X-Message-Number: 6229 Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 00:12:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <> Subject: Re: "One life is enough" My understanding of the "terror management" aspect of the refusal to deal with death in a rational way is simply that death is a terrifying reality that most people refuse to contemplate. Since death is all around us, people who don't want to actually think about it develop ways to "think around" it: dead people are "laid to rest". "Little Jimmy is probably playing baseball with Jesus in Heaven right now" etc. In other words, death is not death. Asking people to seriously consider cryonics involves asking them to seriously consider the alternative: actual final and irrevocable termination of themselves. Leading authorities, role models and opinion-makers are just as loath to do this as anyone else - maybe even more so, to the extent that they care about superficialities rather than serious realities. Once enough people choose cryonics that it becomes a normal procedure, and people don't have to actively consider it, they will be able to opt for it without having to deal with the possibility of their mortality. My suggestion to hasten this is to encourage it to become a normal medical procedure in a hospitals. This cannot happen before it becomes a normal medical procedure in a couple of progressive and respected hospitals. This in turn can be encouraged by having cryonicists concentrate their requirements and demands on a limited few hospitals, rather than every cryonics procedure originating at a different hospital. And this can come about when cryonicists live in closer communities. Of course, that means that I ought to move out of Chapel Hill, NC, to Phoenix or the Bay Area or wherever. I'm considering it, but it's not likely in the immediate future. Ultimately, of course, the popular acceptance of cryonics *will* happen. Always optimistically, Robin HL Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=6229