X-Message-Number: 4671 Date: 26 Jul 95 16:10:17 EDT From: Mike Darwin <> Subject: Re: Long Term Stability of Cryonics Service Providers Eugene Leitel writes: >Very few commercial companies can boast a continuity in decade range, >not speaking of those having persisted for a century or two. Cryocorps >being but few, low finance and providing a highly controversial service >to a small community of eccentrics (that's how the majority sees it), >seem to be easy prey even for minor economical disturbances, thus >rendering their services quite worthless, as a patient off storage >is not a patient anymore but thawed meat. >What mechanisms/policies are currently used to counteract this >potentially desastrous emergencies? >-- Eugene I'll be happy to answer this question. Cryonics societies have given a great deal of thought to this issue, performed countless hours of research, run literally thousands of hours of simulations on both Cray XMP and HAL 9000 computers. Here are the conclusions they have reached: 1) Most of their members/customers are so doped-up with over the counter optimism (which they dispense freely) that they are incapable of imagining anything but Nanotechnological nirvana arriving within the next 50 to 100 years or so. In the meantime, computers, relentlessly advancing rationality, and the milk of human kindness will all combine to increasingly stabilize the world. Further, the formation of small groups to prepare the world for the dowsides of nanotecnology will be effective in keeping everything hunk-dorry through a time when little things can be made that will crawl into your brain and make you appereciate modern art. This, despite the fact that no matter what is done the world won't even know what nanotechnology is till after its kicked it in the b----s. 2) ALL of their customers are science or computer nerds who've never cracked a history book in their life (they had a copy of "Programming In Fortran" tucked into the jacket of their world history books during high school and college). As a consequence almost none of the customers sees the world as a whole in any meaningful context. 3) MOST of the customers have been born in an era of almost unbounded technological progress. They have never read Tacitus, never read Gibbon, never read Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, never understood the heights to which Middle Kingdom Egypt reached (cultural and technological) and never read William McNeill's Plaugues and Peoples or any other good histories which explain why little problems like the middle ages occured largely independent of human stupidity or mismanagement... 4) Most cryonicists don't know anything about the dinosaurs and those that do are so arrogant that they cannot imagine anything which they (cryonicists) can't control, snuffing out 90% of all the life on earth in one fell swoop. A corollary is that some cryonicists unlike Creationists who believe that dinosaurs and men were contemporaries, actually believe that dinosaurs and men will be contemporaries again in five years or so, if they don't already believe that they've been secretly cloned already. 5) Viet Nam was as close to economic disruption as anybody has come in the US who comprises the bulk of the customers. They were all sucking their thumbs when this went on, or busy chasing cheerleaders around the high school football field. In fact, it might be instructive to note that Viet Nam almost cost one patient getting frozen. Dear Richard Nixon and his dear old Objectivist buddy Alan Greenspan had instituted price controls (Phase IIII or Phase IV, I can't remember which) and petrol rationing circa 1973. A colleague and I had a patient who was down in a small town in Maryland. They (the entire town) were OUT of their alloted ration of gas. The only way we could even MOVE, let alone fuel the Cessna to fly us out of there was to bribe some locals (we didn't do this directly, the pt's son did: the family was VERY influential in this town: they ran the liquor store). Otherwise, we would have been screwed, or more precisely the pt would have. And that was only Vietnam!!!!!! Incidentally, you, *all* of you, are STILL paying for that war and the "cold war" the went with it. What this means is that ALL of us are certainly a lot pooer than we otherwise would have been. What this means is that people who would have been making 30K a year instead of 15K would be able to freeze their 90 year old grandmothers. What *that* means is that economic disruption is already costing "patient" lives, lots of them. But then these "deaths" or noncryopreservations are not seen as related at all. Again, as the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises so aptly pointed out: this is the problem of that which is SEEN versus that which is UNSEEN. 6) The most effective way of dealing with the problem (according HAL 9000 analysis) is to get cryonicists into small, local groups where they can hold each others' hands, talk about the grand and ever upward sweep of history, and mentally masturbate each other 'bout the coming Golden Age of Nanotechnology. 7) Failures are not discussed. Except for an occassional rogue madman like Mike Darwin, no one mentions that, other than Bedford (whom Mike Darwin and others "rescued'), nobody who was frozen prior to 1973 is still frozen: they all got thawed out. Also, nobody mentions that even now, in this peaceful time (unless you live in Bosnia and your first name is Mustafa) the rough 180K Bedford set aside for his care was eaten up dealing with crises (manmade!). Furthermore, the roughly $1 million (not my estimate) spent to fight the bureaucrats or accomodate them here in California and in Arizona in order to go about the business of freezing people is largely left unmentioned. 8) As soon as they can, the last traces of Mike Darwin's madness (=depression=lack of perspective=jaundiced view of what a nice place the world is) will be removed from the literature of cryonics organizations using what Mike Darwin wrote on these subjects (which, even Mike Darwin will concede, was REALLY watered down compared to what he actually THOUGHT). 9) VERY few of the customers have ever been to corrupt 3rd world countries, ever visted the former Soviet Union or its "client" countries and thus have no idea about things like Mordita, corruption, systematic beating and killing of people with with slightly divergent views and what a dictatorship is all about. The nice thing about this kind of ignorance is that, if you wait long enough, you won't have to travel to see it first hand. It will come to you. By way of example we just did 7K in SIMPLE construction at the lab: the regulatory bill (permits, extra drawings, etc.) was 3K. A lot of this was FEDERAL. Go figure. 10) The Cray XMP and the HAL 9000 working together have decided that the very BEST approach to dealing with the problems Mr. Leitel cites is to TURN CRYONICS INTO A RELIGION. Work is already well underway to achieve this end, but the problem is that no one seems to be able to write the liturgy in anything other than Pascal or Unix, and this means that lots of people who only understand Basic will be cut off from Salvation. So, there you have it: that is the top ten list what most of the cryonics societies are doing to solve the problem at hand. Oh Yeah, a few crazy people are trying like hell to develop suspended animation (reversible cryopreservation) so that they spend the absolute MINIMUM amount of time possible in the hands of the people who practice 1-10 above, and their noncryonicist cohorts who, due to equal, creeping, unrealism destroy productive societies on a clockwork like basis and plunge humanity into chaos, often accompanied by darkness. Have a nice day :) Mike Darwin Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4671