X-Message-Number: 5825
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #5689 - #5692
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 1996 09:35:16 -0800 (PST)

Hi again!

About the problem of disasters and annoyances in cryonics: so long as an active
cryonics society exists, able to watch over and repair any damage to the 
dewars, I doubt that any purely natural disaster will have much impact at all.
Yes, a lot of attention has gone into fail-safe processes, among which are
the idea (a good one) of having the dewars in holes in the ground rather than 
upright above-ground. The aim of these measures is NOT to provide permanent
protection; their aim is to slow down any loss of LN or other event which might
damage patients, slow it down enough that the cryonics society PEOPLE can get
to the scene and fix the problem.


To focus purely on physical protections is to badly misunderstand the whole idea
of cryonics. It is the cryonics societies that will be responsible for your
revival, not any vague "society at large"; and similarly the cryonics societies
will be responsible for your preservation. Given that enough safety measures 
have been put in place so that the needed margin of time for people to arrive
and fix things remains, the chief problem to long term storage lies in the
persistence of cryonics societies.

I would be the last to claim that cryonics societies, or even any particular
society, will last for the time it takes to revive their patients. Yes, there
are problems here, but they aren't really problems of earthquakes, fires, etc
but instead problems of how well cryonics societies will achieve (at a minimum)

the TOLERANCE of society at large. (And tolerance, rather than total 
acceptance,is all it will really require). We do, of course, hope for much more 
than 
simple tolerance, and it's true that more and more people are signing up ---
but it may be 30 years before we grow enough to have visibility like that of
other movements. And even those who have not signed up show more and more
willingness to help out in suspending someone who has. We have a good chance
of founding something which will last the required number of centuries --- 
and for 1996, that is really the best that we can expect.

Certainly I'm in favor of taking physical precautions, and if some new idea
for such precautions comes along, we should look at it carefully. But the
real grounds for believing that storage will continue does NOT consist of 
any physical precautions. It consists of PEOPLE and their devotion to the 
cryonics idea.

(Parenthetically, I will add here my opinion that much the same stand should
be taken toward storage of nuclear waste. It is absurd to expect that ANY
physical precaution, short of throwing all the waste into the Sun, will 
prevent some kind of leakage. So long as people are around to break into the
storage sites, you have a leakage problem. Thought should go towards making
a facility that will be easy to keep a watch on, rather than making one that
will last for 50,000 years. And maybe after much less than 50,000 years we
really will either find a use for this "waste", or a way to send it into
the Sun... either event a good outcome).

			Best and long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson


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