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 
 


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