From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Mon Dec 06 2004 - 10:47:53 MST
At 07:16 AM 12/6/2004 -0800, Daniel Eder wrote:
>I personally view cryonics as the backup plan if
>medical advances don't come along fast enough for
>me. Since my father died when he was 19 years older
>than I am now, that's a distinct possibility.
That seems to me less salient all the time, at least in the foreseeable
pre-singularity future, due to a kind of tragedy of stop-gap medical
success. My own father died when he was 28 years older than I am now (last
weekend, in fact), but that gives me no great hope of useful longevity
because for the final decade he was demented, with increasing numbers of
small infarct lesions riddling his brain. Cryonics would have done him very
little good; he was gone years before he died. I suspect this is the grim
prospect for a lot of people nowadays. If we were legally permitted to
choose death under conditions optimal for cryonic preservation, and before
natural attrition made the process pointless, it would be a different matter.
Damien Broderick
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