It's laughable to me how Ettinger and the rest of the CI people backed off the idea of physical immortality in favor of long life... the idea reflected in the name of the newsletter "Long Life" previously called "The Immortalist". Pandering to public opinion rather than setting down the principle in effect is pretty poor way to go about things. What's really ironic is that guys like Ettinger who have proposed immortality couldn't EVEN keep the name of their newsletter "immortal"... So here's Long Life [+] --Rick P.
It appears that the newsletter is also published in a Yahoo forum format here [+]
I guess Ettinger will have to rename his first book The Prospect of Long Life. What will he have to call the second one now - Man Into Slightly Improved Man?
ReplyDeleteActually, "The Prospect of Death" is more along the lines I've been considering lately. Or how about "The Prospect of the Inevitable Coming Ice Age... subtitled... How Civilization is Scheduled to be completely Wiped Out Unless We Take Immediate Radical Science Driving Action". All cryonauts will be wiped out in the coming ice age as will all known agriculture as it currently is done... and this in less than the "blink of an eye" geologically speaking-- it could be starting right now... lower sunspot activity was apparent in the 1950's.
ReplyDeleteI'd worry more about turning cryonics around from its apparent decline. I heard the other day that Alcor has had about 2,500 members or so in its history (not all at the same time), yet it has only about 930 signed up now. You can find megachurches in Phoenix which fill their pews with several times that number every Sunday.
ReplyDeleteAs for another ice age, I quote the advice Mike Darwin says he got from Curtis Henderson about 40 years ago:
You see all this here; them boats, this street, that ocean, that sun in that sky? You’re gonna lose ‘em all! The more you go on, the more you’ll leave behind, so I’m telling you here and now, you’d best be damn certain about this living forever thing, because it’s gonna be every bit as much Hell as it Heaven.
If we pass through the right bottlenecks and survive, of course we'll live to see new ice ages. Curtis could have included glaciers covering much of the Northern Hemisphere in his list of things which we'll eventually "leave behind."
Alcor never publishes follow ups on people who leave and why. They publish the number of cancellations and new signups, and calculate a net gain or loss as if they're counting chickens in a barn. To this extent, they are blind. They have no idea what the human factors are behind the losses. Max More is included in this group of Alcor blind. More importantly, they do not care... which can only lead me to believe that the membership game is not what it appears to be or what one would think it should be. Alcor is a cryonics-like front for something else, especially since the start of the new financial endowment just established... which counts assets left to the endowment as more important than membership numbers per se. Members are only as important as the financial numbers that are involved.
ReplyDeleteNobody will survive the ice age unless we all work on that project starting now... and Curtis Hendersons cryocapsule will be wiped out as surely as agriculture if this generation doesn't go on high alert immediately. Nothing can stop the ice age. The ice age isn't merely another bottleneck... it's a smashed bottle... the ultiamte showstopper that you can count on.... the death of humanity itself... which is far greater than any one personal death. Cryonics would do well to alert humanity to the ice age. If we don't do something about it, humanity will not rise to civilized levels for another 100,000 years... well beyond any cryocapsules ability to survive alone unattended.
How ironic that we intended to survive through cryonics and yet may all die by ice that civilization didn't prepare for. Ice ages repeat every 100,000 years with 12,000 year warm periods which we are now ending... since the sunspots declined beginning 50 years ago.
Locate your identity in a larger sense than your personal existence and you'll immediately see this.
Think of yourself as future humanity. What if you yourself were "multi generational civilization" with the lifespan of 200,000 years of homo sapien existnece facing the next ice age? Ice age threat is to civilization what aging and death are to one person. Unless most of us learn to locate our identity in civilization, then civilization won't survive and if that's true, then no individualism in civilization will surive. We all live or die together on the level I'm pointing to.
We either learn to join humanity in common interest or we all die. Including Curtis.
How do you know that nothing can stop the ice age? Don't you want man to have dominion over this planet? I don't have the problem with man-made global warming that most conservatives dismiss, because I celebrate the prospect that man could have that kind of power over Earth's climate, like an advanced civilization out of science fiction.
ReplyDeleteBesides, even if we had another ice age, civilization in the Northern Hemisphere would just have to move south. The Sahara could get enough rain again to become productive farmland, for example. We could also move cryonauts to a country in the Southern Hemisphere like Australia. Come to think of it, in the next ice age Australia might also get more rain, and more reliably, so that its agricultural production could increase substantially.
It's unlikely we're going to to be able to stop it-- if it's imminent... say in the next 50 years. They come on suddently. Moving all humanity further south is certainly possible, but I don't know if there's enough room in the southern hemisphere to support agriculture for upwards of 6 billion people. You could see depopulation of the planet down to ice age levels-- which could destroy civilization and all chances for high tech solutions for this. Humanity has survived ice ages before but in numbers by the millions, not billions. Cryonicists have a vested interest in their personal survival and thus their own particular case requires they pay immediate attention to high tech solutions to ice age survival. As it is, cryonicists see themselves as surviving while 99% of humanity dies off-- which is not going to be possible. The way to look at it is that either humanity survives along with cryonicists... or humanity and civilization fail, taking cryos with it.
ReplyDeleteIf humanity surives the ice age, it won't be due to anything cryonicists did... most likely. One's identity has to be located in humanity and humanity of the future... for survival of the ice age.
Furthermore, southern climates will be colder as well and won't support agriculture as we've known it. Moving south to a cold climate that won't support agriculture isn't much of a solution.
ReplyDeleteCryonicists ought to be in shock over the imminent ice age... because its a show stopper and it hasn't yet been solved.. and there's no guarantee that it will be solved. Anti-agers ought to be alarmed too since this ice age cycle is definite. Solving the ice age ought properly be on the agenda of anti-agers and cryonicists and promoted as such.
ReplyDeleteIt may be that the "elite" are preparing for the next ice by building underground military bases with black budgets. Google
ReplyDelete[black budget + underground bases + ice age
I think the problem with their solution... if I'm right about what they're doing... is that they expect to leave the rest of us on the surface to die. That's not very "general welfare"'-ist of them. I thought "all men are created equal". We should all learn about the ice age and plan to all survive. Besides, I think we stand a better chance of getting through it-- it will last 100,000 years ... if we start to build high population survival systems starting now... for 10 billion rather than 10 million...or the number the elite plan to save.