X-Message-Number: 4848 Date: Wed, 6 Sep 1995 05:52:44 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug Skrecky <> Subject: a little bit of permafrost Ben Best has given permission for me to upload my past articles from Canadian Cryonics News to the Cryonet for your amusement. I will do this one article at a time and will include some comments where appropriate to help clarify the topics of discusion. Most of the CCN articles deal with my preliminary investigations into alternative preservation techniques. Comments are welcome. First I would like to thank Ben for stimulating my interest in this area with his article entitled "Cryonics: A Way to Defeat Death", which appeared in the June 1990 issue of Mensa Canada Communications. He talked mostly about cryonics, but made a brief mention of the 1988 permafrost burial in Inuvik, up in Canada's North Western Territories. This made a big impression on me and I wrote the following, which subsequently appeared in the Sept/Oct issue of the same newsletter. Cryonics: A Way to Defeat Death? (A Halfhearted Rebutal) By Doug Skrecky Die, freeze, thaw and then live again. I'll admit that I found Ben Best's talk about permafrost burial in the June issue of MC2 intriguing. The popularity of traditional religions has always rested on their promise of eternal life. Now Cryonics claims to offer even the religious skeptic some hope of resurrection from the cold hard ground. Is there any real hope that Cryonics could work? Fifty thousand year old Mastodon carcasses have been discovered in glaciers, though none of them have got up and walked away when warmed up. The frozen bodies of two buried sailors from the ill fated Franklin expedition look remarkibly well preserved -for mummies. However even using expensive state-of-the-art perfusion techniques to minimize cellular damage Cryonics still amounts to little more than freezing dead meat. Massive and irreparable damage would occur long before the freezing "ceremony" even commenced. You might as well skip the expensive perfusion rigamarole. Lets face it; Cryonics has only a one-in-a-million chance of working. Cryonics may have a place in the scheme of things - but as a burial option and not as a realistic method to defeat death. With nothing to lose you could state in your will that you wish to have your corpse thrown into a glorified meat locker at the funeral home and frozen instead of being cremated. I imagine used car salesman could profitably be retrained to sell Last Chance Cemetary burial plots under the frozen tundra. As funeral costs need be no greater than with traditional interment procedures even a hypothetical one-in-a-million chance of revival should be an easy sell. If in a few centuaries Last Chance Cemetary is bulldozed to make room for another suburb what would we really have lost? We would already have been long dead. Anyone interested in a Cryonics lottery ticket? .....The hilarious thing about this article is that I am told that it prompted a used car salesman to contact Ben about selling permafrost burial plots. Ben did not encourage him..... EOF Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4848