X-Message-Number: 4708
Date: 03 Aug 95 00:17:45 EDT
From: Mike Darwin <>
Subject: Part II Sweep of History and Odds 

CONTINUED FROM SWEEP OF HISTORY AND ODDS PART I
To recap where we left off:

So, what is the prudent course of action to take, or at least where should
cryonicists take their cues from?

One way of looking at the problem is from an engineering standpoint.

Technologically, financially, and socially what cryonicists are seeking to do is
to establish hardware, software and financial and other reserves equal to the

task of allowing "metabolically inactive" people to survive.  They must in short
create a  framework which will stand the test of time and, very importantly,
must function dynamically, not passively, consuming energy all the while, to

hold those without the ability to expend energy for maintence of their structure
to reach a time when they can recover this ability, and the associated
attributes of life which go with such  recovery.  In order to do this cryonics
organizations must anticipate, as best they can, routine failure modes,
day-to-day requirements, and extraordinary "loading" events or crises.  They

must look at worst case and best case scenarios and arrive at a reasonable point
between the two consistent with their resources.

Various cryonics groups have chosen both widely different overall strategies to
achieve these ends, as well as very different implementations of specific
approaches.

I will not belabor the point with many specific examples here.  Any reader
conversant with the various groups can see the larger differences.

What are some of the events of the past that give us information important to
the survival of both cryonics groups and individual patients?  And what are the
fundamental limitations of our ability to predict which groups will succeed and
which will fail?

Engineering is good guide to start with.  In the early days of iron bridge
engineering catastrophes were common.  One bridge in three failed within a
decade of being built, and the failure modes were not always obvious, or even
predictable given the knowledge of materials science and physics at that time.
For instance, a significant cause of Iron Bridge failure was resonance induced

parasitic oscillations introduced by military troops marching over them in step!

All kinds of problems began to surface as more and more iron bridges were put
into operation that were not apparent to the engineers building the bridges.
This is a pattern which is extremely common in the implementation of new
technologies and will be seen to result in disaster time after time.Several
major contributing causes to this kind of disaster in implementing new
technology (or old, for that matter) is pressure from the customer to build the
bridge or structure at the lowest price possible, and overconfidence of the
engineer, or political pressure applied to contain costs which leave the
engineer no maneuvering room.  Overconfidence comes from working with new
materials and seeing the strengths and obvious advantages, without also seeing
the accompanying weaknesses. Political maneuvering to contain costs, well, that
comes from a form of stupidity common to us all which hardly needs exposition
here.

Iron bridge failure rate became so bad in England that a special working group,
mandated by Victoria herself, was convened to determine the source of the
problems and, if possible, find solutions.  I have read the report of that
committee.  It  bears a not accidental and rather sickening similarity to

Richard Feynman's Appendix to the Roger's Commission Report on the Space Shuttle
Challenger Accident (you can download this report from the Compuserve Web Page
under the 'Science' heading).


One of the first things the Iron Bridge Committee concluded was that  inadequate

safety factors were a major problem.  Indeed, this was one of the first times in
modern engineering history that attention was paid to the NEED for safety
factors and to debate over what they should be.  Conclusions of the Committee
were that a minimum safety factor of 3 to 6  times anticipated expected peak
load was necessary to stop the collapses from occuring.

So, one of the first questions you should ask yourself in evaluating a cryonics
group is what kind of safety factors do they require for their financial
minimums and what kind of contingency/redunancy factors do they have in place
both in terms of equipment and personnel in confronting nonfinancial

emergencies. And, how did they arrive at them? (In other words, show your work!)

The other factor identified as critically important to the safety of  iron
bridges was MAINTAINENCE.  Iron Bridges, unlike stone bridges, are relatively
dynamic and while easier and much less costy to build, require on-going
maintainence *in addition* to being "overengineered" for anticipated peak loads
by at least a factor of three.

The analogy here to cryonics is simple:  Patient's funds need to have extra

capacity over the anticipated marginal costs of treatment and storage.  Further,
these monies must be supplemented by active addition of income, independant of
interest income, in order to deal with the inevitable depradation of the
currency and various other forms of theft (lawsuits, government attempts to
outlaw the practice, attacks by hostile special interest groups, etc.) which
will occur over the likely time course of storage. 

The history of fixed funds providing steady-value income over very long periods
of time bears out this observation.  Yes, there are exceptions, but then when
you go examine casino activity in Las Vegas there are exceptions to the general
rule that, on average, considerably  (and quite consistently) more people lose
money gambling than win money, and by a wide margin!

