X-Message-Number: 6725 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: Re: CryoNet #6712 - #6717 Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 22:43:59 -0700 (PDT) Hi again! About Brian's reply to me: I may well have misunderstood some of what he said before about support for research. Clearly some kind of organization is needed to support ANY research, and so far the cryonics societies have been the only organizations available. I hope that Prometheus becomes an organization with members for all the different societies, and if it does then we can talk about support of research by ALL cryonicists. However, given the many things that we all must do just to keep cryonics going, I would still not say the situation was "shameful". Not good, certainly. Not helpful, not as forward-thinking as we should all be. But then we're hardly speaking of a large group of people. It's very heartening to me that Paul Wakfer's call has gotten so many to pledge already. Finally, about the course of Prometheus itself. I agree with Brian that we should definitely keep in mind the possibility of other, better technologies than vitrification. HOWEVER, one complaint several people on Cryonet have made about Prometheus is that it simply proposes to (figuratively) throw money at the problem, without any real idea of what to do. And those such as Brian Shock who raised such a problem weren't really doing so out of an urge to be negative (I think). After all, it's one point Bob Ettinger made, too. The real issue, and what is most important if we want to raise money towards this goal, is that we have a project with some real flesh to it. Vitrification is that flesh, and a project to pursue brain vitrification has enough focus for us to say, reasonably, that it will either succeed clearly or fail clearly if only we provide the fundi In that sense it WOULD be like the moon landing project, while simply asking for money to study improved means of preserving brains is too broad. (To see this point, of course, requires some knowledge of vitrification and GF's work on it). I suggest that the focus of Prometheus be vitrification, but that we also remain watchful of other means of storage. Even during the Apollo project NASA looked at different kinds of propulsion, etc etc. And in the end we may do space travel by other means (lots of interesting ideas have been suggested, most of them requiring, to be economic, a need to send millions of tons up into orbit). If vitrification can be made to work, then we'll have something to build on. And it should be possible to show that it simply won't work in less time than 5 years --- if that turns out to be the case. Then we'll have to choose something else. After all, 20 years from now we may have several different ways to preserve brains so that they can be easily revived. What we need now is just ONE way. And, of course, if Olga or someone else comes up with something which looks much better and more likely to work than vitrification BEFORE WE START PROMETHEUS' RESEARCH then we should change. But doing so afterwards is a good way to waste lots of time and money. Long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=6725