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My Attempt at a cryonics advocacy article


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#1 Utnapishtim

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Posted 14 March 2004 - 11:55 AM


The article below was my first attempt to write a positive article about cryonics for a mainstream audience. The tone and style have been designed to appeal primarily to male American babyboomers as this is where I see the most potential growth in the short term. I'd like to submit it to a mainstream publication at some point. It was written quite a while ago so it needs updating notably some comments on the political furore surrounding Alcor at the moment and the death of John Henry Williams..

I'd love some construcutive criticism! What do people think?

In Defense of Frozen Heads
by Jerome Thomas

On October 17 at 12:16 AM in Yankee Stadium Aaron Boone drove a Tim Wakefield pitch into left field to win the ALCS, crush the dreams of Boston Red Sox fans around the world and adding another torturous chapter to the 85 year drama that has haunted generations of New England sports fans.
I am a skeptic. I do not believe in curses ghosts, gods gremlins, lucky numbers or voodoo dolls.
However I could not help but think about the figure who slumbered somewhere in a vat in Arizona silently awaiting his return.
I fully expect the cryonic suspension of Ted Williams to become a part of Red Sox lore one day. Maybe as the years roll by and no world championship banner flutter over Fenway park people will gaze at the grainy old footage of the last man on earth to hit over .400 and wonder...
Perhaps, as time goes on and Cryonics creeps from the ridiculous to the merely speculative in the popular imagination New Englanders will file past the Liquid Nitrogen tomb of Teddy Ballgame with the same reverent awe in which Russians once held the tomb of Lenin.
The Red Sox saga contains tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. The Babe Ruth trade, the Bucky Dent Home run the Bill Buckner error, and now Grady Little's inexplicable bullpen management are all engrained parts of America’s sports folklore.
But to me Ted Williams slumbering silently in his cryonics vat like King Arthur waiting to return to Camelot/Fenway Park tops them all.
Perhaps Second Coming metaphors are a little too much even for overblown mythologisers that write the sports pages but I must admit that it has made me wonder.
The idea of freezing people has fascinated me since seeing Han Solo 'suspended in Carbonite' during Empire Strikes Back when I was a young child.
I vividly remember seeing a documentary about strange californians who had their bodies frozen and thinking about how strange it was to hear adults calmly discuss what they'd like to be doing hundreds of years hence.
For years I assumed that the idea must be either a scam or quack science of the lowest order. During my freshman year at college after seeing that old Star Wars movie again for the first time in years I decided to find out why. It is important to mention here that I went into this in an utterly closedminded way. I did not want to find out if Cryonics was quackery but only why. The idea seemed so self evidently cranky and so obviously the preserve of a fringe that I was certain that I must be able to find a clearheaded explanation as to why this was nonsense. I had recently read 'Demon Haunted World' by Carl Sagan, a book which really opened my eyes to critical thinking and the way superstition and irrationality distorts how we see the world.
What really shocked me was that I could not find ONE decent refutation of the arguments advanced by cryonicists. Instead I discovered articles such as 'the molecular repair of the brain' and 'Cryonics cryptography and the maximum likelihood estimation' by folks like Georgia Tech professor Ralph Merckle.
At the same time I became aware of nanotechnology and of the prospect of potential medical applications that could literally build or repair physical structures atom by atom by atom.
To me the two most pertinent questions are simply these. 1) Is long term memory essentially nonphysical in nature? 2) Is the damage that occurs in the brain at death and during the cryonics process so radically randomizing that it would be absolutely impossible to infer the previous structure from what remains?
So far the answers to both of those questions appears to be a tentative no…
As Boston looks ahead to the coming baseball season, I can’t help but ponder what the less immediate future holds
Any technology advanced enough to return to return the splendid splinter from beyond the frozen grave would almost certainly be able to restore him to full youthful health.
Maybe the Red Sox of 2100 will welcome an old face back into left field. It is certainly an intriguing thought

Edited by Utnapishtim, 16 March 2004 - 02:10 AM.


#2 thefirstimmortal

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Posted 14 March 2004 - 03:10 PM

I'd love some construcutive criticism! What do people think?


OK, it's.... umm..... well... er... hmm. IT'S PERFECT.

#3 Utnapishtim

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Posted 14 March 2004 - 03:54 PM

Thanks for the encouraging words Will, I appreciate it! Any ideas on where I should submit the finished product?

#4 sjvan

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Posted 14 March 2004 - 06:23 PM

Seems a good size for a newspaper op-ed piece. Maybe your local or a Boston paper? Even better for Alcor, perhaps a phoenix paper.

If not that, the maybe something large online like Slate, or Techcentralstation

http://www.techcentralstation.com/

or reason magazine online

http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/

both of whom have been somewhat positive

#5 thefirstimmortal

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Posted 15 March 2004 - 12:09 AM

Any ideas on where I should submit the finished product?


Any place that ran the Ted Williams story. ;)

#6 bgwowk

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Posted 15 March 2004 - 05:54 AM

Please delete

Perhaps, as time goes on and Cryonics creeps from the ridiculous to the merely speculative in the popular imagination New Englanders will file past the Liquid Nitrogen tomb of Teddy Ballgame with the same reverent awe in which Russians once held the tomb of Lenin.


and if necessary replace it with an example of a vigil held while some famous person was undergoing surgery or otherwise unconscious in a hospital.

Ettinger originally suggested cryonics after legal death simply as a legal trick to permit early adoption of an unproven technology. The unfortunate result of that gambit has been the equation of cryonics with death, entombment, and resurrection for the past 40 years. That perception has been disasterous for public relations. It must be avoided. Cryonics is medicine, not interment.

Thank you.

---BrianW

#7 DJS

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Posted 15 March 2004 - 06:11 AM

I really liked it. You have a dramatic flair to your writing Jerome.

My one criticism would be that at the end you simply state:

To me the two most pertinent questions are simply these. 1) Is long term memory physically encoded? 2) Is the damage that occurs in the brain at death and during the cryonics process so radically randomizing that it would be absolutely impossible to infer the previous structure from what remains?
So far the answers to both of those questions appears to be a tentative no…


And then you simply leave it at that. Why not elaborate? Or did you have concerns about the article being too lengthy?

#8 Mind

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Posted 16 March 2004 - 12:59 AM

Great article. Great angle. Maybe you could get it in a sports publication like Pro Baseball Weekly, or even SI, ESPN (long shots, but worth a try).

One question. In the end it says; "Is long-term memory physically encoded?" and the asnwer is a tenative no. Is this good or bad? If memories are not physically encoded then how are they stored and how could they ever be preserved via vitrification? I was under the impression that if neurons were all placed back in their correct places and repaired then memories would be restored.

#9 Utnapishtim

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Posted 16 March 2004 - 01:19 AM

Mind. Thanks for catching that error. I must have altered part of that paragragh during editing and forgot to adjust the rest to match

I think I may give the sports publications you mention a shot, as well as the Boston Globe and a couple of the phoenix papers. It is a long shot as you say but it can't hurt!




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