Samizdata

Usually – well often at least – the Opinion Journal email newsletter delivers interesting stories with an interesting spin on them. But today they went off the deep end with a Cryonics story. It seems Ted Williams may be an Alcor customer. For those in the know, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is the premier organization of its’ kind. I have met and dealt with many of Alcor’s founders and customers. They are uniformly well educated, intelligent and interesting people. Fortunately none of those I know well are suspendees yet.

The silliness with which the OJ approached the topic showed a low standard of care in research. The writer shows a lack of general knowledge of the subject and uses cuteness to cover ignorance.

There are many reasonable questions that could be asked. What exactly is Alcor? Who are its’ customers? What does it stand for? Why would someone have their self frozen? I will attempt very short answers, but I suggest those who are really interested go to their web site and perhaps some others I will reference.

What is Alcor Alcor is an organization dedicated to cryonic suspension of its’ members upon a declaration of death under current medical criteria. Alcor has an experienced staff that will then do their absolute best to get the member into long term suspension in liquid Nitrogen with the minimum possible extra damage possible under current technology.

Who are its’ customers? The customer base of Alcor is drawn from the ranks of extremely intelligent and creative people. They are not fanatical believers in some pseudo-science. They are lovers of life who are taking one last gamble. If the medical technology of 100 or 200 years hence is advanced enough to fix both the original cause of “death” and the possibly severe cellular damage from the freezing process, they win. If they lose, they will never know the difference and so don’t much care.

What does it stand for Alcor believes nanotechnology will advance to a point at which repair at a cellular level will become possible. Life expectancy will then jump to hundreds if not thousands of years. The primary cause of death in the future will be accidents that destroy the brain structure. The difficulty Alcor sees is most of us will be dead long before this becomes possible. Their premise is to just “bite the bullet” now and use the best techniques we have at hand in an attempt to bridge the gap.

Some experiments have shown excellent long term tissue preservation in LN2; in one experiment a dog was taken down to freezing and brought back. It lived out a normal doggy life afterwards. Many in the cryogenics field have a political dislike for the whole concept so few have actually been doing the experiments. None expect it to be easy; none give the current techniques any more than an outside chance of working. Alcor people will tell you that up front. It’s in their paperwork and disclaimers.

Why would someone have themselves frozen???? “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia”. If you are cremated, you ain’t comin’ back. If you’re buried to rot, you ain’t comin’ back. If you’re cut up for medicine, you ain’t comin’ back. If you are frozen in liquid nitrogen for a century or two… well you might not be coming back. But… If you love life why not take a shot? You can’t take the money with you anyway; Alcor isn’t a big profit corporation, it’s a member run organization and all funds go to the purpose. Their employee salaries and benefits suck. It all goes back into keeping those dewars icey.

I first ran across the concept of Cryonic suspension a long time ago. Way back in the late 60’s or early 70’s I believe (the oldest still viable suspendee dates from that early period). I thought it was technically preposterous but somewhat interesting. Nothing about it interested me enough to dig further until after I read and commented on Eric Drexler’s drafts for Engines of Creation in the early 80’s. The penny dropped. If you can manipulate atoms, repairing or even rebuilding a body becomes technically conceivable. I have watched the field of nanotechnology grow from a handful of Eric’s friends to a globally known buzzword in less than two decades. Some of the first products of the field will be out in a couple years. It is expected to be a major economic sector within the next twenty years.

There are critics of the whole scenario. They may be right. I don’t think so, but they might be. So read the literature, take my opinions with two grains of Sodium Chloride, study the technical issues, pick your horse and lay your money down.

If you are interested in a quick education on nanotechnology, check out Foresight Institute. And oh yeah. Jim Bennett, Glenn Reynolds and myself all have ties of one sort or another to Foresight.

Ask most British people about what they know about Manchester, in north-west England, and they will probably name Manchester United Football Club, (“The Reds”), cotton mills, rave music nightclubs, or, if they move in libertarian circles, the city often associated with laissez faire economic thinking in the 19^th Century. So it is a proud day for the city to be now put alongside Cape Kennedy as a centre of space flight excellence.

Natalie. This time I’m going to fall into the trap of taking your obviously humorous posting seriously.

The point is, it’s for portable computers. Although now still somewhat clunky, the new gismo will soon get very small and then be very easy to carry about in your pocket, probably soon as part of your portable. You try carrying a keyboard around with you on your travels, unless it’s a foldable one like mine.

Keyboards compatible with your portable computer are hard to find, but plain flat surfaces are pretty common, all around the world.

And as for non-portable computers, we must understand, Natalie, that not all people are like us. For some strange corporate beings, a computer keyboard is clutter, and one that can be switched off would be ultra-cool.

Next: VKB must do the same for the screen. Then, answering Natalie’s objection, they may want to supply the clear desk space for the keyboard and the screen for the screen themselves, so that the thing can sit on top of the festering pile of junk that is permanently between Natalie and the top of her desk, just like a regular portable computer or computer keyboard now.

The new standard portable computer is: four white (or whatever turns out to be the best colour for receiving projections) bricks, 12 inches by 3 inches by ¾ of an inch, joined at the long edges by three hinges. The outer two hinges enable the white bricks to flatten out and form the keyboard surface and the screen surface, while the central hinge is like the one hinge on a portable computer now. The keyboard is projected towards you from a little hole in the bottom brick of the screen. The screen is projected upwards from a little hole in the far brick of the keyboard surface (or maybe fownwards from a thingy that sticks out from the top of the screen, and doubles up as part of the case).

I’m glad that’s clear.

Note that different keyboards will be projectable at the press of a key, just as “different screens” are already presented to us all now, ditto, which is not possible with a hardware keyboard. I’m an inventor.

Richard Barber: thanks for this link, which is an improvement even on the one I finally got around to supplying. We weren’t inundated with link info, so far as I know, following my failure to include any in the rare first edition of my original posting. It is Sunday. You and I, Richard, are stuck at our old-style mechanical computer keyboards, making our peculiar lifestyle choices. Most people are out doing … what? Things, I suppose. Who knows what normal people get up to?

Meanwhile, as Richard says: “Ain’t capitalism grand?” It is indeed.