X-Message-Number: 9104 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #9085 - #9093 Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 23:11:28 -0800 (PST) To John Pietrzak: Well, here we are. Yes, life preservers are not the same as cryonic suspension. But there are similarities in the situation I set up, and that was my point. Remember that I said you found yourself in the middle of the ocean, with a life preserver drifting nearby. Your question is whether or not you will hold on to it. Your question is not where it came from, its state of technical sophistication, or anything of that. And as you very well know, with the life preserver alone, no one can come close to guaranteeing that you will survive. Yes, in other circumstances they have helped people survive, but that is IRRELEVANT TO YOU. You have to think about whether the life preserver will help you survive where you are in the situation in which you are. And lots of people do NOT survive merely with life preservers. We KNOW that also. But then, that too is irrelevant to the question in front of you, which is what are you going to do? Basically, the situation I set up looks very similar to ours now in relation to cryonic suspension. Lots of people, including you, can ask lots of quite irrelevant questions and make irrelevant demands. No one can prove to you that cryonics will work for you --- even if we had suspended animation, just what will YOU die of? What will be YOUR situation? I grab onto the life preserver, not because I believe it will guarantee my survival, but because NOT to do so will certainly promote my FAILURE to survive. As I said, I do not know your age or your situation. You may be young and healthy, and live your life carefully so that the thought of possible accidents does not arise. And so, for a while, you have the luxury of asking the irrelevant questions you ask. Yes, a life raft would be far better than a life preserver. And a life raft, with supplies, with a helicopter on the horizon looking for people would be even better. And far better than that would be not to have found yourself in the middle of the ocean at all. And (following that metaphor) it's quite appropriate to do what we can, NOW, to try and make our situation different. But that still does not face the question that cryonics puts before us: just what will you do if all those efforts fail, and one day you find yourself in the water with a life preserver nearby. The one thing I KNOW about cryonic suspension is that it has a serious possibility of working. Just how serious and how strong is that possibility, I do not now know. But I know something else, too: ALL of the alternatives have no possibility of working AT ALL. The alternatives I refer to here are not those that you may see sitting comfortably in front of your computer, not at all. They are the alternatives faced by someone who knows that they are dying, and no cure for their problem will come. And since cryonics requires preparation NOW for the time when I (or you) will find ourselves in such a situation, we have that question to ask ourselves, NOW. And I do hope that you come to see that before you find yourself in the ocean. To say that choice of cryonics in such a situation involves any special faith seems to me to be absurd. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9104