Extropians and Cryonauts,
I've been enjoying the NBC miniseries about Noah that started last night. I think this Noah story could become a powerful tool in the promotion of cryonics and extropy and would like to see cryonic people talk about this story more. (Hey, could we contract a toy company to make some toy dewers and characters that fit inside? ;)
Towards this end I'm reposting hear an article of mine John de Rivaz published in his "Longevity Report".
Everyone's familiar with the Noah story right? The one where Noah tries to warn everyone about the impending, yet avoidable doom, trying to get everyone to help build arks so that they might survive the flood. But, unfortunately, no one listens to him, (for what reasons?) and he and his family, along with the animals he has collected, are the only ones that survive. I was in a Lutheran Church last Saturday (for a friend's wedding) and I noticed a brightly colored (with rainbow) picture of the inhabitants of the ark coming forth upon the finally dry (and cleansed?) land. It was a large mural covering an entire wall in the children's nursery. It's probably a good thing I resisted the temptation to add a few dead and rotting bodily remains with an ink marker, that surely would have been left over from what, if it really occured, was one of the most devastating and destructive catastrophes during the history of mankind.
But anyway, I wondered what the chance will be that, maybe 1000 years from now and more, one of the stories we all tell our children (and make children's toys about and paint colorful depictions of on the walls of nurseries with...), is how Robert Ettinger, and others, tried to warn and convince the world of the doom they could have avoided by simply taking proper actions. The story would be very similar in that only a relative hand full of people would heed his warning and would make the eternal life saving effort, mostly because of ancient religious ideas contained in stories like that of Noah and the flood... I can imagine toy dewers with little dolls representing people and their pets nicely fitting inside along with the toy arks and their animals... (and cheesy animated videos...? Nahh!) Obviously, some of the actual survivors will be on hand to retell the story first hand, giving it infinite more significance, as compared to Noah who is now, if he was more than a cheesy animated character, long dead and gone.
Religion seems so completely ironic to me, as a cryonaut, in so many never ending ways. Wouldn't it be humorous if it wasn't so tragic?
Brent Allsop