X-Message-Number: 8378 Date: Wed, 16 Jul 1997 01:17:10 -0400 From: "Andrew S.Davidson" <> Subject: Nagging questions >I have been contemplating signing up with CryoCare or Alcor for a long >time, and wonder why I, a person not otherwise prone to procrastination, >continue to defer making this decision. I am in a fairly similar state. My thinking is that, as I am 45, I have about 20 years before the problem becomes pressing. If I die before then it will probably be unexpected and so difficult to recover from. >It's not the money. As soon as I started to contemplate this, I >purchased a life insurance policy that will cover it. Ditto. I could pay the cost of suspension out of savings right now but there is no financial incentive to pay up-front in this way. I am surprised that cryonics orgs don't offer this choice, given their current need for capital. Some legal problem with insurance company licensing, perhaps? >Is my analysis incorrect? I've found that standard argument for cryonic >suspension (Some probability of revival is better than none) is weak if >the probability of satisfactory revival is no better than 1 in a >BILLION, which I estimate. It still works for me - it's nice to have some comfort that death is not necessarily the end. What's stopping me is the faction fighting in Cryonics - the key players seem too flaky. >1. Cryonicists seem to ridicule "simple cloning" as far less desirable >than suspension followed by revival. It would seem to me that "simple >cloning" followed by a "reeducation program" in which the archived >record of the person's memories, experience, etc., were told to the >person upon revival is a reasonable alternative: You come back with a >guaranteed healthy physical copy of the person. Given my >already-starting-to-fade memory, seeing my personal archive of memories, >etc., might not result in too great a loss from my current self. What >am I not understanding? Perfect recovery of identity is impossible - you cannot step into the same river twice. Your scenario is a reasonable fall-back to me - one step up from living on through your descendants. The question is, is it worth financing, given that it is likely to be of comparable cost to current cryonics? >2. What's the current thinking on the pros and cons of CryoCare vs. = >Alcor? A good question. Andrew Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8378