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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=847