X-Message-Number: 8088
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 20:50:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: Olaf Henny <>
Subject: CRYONICS CryoNet #8081 (Mike Perry); #8031 (Mike C.)
>Again to Olaf Henny: you say "The notion of immortality is
>at this time ridiculous anyhow." I disagree, but I think I understand
>where you're coming from, and I've devoted a lot of space recently
>to airing my point of view, so I'll close for now.
I was hoping that crack would quietly slide into oblivion, but it
appears, that you won't let me off the hook. ;-)
So here is that bit of a soap opera:
Scott Painter a.k.a. Mike C. started it all with:
Message #8031
From: (Mike C.)
Let us stop calling it immortality.
They are jealous of us using the meme.
Call it indefinite longevity,
or better yet help me think of an extremely technical term
in an obscure language.
If they do not know what we are talking about
they may not argue as much about it.
I replied in Message #8052...:
>> Let us stop calling it immortality.
"The notion is at this time ridiculous anyhow.",... agreeing with
him, I thought.
However it got me the following reply from Scott:
Mike C. in Message #8060:
>The notion is at this time ridiculous anyhow.
Olaf, please do not ridicule me
for wanting to avoid using a word
which may inspire negative reactions from religious.
Calling it living, longevity, or survival
may avoid accusations of "playing God".
Avoiding negative reactions is important to me;
The fewer enemies I have the more secure I feel.
It is a sugar coating.
The first reference to my crack from *you* came in Message #8064
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 97 15:34:42
From: Mike Perry <>
CPR was not the same as overcoming the aging process,
which is where we are aiming with cryonics. I question
whether saying we plan to overcome aging will not have
much the same effect as "those ridiculous assertions of
immortality" (not always ridiculous, in my view).
*Nevertheless,* I'll concede *we must proceed with cau-
tion.* Events in Canada are a cause of concern, both for
that country and, in view of the precedend it sets, the world
at large.
This entered my left ear and slipped right back out the right one.
;)
But now to the 'pregnant' phrase itself. The context was the
image of our group with the general public.
We have 3 different basic approaches in cheating death>
1.) The extension of life with replenishment of hormone levels to
those experienced in our youth, calorie restriction, vitamin
supplements and similar actions, which might gain us about 20 to
30 years. In view of the fact that we gained about that amount of
life expectancy during the last century, this makes sense and is
conceivable to most.
2.) The concept of accomplishing an indefinite life span is a lot
more 'exotic to weird' to most. You load on top of that the
prospect of achieving this end through cryopreservation and you
will increase the 'weird factor' exponentially. ***Veerry** hard
to digest for the guy next door. You are now definitely loony-
suspect.
3.) Now comes the concept of immortality. I have learned of
enough instances in the past, when the impossible over time
becomes the mundane. Flying without feathers is one of those.
While the defeat of aging and sickness will open the prospects of
an indefinite life span, it will not eliminate accidental death.
I understand, that at this time with aging and sickness eliminated
our life expectancy would be about 1600 to 1700 years. Of course
with a medical technology, which conquers the first two factors,
restoration after an accident would also be greatly enhanced. So
maybe our life time will be expanded to 5,000 or even 10,000 years.
That would still leave us nowhere in sight of immortality.
To demonstrate my point, please read the following story a friend
sent me several months ago:
*************************************************************
Subject: CRYONICS DARWIN AWARD
Date: Tuesday, 18 June, 1996 06:50
This is from the "Art Bell" Radio Show. Art is a talk radio
show host in the SF Bay area:
"You all know about the Darwin Awards - It's an annual honor
given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by
killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way.
This year's winner is:
The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal
embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex
of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash,
but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene.
The lab finally figured out what it was and what had happened.
It seems that a guy had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit (Jet
Assisted Take Off - actually a solid fuel rocket) that is used to
give heavy military transport planes an extra "PUSH" for taking off
from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the
desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached
the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed and fired off
the JATO!
The facts as best as could be determined are that the operator
of the 1967 Impala hit JATO ignition at a distance of approximately
3.0 miles from the crash site. This was established by the prominent
scorched and melted asphalt at that location. The JATO, if operating
properly, would have reached maximum thrust within 5 seconds. The
driver, soon to be pilot, most likely would have experienced G-forces
usually reserved for dog-fighting F-14 jocks under full
afterburners, basically causing him to become insignificant for the
remainder of the event. However, the automobile remained on the
straight highway for about 2.5 miles (15-20) seconds before the
driver applied and completely melted the brakes, blowing the tires and
leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface, then becoming
airborne for an additional 1.4 miles and impacting the cliff face at
a height of 125 feet leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the
rock.
Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable; however,
small fragments of bone, teeth and hair were extracted from the
crater and fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece of
debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel.
************************************************************
If you can put that fellow back together complete with *all* his
memories, I will concede, that you have true immortality. Oh I
know, that you could possibly in future implant a memory chip in a
fellow's brain, which might be able to record all sights, thoughts
and emotions, and download these from time to time into a
permanent storage, and you could possibly restore the fellow from
DNA samples which you scraped from the hillside and implant all
the information contained in his permanent data file.
You would then have 'sort of' restored the man with all the
memories up to the last down-load sort and arguably 'preserved'
his life (with the best part, the ride down the road missing).
***You would at best have immortality with an asterisk***. I said
memories would be time distorted and not fading toward the past,
as ours do now.
As far as my 'ridiculous' assertion goes, I would like to point
out, that I qualified it with 'at this time' and used it in the
context of calling anything we propose to do as aspiring
immortality. If there is now any serious scientific research
under way toward immortality, I have certainly not heard about it
and must at this time classify it as science fiction/speculation.
To talk at this stage in any serious context about immortality,
would only invoke incredible general resistance to *anything* we
try to achieve and likely spawn calls by the populace for our
being committed to an institution for delusions.
About 95% of the reasonably educated public (98% of the general
public) have never even heard of the notion, that anybody alive
now could achieve an indefinite life span, let alone contemplated
it. We, who deal with thoughts about this every day, must not
forget how strange or even absurd this all must sound to the
uninitiated.
Olaf Henny
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