On Saturday, February 05, 2000 12:21 PM Spike Jones spike66@ibm.net wrote:
> > If the show was negative -- I didn't see it -- has anyone decided to
write
> > to Fox and say that portrayal was unfair?
>
> Thinking it over, I reverse my earlier stance: the Fox show was about
> as balanced as I would expect.
Okay. I did not see it, so I can't say.
> If they had been positive about
> cryonics it mighta started to look like an infomercial. They had a
> deathist on there urging people to just die and let our grandchildren
> run the show [he *assumed* we have offspring],
I take it he was an altruist type, reasoning that it's selfish (in the
conventional sense of being bad and inconsiderate) to live longer than three
score and ten years. I wonder how consistent he would be in this if
cryonics actually worked. My bet is if and when cryonics does work -- in
the sense of reviving patients -- people will trip over each to sign up.
Surely, a small %age of the population will still say no to near
immortality, but I doubt the vast majority will.
> they had
> David Brin, who was more or less neutral [saying current corpsicles
> have ~5% chance of drawing a breath sometime in the future],
Not that I think that Brin is wrong here or that his number is off, but
where do people derive such numbers from? It just seems to me that using
numbers like that is a way to garb uncertainties and unknown in mathematical
dress to hide them.
> and
> Merkel whose stance was predictable. {8-] Overall, perhaps it
> is better to present a moderate view of cryonics than a positive one,
> for even if it gives us a 5% chance, it is infinitely better than the
> current two alternatives. Brin's 5% isnt all that different from my
> own estimate of cryonics eventual success, altho I have been
> moving more toward the optimistic in the past year or two.
5% is pretty good odds if you asked me. How many on this list would be
willing to sign up now if someone could guarantee those odds on revival?
BTW, did the Fox show also tell where to find out more about cryonics?
Daniel Ust
The sad truth about how thr FDA is suppressing the facts about tar water
can be seen at:
http://mars.superlink.net/neptune/
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