X-Message-Number: 9588
From: Ettinger <>
Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 19:18:05 EDT
Subject: Messages Received

MESSAGES RECEIVED

Whatever messages Saul Kent and some of his associates think they are sending,
the messages actually received, in my opinion, are mostly as follows:

"If you join a cryonics organization, or remain a member of one, you are
deluded and wasting your money. And you had better give heavy weight to my
opinion, because I was a cryonics pioneer before I saw the light and rejected
cryonics."

"If you are in early danger of death, lie down and die quietly and save your
money for your heirs or some worthy cause, preferably a research project that
I endorse. If a relative is near death, give her a decent burial, or a cheap
cremation."

"If you are young, give all your discretionary cash to the research projects I
endorse. If we achieve suspended animation in the next ten or twenty years,
and if you can then afford the cost (almost certainly very high), then you
have a good chance of indefinitely extended life."

"If you are in the leadership of a cryonics organization, urge your members to
use all available cash and all available energies to support of my research
projects. Distribute my message as widely and as emphatically as you can, and
discontinue or at least minimize your recruitment efforts and your own
research efforts."

"If you have any dirt or any suspicions or negative opinions about other
people in cryonics, be sure to shout it to the rooftops, because full and free
expression is the lifeblood of science and the hallmark of a free society."
 
"When you have made the sensible decision to forget cryonics, stick around the
cryonics discussion groups anyway and stick it to them. It's your civic and
scientific duty, and fun too, and cheap."

"When I was young and stupid, I read THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY, the central
thesis of which was that we have an appreciable chance to avoid permanent
death through biostasis--even if that means a straight freeze within a
reasonable time after clinical death. I didn't really buy that at the time,
but thought that, with enough research, methods might be developed that would
offer a reasonable chance. Now I realize that even the best methods developed
since then (by my colleagues) leave the corpse merely an expensive corpse. The
establishment physicians and cryobiologists were right all along: if we can't
get the deep-frozen dog to stand up and bark after thawing, right now, forget
it. It makes no sense to invest money, hope and effort in a mere possibility.
Cryonics is nonsense, and only a few neurotics are dumb enough to buy it."

Could I be wrong about these messages received? Some of them, maybe. We'll
know more if some newcomers and lurkers (not just the usual suspects) chime in
with their impressions.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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