I have more thoughts on Bob Ettinger’s deanimation over at Pajamas Media.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
The Father Of Transhumanism
…has deanimated:
In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story elucidating the concept of human cryopreservation as a pathway to more sophisticated future medical technology: in effect, a form of “one-way medical time travel.” The story, “The Penultimate Trump”, was published in the March, 1948 issue of Startling Stories and definitively establishes Ettinger’s priority as the first person to have promulgated the cryonics paradigm: principally, that contemporary medico-legal definitions of death are relative, not absolute, and are critically dependent upon the sophistication of available medical technology. Thus, a person apparently dead of a heart attack in a tribal village in the Amazon Rainforest will soon become unequivocally so, whereas the same person, with the same condition, in the emergency department of large, industrialized city’s hospital, might well be resuscitated and continue a long and healthy life. Ettinger’s genius lay in realizing that criteria for death will vary not just from place-to-place, but from time-to-time. Today’s corpse may well be tomorrow’s patient.
Ettinger waited for prominent scientists or physicians to come to the same conclusion he had, and to take a position of public advocacy. By 1960, Ettinger realized that no one else seemed to have grasped an idea which, to him, had seemed obvious. Ettinger was 42 years old and undoubtedly increasingly aware of his own mortality. In what may be characterized as one of the most important midlife crisis in history, Ettinger reflected on his life and achievements, and decided it was time to take action. He summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance as a mechanism of affordable funding for the procedure, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who’s Who In America. The response was meager, and it was clear that a much longer exposition was needed. Ettinger observed that people, even the intellectually, financially and socially distinguished, would have to be educated that dying is (usually) a gradual and reversible process, and that freezing damage is so limited (even though lethal by present criteria) that its reversibility demands relatively little in future progress. Ettinger soon made an even more problematic discovery, principally that, “…a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!”
I’ve never understood the resistance, either.
Rest in peace, but not in perpetuity.
[Update early afternoon]
Adam Keiper has a link roundup over at The New Atlantis, with a promise of more to come.
[Another update a few minutes later]
This is the first time I became aware that Mike Darwin (long-time cryonics pioneer) has a blog. I’ll have to add it to the blogroll.
Remembering Borders
Like Ann Arbor native Jay Nordlinger, I remember when there was just one Borders, and what an amazing place it was in the seventies. I wasn’t shocked that it became a chain, though I wondered why such a chain would have just happened to have started in the town where I went to school. But the owners didn’t have the foresight of Jeff Bezos, and anticipate the future. But even if they had, it’s not clear that they could have saved the brick and mortar. Even the best buggy-whip manufacturers didn’t survive the advent of the automobile. Like, Jay, though, I wonder how we will be able to browse on the Internet, and how to capture the scents and the social experience of discovering a wonderful book for which you hadn’t been looking.
Michigan native (and resident once again) John Miller has more thoughts, as does Rich Lowry, with some relevant commentary on creative destruction and the moribund stasis of government bureaucracies.
[Update a while later]
Many commenters note, both here and at the links, that Borders committed suicide by losing touch with what made it attractive in the first place, so it wasn’t even one of the better buggy-whip makers. It’s also worth noting that some of the carriage makers survived into the auto age by adapting (e.g., Fisher Body in Flint and later other places as part of GM, and Studebaker).
Why Bill Maher Is A Coward
Steven Crowder explains. He also explains how to be truly politically incorrect.
Marshall McLuhan
An essay on his incomprehensible nonsense. I still enjoy that scene from Annie Hall, though.
Science Fiction
Why we should read it. It’s not a new thought, but it’s always a useful reminder that it helps us be prepared for the future. Of course, from that perspective, “speculative fiction” might be broader and more useful genre.
The Shuttle’s Ignominious Conclusion
Thoughts from Ed Driscoll, over at PJM. As he notes, Lileks has some reflections as well:
NASA is keen to tell you there’s a still a future for sending Americans into space, but there’s a general cultural anomie that seems content to watch movies about people in space, but indifferent to any plans to put them there. This makes me grind my teeth down to the roots, but I suppose that’s a standard reaction when the rest of your fellow citizenry doesn’t share the precise and exact parameters of your interests and concerns. That’s the problem when you grow up with magazines telling you where we’re going after the moon, with grade-school notebooks that had pictures of the space stations to come, when the push to Mars was regarded as an inevitable next step.
Just got hung up on the “why?” part, it seems. Also the “how” and the “how much” and other details. I can see the reason for taking our time – develop new engines, perfect technology, gather the money and the will. It’s not like anything’s going anywhere. But it’s not like we’re going anywhere if we’re not going anywhere, either – when nations, cultures stop exploring, it’s a bad sign. You’re ceding the future. If you have a long view that regards nation-states as quaint relics of a time in human history when maps had lines – really, you can’t see them from space! We’re all one, you know – then it doesn’t matter whether China or the US puts a flag on Mars. It’s possible a Chinese Mars expedition would commemorate the first boot on red soil with a statement that spoke for everyone on the planet, not a particular culture or nation. It’s possible. But history would remember that they chose to go, and we chose not to.
No signs that anyone is serious about choosing to go to Mars, other than Elon Musk. For the record, I think that it’s important that we carry Anglospheric and western values into the cosmos, and I’m pretty confident we will. I am equally confident that we won’t do it if we persist in thinking (like the Chinese) that it will be done with a Twenty-Year Plan.
I’m wondering what the thirty-somethings are thinking today. They don’t really remember a time when there wasn’t a Space Shuttle, either under development, or flying. And for most of them, Apollo is just a history that their parents lived through and told them about (as the Depression and WW II are for me). But I suspect that they, and the generation behind, will get pretty used to the idea of a real American space industry taking people into orbit, sans a government mission-control room with lots of desks. I hope that, for them, space will finally become a place instead of a program.
[Update later morning]
More lunacy and inability to read for comprehension or discern human emotions, from Mark Whittington, who fantasizes that I am “dancing on the Shuttle’s grave.”
Completely Useless
…signs.
[Update a few minutes later]
Someone had too much time on their hands: the physics of Superman.
The Core Belief Of Leftism
The far future seems to have put Frase in full flaming far mode, declaring his undying allegience to a core ideal: he prefers the inequality that comes from a government hierarchy, over inequality that comes from voluntary trade.
Yes, he prefers a world in which everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. And as Glenn notes:
I always figure that people who feel this way do so because they think they’re better at sucking up to authority figures than at creating value on their own. And my guess is, they’re right about that.
And the president is a canonical example.
A Demonstration Of American Democracy
That was apparently the theme of Gilligan’s Island.