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


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