X-Message-Number: 847
Date: 23 May 92 02:16:38 EDT
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: Re: cryonics: #838 - #841

Dear Ralph:

Thanks for your comments about CRFT. Fundamentally, I agree with the idea
that more human interest would help out a lot. I do want the scientific
issues treated SOMEWHERE, and want them to be easily available, but just
how that is done doesn't matter very much to me at all.

But being "slick" isn't the same as human interest. What I sense on reading
CRFT is a quite halcyon view of the future. I doubt very much that anyone
living now will really form a good idea of that future, even as close to us
as 200 years from now. Sure, we all have ideas, and they can be interesting
to talk about, but anyone who has read science fiction written in the 19th
Century or other futurist expectations written long enough ago will guess
that with our rather weak predictive powers, the real future will turn out
quite different from what any of us may have thought. What would bother me

us is an attitude (even more so if that attitude is implicit!) that all
our problems will be solved and we will all dance away happily into 
infinity in companionship and understanding.

The only doctrine about the future that cryonics has is that it will come.
It seems to me that the central message of cryonics isn't about the future
that will come at all. It is about going to jail for the sake of patients
you have never met, working long hours to put out the word to those few
people who would be ready to hear it. It is about a collective, determined
attempt to defeat death through science, technology, and all the acts you
yourself mentioned: going to jail included. It is about REFUSAL TO GIVE UP.

In those terms human interest might consist of descriptions or interviews
with people who are actually doing cryonics. If those people say (or are
asked) a little about their ideas for the future --- or even if they 
simply admit that they have no very precise ideas about the future ---
that's all the better. But cryonics is about people living today. And
someday, I hope, when we are all revived, we will see all the ideas we 
had about the future as unreal fluff compared to the true future that we
are all working to reach right now. Cryonics is about the future that WE
CREATE, not about the future which comes to us.

				Best and long life.
					Thomas Donaldson

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