From: Kenneth Hurst (k_hurst18@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 14 2002 - 12:51:28 MDT
On Saturday, July 13, 2002 at 10:08 PM, Damien Broderick wrote:
> Don't be bloody ridiculous. A `scam' is a deliberate enterprise knowingly
> based on fraud designed to extract payment from the gullible.
And most people don't understand cryonics enough to know that it isn't
"based on fraud to extract payment from the gullible" (as evidenced by the
recent "debate" on CNN with Dr. More). This Caplan guy they interviewed may
have been published many times concerning cyronics, but he obviously has no
more understanding of it than most people in the public and therefore
believes that it is based on fraudulent, or, at the very least, highly
misleading, practices.
Remember, most people only see cryonics (other than the recent Williams
case) in scifi movies, which take place, generally, in the future, so they
don't believe we have the technology to implement cryonics successfully.
While Alcor and others aren't saying the process will be successful, most
people would probably presume there is such little hope of successfully
reviving (or even storing) someone that it *is* fraudulent to charge someone
$100,000+ for this procedure.
> Cryonics would be a fraud only if all those involved *knew* that recovery
> in the future was absolutely ruled out, or pretended to preserve the
> deceased at cryogenic temperatures while actually cremating them
> in order to obtain unearned profit.
In the minds of most peope, if a group charges that much money for a
procedure that has such a small chance of working, it is fraud--if not
legally, at least morally. Also, most people would probably believe that
those involved with cryonics do know that the chances of successful revival
are so slim that it is a scam.
> It is, of course, none of
> those things, *even if* it eventually turns out that people cryonically
> preserved *can't* be revived, for technical reasons still unknown.
Again, in the minds of most people, it should be considered a scam to charge
people so much money for what many people consider to be nothing more than
an overpriced, frozen grave.
Note: just for clarification, I do not hold the aforementioned beliefs about
the "fraudulent practice" of cryonics. I believe it will be a successful
tool for preserving the dead until they can be revived and cured--if not
now, probably when I have the need to use it.
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