Quoting Infernity:
QUOTE
Yes, the slowest one determines the speed tempo. All of my friends shouted me not asking question, claiming it confuses them and wastes the time of the original subject the teachers should teach...
In Carl Sagan's
COSMOS (video) series, where he is reviewing the life of Albert Einstein, he has a good segment on Einstein's teenage years where he was (these are probably not Sagan's exact words) "thrown out of school because he was considered to be a 'disruptive' influence, that interferred with class discipline".
Sometimes, however, you see extraordinary examples of very rapid advancement by a young person which are acknowledged and given credit. When my life-partner got her AA, the commencement ceremony's main speaker was a "new-graduate" who was only about 8 years old, and who was expected to wrap up his BS level in about another year, plunging on into graduate school well before he was twelve.
This was a truly great presentation, largely because (I think) he geared it for the audience, mostly pretty bright late-teenagers and their parents, probably holding back a lot of things he would have liked to have said, because he knew it would go totally "over their heads". Infernity, I'm sure you're already running into this. You'll probably never have to ever actually "grow old", but if anti-aging were to come along too slowly, that would be the greatest tragedy you'd ever experience, to have your brain slowly fall apart before your very eyes, as is already happening for many of us older people.
The novel "Flowers for Algernon" is a warning to us all, and perhaps you've already read it, but for those who haven't, the theme is that no matter what our minds may be like, right now, they can "go away", usually gradually, sometimes rather quickly. One of the most striking stories from the history of cryonics (so far) is an attorney who developed a brain tumor, and was finally "frozen", but before that happened the period of approach was (for him) much like the rapid decline of both the human and the animal in "Flowers". He knew his "mind was going", and his wife said (later, after he was suspended) that she would come into the bathroom and find him looking at himself in the mirror, crying. He could literally "feel himself slipping away".
Flowers for Algernon (Link to Amazon.Com)
We have to all be grateful for what we have, while we have it, and make the most of it. That's part of why I'm sitting here at the computer, at about midnight, even though I know I'll be "getting up to go to work" at 2:00 a.m. Sleeping might be a more sensible thing to do, from a physiological point of view, but there are only so many days in 100 years, and I've already had a lot more than others I know who now are at liquid nitrogen temperatures.
My time for that is coming, too, I'm afraid, long before we have ways to prevent the "Flowers For Algeron" syndrome from turning us older people into virtual vegetables. So, I make the best use of what's available. One of the statements from the early days of Buddhism, attributed to the young man who eventually became referred to as "The Buddha", in view of how fast time eats away our lives, was that "
people should live like their heads were on fire"! From the number of postings you've already placed on this board, Infernity, it seems like you're already living that way.
Thank you, Infernity, for being who you are, and for being ready to journey on into the future (which I really believe you will) without ever having the necessity to face having your mind fall apart simply from the passing of the years. As you pursue your studies in philosophy, perhaps you'll be able to look forward to a day when you'll stand before an audience of billions (taking virtual reality as the medium of choice at conferences of the future) and say something like:
QUOTE
"I can remember a day when only a very few of us ever thought, realistically, that we would ever live to be 200 or 300 years old, which we now regard almost as "passing through infancy"... and very few of you were there... but those times are still very real in my mind..."
And, perhaps you will be able to give them some sense of what it was like, here in the beginnings of the "third millenium", to live in a world where the very notion of such a future is totally beyond the imaginations of almost everyone on Earth.
As a final note, I'd like to provide the links for several stories by Thomas Donaldson, a PhD mathematician who was among the very early cryonicists, and who now has reportedly had a serious recurrence of an illness that held him in its grip earlier. At an earlier time, between one and two decades ago, he "went to court" to get permission to have himself suspended if this illness should take him down, before his brain was destroyed, and permission was not granted. Now, he may be facing that dilemma again. The recent report, from Cryonet notes this as follows:
QUOTE
Thomas became famous all over the United States in 1988-1990 when he was
first diagnosed with what seemed to be a near-term fatal brain tumor, of a
particularly cruel type that was likely to destroy his personality and memories
before it resulted in his legal death. Thomas had already been a committed
cryonicist and he determined at that time to ask a court to establish his right
to undergo cryonic suspension *Pre-mortem* -- that is, before legal death -
should the tumor continue to grow. I won't go into all of the details on this
(you can get those at
http://www.alcor.org.../donaldson.html );
but eventually the California courts, while sympathetic to his dilemma, turned
down his appeal. However, the publicity that this generated gave millions of
people a cryonicist with a problem they could clearly relate to. The television
program *L.A. Law* built an episode around the case, giving it the added
emotional twist of the patient being a beautiful former girlfriend of one of the
attorneys.
Fortunately, Thomas has survived, both active and productive, for many years
since then. Maybe his current problems will be the final plot twist to this life
cycle for Thomas, or maybe not; but that time will come someday. And then we
can hope that all of Thomas's (and my and your) work on behalf of this idea will
pay off for him. We wish you good fortune, now and forever, Thomas.
Now, here are the links to Thomas' stories as published in LifeQuest in the late 1980's, on-line for your enjoyment. These stories go way beyond cryonics, into the depths of what I think is at the heart of the Immortalist perception of what the future may hold:
TravellingBirthscarsMass on Christmas Day, 8936 ADboundlesslife
that's like, um Goddess...
)
DSCN0174.jpg 24.24KB
0 downloads
