anyway. Our perfusion materials are horrendously toxic and our perfusion methods are grossly inadequate even under the best of circumstances. Vitrefication is an untested though plausible theory even though we can't achieve even this without severing the head. Nanotech for biological repair remains a far-off pie-in-the-sky sort of solution proposed by a guy who won't even sign up himself.Our two organizations which actually have a history and capability of holding remains in deep cold are small, understaffed, and underfunded for the full range of tasks and services they are supposed to perform. The prospect that either will be able to sustain itself and continue to hold members in suspesion for the two to three hundred years required to bring the kind of progress we imagine is very doubtful, given the history of instability and failure of past cryonics providers. Beyond this there are more and more questions which can be raised, good scientific questions which require answers. I am one who believes fervently in the expansive future of humanity which will almost certainly include lives commonly extended to hundreds of years, who can say how many? I suspect that there are many more people, probably hundreds of thousands, who share that particular belief. Of these a much smaller number wishes they could somehow partake of that future which is surely at least 100 years away as this is written. Of these there are some, maybe thousands, who think they can do this by either starving themselves or taking one or another chemical concoction in various doses. These people are deluding themselves and they are being led on by crackpots and snake oil salesmen. I will not name them. Then there are people, rational people who think maybe there is an outside chance that it could work under ideal circumstances, but they have to weigh the costs in money, alienation of family, inconvenience, and perhaps even legal hurdles, against a very doubtful if enticing ultimate benefit. Who is to say they are not being reasonable in today's world to decide to give that same $30,000 or $50,000 or $150,000 to a deserving wife, son, daughter, nephew, or worthy charitable cause? That is what we are up against, folks, so what do we do besides what we have been doing? We make incremental improvements in procedures, in the stability of our existing organizatiojns, in the complicated and many tiered delivery system, above all in the research that makes the whole thing seem more plausible. As we do these things we will start to attract more members. If we make a breakthrough on organ preservation, a lot of people will begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We should look first of all to the cryobiologists. We should support their efforts even if they hate us for it, and we should be constantly looking over their shoulders. Organ transplant is a big business, a big service industry supported by a constantly advancing medical science. Sooner or later they will want to have viable frozen organs at their disposal. That is the ship which will probably bring us home within the next few years. Meanwhile, we need to keep the faith with ALCOR and CI and strengthen them in any way we can. I think that in promoting our cause we need to be both hopeful and realistic. If our friends and neighbors come to realize that we are not crazy, some of them may join us. Ron Havelock --- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=31479