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


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