[LINK] Slashdot interview with David Ettinger of the Cryonics Institute

BTW, when you have two cryonics options in the U.S., Alcor and CI, Ci has status simply from existing, because something > nothing, and because it still has some reputation capital left over from the fact that Robert Ettinger founded it.

If a third, capable cryonics organization came online, it would probably view Alcor as its competition, and that might have the effect of pushing CI into the outer darkness which TransTime entered over 30 years ago.

"Trans-what?" you might ask. Apparently it still exists and it has perhaps three suspendees, including the brain of Luna Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson's daughter murdered in the 1970's. Or so I've heard, because my efforts to contact anyone at TransTime to confirm the disposition of Luna's brain have not resulted in responses.

Reference:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/160354250/That-70-s-Transhumanism-A-Review-of-Cosmic-Trigger-Final-Secret-of-the-Illuminati

The comment thread on that is pretty poor, so far.

Yeah, cryonicists talk a good game about how much we believe in scientific and technological progress. But the facts on the ground just don't show that, especially because we've let the "nanotechnologists" string us along for nearly 30 years with their pseudo-engineering fantasies.

In fact, the dependency of cryonics literature on the N-word increasingly bothers me, for two reasons: One, if "nanotechnology" just doesn't come into existence, it can't serve as the magic revival mechanism; and if it can never exist because its proponents got the physics wrong, then it won't revive anyone, ever. And two, if cryonics organizations keep invoking "nanotechnology" as part of the argument for getting cryopreserved, when people can see its absence in the real world, then that supports the perception that the providers of human cryopreservation services knowingly engage in fraud.

And while I feel like venting this morning, I've also had enough of these "immortality in 30 years" predictions. I give some reasons for that in my review of Cosmic Trigger:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/160354250/That-70-s-Transhumanism-A-Review-of-Cosmic-Trigger-Final-Secret-of-the-Illuminati

The emerging apocalyptic cult created by Ray Kurzweil, Dmitry Itskov and others wants to reschedule the "immortality" date from the 2000-2012 years predicted in the 1970's to 2045. This shows that transhumanists just don't want to learn from their predecessors' follies. Just add another 30 years every generation, and never admit that the older transhumanists got the previous dates wrong.

I wonder what Ray's fans will say when he dies on schedule like everyone else. I looked up the actuarial tables and performed a calculation with the help of a spreadsheet. An American man Ray's current age (65) has a probability of 22 out of 100 of dying in the next 10 years. Think of that as one trigger pull of Russian Roulette with a 5 chambered revolver.

Great. The failed paleofuture model of cryonics invented by David's father in the 1960's and 1970's presents itself as the cutting edge. A recent book review in the Wall Street Journal describes CI as follows:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Venturists/message/1850

Mr. Gollner tours a creepy cryonics facility in Detroit, with interior design that looks like a budget, outdated version of futurism; less iPod sleekness and more Atomic Age plastic flimsiness. He finds that it is little more than a high-tech cemetery, based on the dubious assumptions that medical science will someday be able to cure all disease and that the frozen dead can be reanimated.

Alcor does better, but not radically so, considering that it hasn't moved beyond the failed paleofuture model of circa 1990 cryonics based on Drexler's illusory "nanotechnology." But it has attracted people with a lot more financial resources than typical CI members, so I hang around it and bide my time for an opportunity to get it back on a track which makes medical and neuroscientific sense. (I have attrition working in my favor.)

I'd like to meet some cryonicists in person to discuss what cryonics in the 2020's should look like, if you want to attend the Venturists' Cryonics Convention in Laughlin, Nevada, this October and look me up:

http://venturist.info/venturist-faq-cryonics-conference-october-25-27-2013.html