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