Recently,  Bob Ettinger said I accused him of fraud in the past over the issue
of CI's minimum charges.  I can't recall specifically doing this, but Bob is

right that I have strongly criticized CI policies in this regard.  CI's minimums
are based on very tight computations of the marginal costs, continued reliance

on volunteer labor, and virtually no safety factor in financing as far as I have
been able to determine, other than the largesse of overfunded patients.

Perhaps looking at what has happened to engineering will be instructive.  No
competent engineer in his/her right mind has built bridges with little or no
safety factors, or without appropriate anticipation of parasitic oscillation,
wind shear, etc. as a potential source of structural failure.  This does not
mean that such badly designed structures don't still get built: the Verazzano
Narrows Bridge failure is notorious, rivaled only by the recent Hyatt Regency
mezzanine collapse disaster.

Indeed, the overall incidence of structural failure, particularly for new
materials/designs, has risen in recent years.  The rise coincides nicely with
the adoption of hand-held, powerful calculators by a new generation of
engineers.  Older engineers had to use slide rules, and thus were not only
unable to carry the decimal point out very far due inherent limitations in
slide-rule accuracy, but were also mistrustful of the accuracy of slide-rule
obtained numbers in the second slot of the decimal place.  This lead them to a
slight, but significant margin of "over-engineering."  Further, materials
specifications were not called out (again by use of computers) to .0000

tolerances, making pre computer/calculator engineers much more conservative than
their latter day computer equipped brothers with bolts and I-beams carrying
specs to .000 or better tolerances!

So,  what's the bottom line? Engineers who do not follow the Universal Building
Code and/or common sense practices for building in safety factors are hauled

before courts for both civil and criminal action when their structures fail.  In
ancient Babylon the Code of Hammarabi called out the penalty for someone who
built a structure which collapsed and killed some: death..

There are no generally accepted safety margins for obvious, identifiable
elements central to the operation of cryonics organizations.  In the absence of
such factors, and in the absence of feedback (buildings collapsing, bridges

falling, and lives ruined or lost)  there will be a slipperly slope.  This slope
will get slipprier and more precipitous with passage of each year and the
occurence of each cryopreservation from which there is no feedback.  This gives
special urgency to the development of clear, objective, easily agreed upon
biopreservation method(s) such as either full functional return of brain
activity (suspended animation for the brain) or very high fidelity gross,
histological and ultrastructural preservation, even if such techniques fall
short of full reversibility.

Perhaps I should end by quoting from the opening and closing of Feynman's
Challenger disaster  report:

Introduction:

It appears there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a

failure with loss of vehicle and human life.  The estimates range from roughly 1

in 100 to 1 in 100,000.  The higher figure comes from the working engineers, and
the very low figure from (sic NASA) management.  What are the causes and
consequences of this lack of agreement?  Since one part in 100,000 would imply
that one could put a shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only

one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in
the machinery?"

We have also found that certification criteria used in Flight Readiness Reviews
often develop a gradually decreasing strictness.  The argument that the same
risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for
accepting it again.  Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again and
again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to
delay a flight because of their continued presence...

Conclusions


If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be
done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative
certification criteria to guarantee a very safe vehicle.  In these situations,

subtly, and often without apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered
so that the flights may still be certified in time.  They therefore fly in a
relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent
(it is difficult to be more accurate).

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of
failure is a thousand times less.  One reason for this may be an attempt to
assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the
supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true,
demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and
their working engineers.

In any event this has had very unfortunate consequences, the most serious of
which is to encourage ordinary citizens to fly in such a  dangerous machine, as
if it had attained the safety of an ordinary airliner.  The astronauts, like
test pilots, should know their risks, and we honor them for their courage.  Who
can doubt that MacAuliffe was equally a person of great courage, who was closer
to an awareness of the true risk than NASA management would have us believe?

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a worl of
reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough

to be actively trying to eliminate them.  They must live in reality in comparing

the cost and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they
must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty
of the projects.  Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules

that have a reasonable chance of being met.  If in this way the government would

not support them, then so be it.  NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks
support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make
the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.


For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations,
for nature cannot be fooled.

--Richard Feynman

I don't know how to say it any better myself. 

Post Script

While I discuss CI here specifically in responding to Bob, I believe all
cryonics groups to varying but significant degrees carry these risks.  Further,
I believe that the likely success of ALL cryonics organizations is low for
reasons both well understood but unaddressed, as well as for reasons currently
unimagined and unimagineable.  Complexification of human civilization leads to
fragility at the top of the structure, where frozen patients and the

organizations caring for them must necessarily reside.  While there is redudancy
in many different parts of contemporary civilization, there is also universal
vulnerability and increasing liklihood that enabling technology capable of
ending this civilization will be developed and carry with it the possibility of

comparatively easy and inexpensive deployment,  either through malice, insanity,
or accident.

Mike Darwin


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