X-Message-Number: 4681 Date: Thu, 27 Jul 95 17:11:04 From: Derek Ryan <> Subject: Long Term Stability of Cryonics Services Providers From: Derek Ryan To: Cryonet Re: Long Term Stability of Cryonics Service Providers [CAUTION: THE HUMOR IMPAIRED MAY WANT TO SKIP DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST! (I.e., The section beginning after the asterisks.)] As you all know, Eugene Leitl recently asked the following question: >What mechanisms/policies are currently used to counteract >potentially disastrous emergencies? Some of us (myself included) gave a few of our thoughts about it, but I see now that it would have been useful for all of us to have refrained, since Mike Darwin, being in a most generous and giving mood, went to great lengths to answer for us anyway. Although Mike also gave a brief answer of his own at the end of his post, I see that he held back, and didn't really say everything he felt. (My own opinion is that Mike might become a much happier person if he could just learn to express himself. ;-) So, in the spirit of giving and generosity, I thought it might be nice to return him the favor and answer the above question for him the way he really meant to. . . Fortunately, Mike has given a great deal of thought to the issue of disastrous emergencies. He has performed countless hours of research, and run literally a couple of minutes of simulations using nothing but some dirt, a stick to draw with, and a few well chosen hieroglyphs. Here are the conclusions he reached: 1) Sadly, Mike is the only cryonicist around capable of imagining anything but Nanotechnological nirvana arriving within the next 50 to 100 years or so. He alone realizes that relentlessly advancing irrationality and hatred for all mankind will combine to increasingly destabilize the world. Furthermore, he understands that no amount of technology in the world (no matter how small) will ever be able to make you appreciate modern art. 2) Mike is also the only cryonicist who isn't a science or computer nerd. He's the only one who has ever cracked a history book (having had the foresight to see the evil nature of "Programming In Fortran" early on in life, and to wisely shun it thereafter.) As a consequence he is the only one of all of us who sees the world as a whole in any meaningful context. 3) Mike is one of the few cryonicists to have been born before the era of almost unbounded technological progress. This means he was smart enough to have read Tacitus, Gibbon, and Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples, to have understood the heights to which Middle Kingdom Egypt reached (cultural and technological), and to have read William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples and other good histories which explain in sufficient detail everything we need to know about why huge problems like the middle ages occurred. 4) Mike is also one of the few cryonicists who knows anything about the dinosaurs. Fortunately for all of us, he possesses both the wisdom and humility required to imagine things which cryonicists can't control, things capable of snuffing out 90% of all the life on earth in one fell swoop. We're lucky that he's not gullible enough (like the rest of us) to actually believe that dinosaurs and men will be contemporaries again in five years or so, or that dinosaurs have already been secretly cloned. 5) We all know that Viet Nam was as close to economic disruption as we cryonicists have ever come. It's (again) fortunate that Mike was the only one not sucking his thumb when this went on, or busy chasing cheerleaders around the high school football field. Were it not for his negative experiences with government controls during that time, none of the rest of us would ever realize that governmental influence could possibly be harmful to cryonics. 6) The most effective way of dealing with the problem (according to exhaustive stick-in-dirt analysis) is to gather all cryonicists into one large, central group where Mike can scare the hell out of us, talk about the awful, ever downward sweep of history, and shake us out of our Nanotechnology (capital N!) induced stupor. 7) All failures should always be discussed continually, and they are much more important than successes. Were it not for the rogue madman Mike Darwin, none of us would ever mention that, other than Bedford (whom Mike Darwin and others "rescued"), nobody who was frozen prior to 1973 is still frozen. Nobody would mention, even now, in this, the most dangerous, strife ridden time in the history of man, that the roughly $180K Bedford set aside for his care was eaten up dealing with manmade crises. Furthermore, the roughly $1 million spent to fight the bureaucrats or accommodate them in California and in Arizona in order to go about the business of freezing people would be left largely unmentioned. 8) As soon as possible, Mike Darwin's helpful perspective on all issues should become the central, featured content in all cryonics organizations' literature, since (even though what Mike has written is REALLY watered down compared to what he actually THINKS) his unflinching pessimism is clearly the best way to interest others in cryonics, and to make advances on all current obstacles to success. 9) Mike is one of the VERY few cryonicists to have ever traveled to corrupt 3rd world countries or to have visited the former Soviet Union, and thus he is one of the VERY few to have any idea about things like Mordita, corruption, systematic beating and killing of people with slightly divergent views, and what a dictatorship is all about. The awful thing about this kind of ignorance (which Mike is so fortunate to have been educated out of) is that it makes us unable to detect creeping tyranny in our own society, or to see that it could possibly have an effect on cryonics. 10) Utilizing his patented, revolutionary stick-in-dirt method, Mike (and Mike alone) has realized that the WORST possible approach to dealing with the problems Mr. Leitl cites is to TURN CRYONICS INTO A RELIGION. Sadly, work is already well underway to achieve this end, and it appears that even the problem of not being able to write the liturgy in anything other than Pascal or Unix (which would mean that lots of people who only understand Basic would be cut off from Salvation) will soon be overcome. ********************* END HUMOR Mike: I wonder why you persist in denigrating the ENTIRE cryonics community this way. You know how I (for one) feel about your research, and you know that there are many others who also think it is VERY IMPORTANT. If you believe that the best way to shake those who don't feel this way out of their "stupor" is to ridicule and insult them, you are mistaken (IMO). Indeed, I can think of no better way to alienate those most likely to support cryonics research than to describe for them in torturous, dripping sarcasm why they are wrong about everything you believe they think. Besides, you know full well that what you say isn't true. You are not the only one doing research. You are not the only one interested in MORE research. You are not the only who wants to minimize his time in suspension (or avoid it altogether). And you are not the only who realizes frozen time equals risk time. We all want to improve our chances as much as possible, and we all (even the ridiculously demonized Ralph Merkle) realize that improving the technology itself is one of the best ways (if not THE best way) to do that. Sincerely, Derek Ryan Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4681