After wasting billions of dollars on things like X-33, NASA has awarded four small contracts (total of about ten million) to look into ways of providing transportation to the space station commercially. While the two remaining Usual Suspects (Boeing and Lockmart) got two of the contracts, the two others went to newcomer startups Andrews Space and Technology, and Constellation Services.

They got off two flights in a single day, and on both flights, they demonstrated multiple restarts of the engines in midair. This is in preparation for a demonstration at the Oshkosh Air Show.

I’ve been focusing on the this coming Saturday, July 20, as the thirty-third anniversary of the Apollo landing. But today, July 16th, is the thirty-third anniversary of the launch, when the Saturn V rose to the heavens on a roaring pillar of fire. For a few minutes, the power generated by its engines probably exceeded the entire electrical output of the country.
The launch went off without a hitch.

[Thanks to Mark Whittington for the reminder]

It was just a matter of time.

The polio virus has been constructed from scratch in the laboratory, using instructions off the Internet. There’s no reason that the same couldn’t be done with smallpox. Fortunately, the people who would want to do so are probably still incompetent to, but we can’t count on this to be true forever.

This is also a step on the way to building true artificial lifeforms.

I said earlier that it was a simple probate case. If this report from MSNBC is correct, it may become more than that, though the thrust of the story is that the family is working out their differences. It’s hard to imagine how they could compromise, given the huge disparity between the positions–one side wants to literally destroy the body, the other to preserve it as best as can be done.

But according to the story, it may come down to a judge’s decision as to what’s the best solution. If that’s the case, then the actual ethical and scientific case for cryonics (as opposed to simply attempting to determine the wishes of the “descedant”) will become a factor in the judge’s decision, which means that it could turn into a landmark case in the field of life extension, if the family doesn’t resolve their differences.

I’ll continue to watch it with great interest.

(Thanks to Alan Boyle over at MSNBC for the heads up.)

There are at least two web sites that are collecting stories about memories of the first Apollo landing, whose thirty third anniversary is this coming Saturday. (You have made arrangements to celebrate it, right?).

One is Where Were You, a site that’s been collecting these memories for a while. The other one, which I got via Mark Whittington‘s blog, is at the George Mason University website, and is part of a project that they call Memory Bank. I hope that the two can coordinate, so we can get it all in one place.

TechCentralStation has two more sympathetic pieces from (unsurprisingly) folks at Cato and Reason (Ron Bailey).

And Kevin McGehee has some thoughts on the implications for souls. To the degree that I believe in souls (not very much), I agree with him. If souls exist, God determines when they leave the body–not doctors or lawyers, and if a body is frozen with the prospect of being reanimated later, I suspect that God’s smart enough to know that, and leave it in place until the situation changes in some way. If not, He doesn’t really live up to His reputation for being omniscient.

I received another comment questioning our right to “impose ourselves on the future.” The quick response is that you impose yourself on the future with every day that you decide to continue to live, instead of tossing yourself off a bridge. The distinction between cryonics, and other means of preserving and extending life, including simply continuing to breathe, is an artificial and arbitrary one.

Along those lines, unlike Jay Manifold, Kevin Holtsberry (who’s having a problem with Trackback) sees a fundamental conflict between cryonics and Christianity.

If cryongenics [sic] was just a way to help people live longer more productive lives, fine. But it is not, it is perserving your body in hopes that someday they can bring you back to life.

In what way does this differ from keeping someone in a coma on life support? Does Mr. Holtsberry propose that we pull the plug on them?

This is quite clearly an unwillingness to accept death. The reference to Lazarus gets us nowhere because that was Christ – God incarnate – using a miracle to teach those around him. Using this to imply that we should go around trying to raise people from the dead is a stretch and one that assumes we should play God. At least Jesus raised Lazarus within a relatively short period of time. Cyrogenics [sic] is not going to raise someone any time soon.

We have a problem of terminology here. Cryonicists don’t propose to “raise people from the dead.” Simply put, they don’t accept that they are dead–just that they are badly broken, and beyond the help of current medical technology to restore them to full function.

Many people who die are allowed to do so, by not taking heroic measures at the end. In the process of cryopreservation, a well-performed procedure in fact involves restarting the heart, so that the necessary preserving fluids can be circulated properly throughout the body. So in what sense is someone in this state “dead”?

Once you get past the notion that death is an objectively-verifiable state (it’s not) then the whole notion of “raising the dead” disappears, and it’s simply another medical procedure designed to, at least ultimately, cure the patient of what ails him. The fact that the functional deterioration, and even absence, is great is mitigated by the fact that future medical technology may be even greater.

At base, cyrongenics [sic] is not life affirming but rather worships life on earth as the end all be all. Those who have faith in a better life beyond this earthly one will not choose to escape thier finite nature and cheat death via technology. Christ death and resurection has already cheated death. Those that accept that gift need not freeze themselves in hope of an earthly solution.

Well, as I said above, if we accept that the unearthly solution is to be preferred, why wait? Why not just end it all now?

How is a cryonic suspension different than prescribing an anti-biotic, or performing a heart transplant, or putting someone with severe brain damage on life support? Which medical technologies does Kevin consider “cheating death,” and which ones will he therefore abjure if the circumstances arise? Will he avoid taking anti-malarial pills before a trip to the tropics, so he doesn’t appear to be thwarting God’s possible will that he die a feverish death? If he’s injured in a car accident, and is conscious, will he beg the doctor, amid the hemmorhaging, not to stitch him up, because it reeks of hubris, and he’s content, even eager to reach the hereafter?

If God objects to any of these things, including cryonic suspension, I presume that he will make his objections known in some divine manner. So far though, medical science continues to advance.

I should point out (and should have pointed out earlier) that almost all of these philosophical issues have been treated extensively in a book by Dr. Mike Perry, titled Forever For All: Moral Philosophy, Cryonics, and the Scientific Prospects for Immortality. He is associated with Alcor. His book assumes the materialist premise, but I suspect he treats souls at least on a theoretical basis, as Kevin did at the post referenced above (since there’s really no other way to treat them).

[Update, a few minutes later]

I see there’s also a post over at Samizdata (which has finally gotten off of blogspot) on the subject.

Here’s a story unusual in the fact that it doesn’t treat the subject as wacky or off the wall. It’s actually quite sympathetic. Unfortunately, it’s from Santa Cruz, so it’s not necessarily a harbinger of more rational coverage from the mainstream press.

David Barash has a fairly critical review of Steven Jay Gould’s final book (though not of the man himself). Summary: it was too long, it badly needed an editor, he simply ignored valid criticisms rather than responding to them, he has a final indulgence in some pet (and silly) theories, and the author was too full of himself right to the end. Warning: the review itself is not short.

I probably won’t be reading the book myself any time soon, but at fourteen hundred pages, I probably wouldn’t have been anyway.

David Barash has a fairly critical review of Steven Jay Gould’s final book (though not of the man himself). Summary: it was too long, it badly needed an editor, he simply ignored valid criticisms rather than responding to them, he has a final indulgence in some pet (and silly) theories, and the author was too full of himself right to the end. Warning: the review itself is not short.

I probably won’t be reading the book myself any time soon, but at fourteen hundred pages, I probably wouldn’t have been anyway.