X-Message-Number: 990 Date: 15 Jul 92 10:59:13 EDT From: Charles Platt <> Subject: CRYONICS Brian Wowk has a valid point when he says that cryonics organizations will be reviving people in the future, and therefore my concerns about "Who will bother to revive us?" are not justified. However, I think that there is still some reason to think that generally speaking, one's chances of coming back are slightly greater if there are fewer people frozen. There are many scenarios. I could imagine, for instance, that cryonics might become regulated by a federal agency, which would impose a limit on the number of resuscitations per year. I can also imagine that some cryonics organizations could go out of business before all of their patients were revived. There are dozens of other scenarios. They all share the same two propositions: 1) It is impossible to predict the future, and 2) Generally speaking, a resource in short supply is more valuable than a resource that is plentiful. As for the very good quote from Mike Darwin, pointing out that there is strength in numbers: yes, it would be nice to reach a point where cryonics is so big and so widely accepted, we actually have some clout. It would definitely be nice to have some control over autopsies. But how big would cryonics have to be to accomplish this? I suggest it would have to be an option chosen by at least, say, 1 person in 10. If my rough calculations are correct, that would translate into more than 3 million freezings per year. It is hard to imagine the kind of social upheaval that would be necessary to create, and to accommodate, that implementation of cryonics. I certainly believe it would cause more problems than it would solve. Lastly, Brian dismisses my concerns about growth making cryonics organizations less flexible and more bureaucratic, because these general concerns apply to any organization. Yes--precisely! And we see their effects. Who would you rather be frozen by, Alcor or General Motors? Personally, I would like to see some cryonics growth, because I would feel safer if the organizations were stronger financially, and I would like to see more people trained to perform the various special tasks involved. To this end, I am writing a book which has the potential to attract more cryonics members, and I am still pursuing the possibility of a cryonics contest in OMNI. I have also signed up to take Mike Darwin's introductory course in September. But I start to feel ambivalent when I imagine Alcor more than ten times as big as it is today. Meanwhile, Saul Kent replied to my points by phone rather than by email, and made the excellent point that there are two kinds of membership growth: 1. People in good health who are planning ahead, and who have a general belief in cryonics. 2. People who don't have long to live and join out of desperation. The second group (Saul points out) are a drain on the system. They don't live long enough to become activists who will help cryonics; instead, very quickly, they need to *be* helped. They do bring money in, but (if one believes the calculations that Mike Darwin made a year or two ago) the fees charged by Alcor do not properly cover all aspects of a suspension, especially if there is remote standby. Thus, each new suspension is a net financial drain on the organization. In addition, remote standbys totally disrupt everyday operations at Riverside, for a week or more in each case. It's worth noting that in several recent suspensions, the patients only joined when they knew they had life-threatening conditions. Saul feels it would be sensible to apply a surcharge to cases such as these, and I find his argument persuasive. Otherwise, the same small staff is going to find itself overwhelmed with endless "last minute" cases. Ultimately these dedicated activists will burn out and there will beno one to replace them. If growth is going to benefit us at all, the growth has to be primarily in the number of living members, not frozen ones! --Charles Platt Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=990