Subject: CryoNet #29361 - #29368

From: CryoNet <[email-masked]>
Date: 29 Mar 2007 09:00:02 -0000

CryoNet - Thu 29 Mar 2007

    #29361: Living Alone [2Arcturus]
    #29362: Cryonicist muppets! [Mark Plus]
    #29363: Video From Trans Time Surfaces On Youtube [John B. Krug]
    #29364: My journey to cryonics [marta sandberg]
    #29365: My journey to cryonics   Part II [marta sandberg]
    #29366: My journey to cryonics   Part III [marta sandberg]
    #29367: My journey to cryonics   Part IV [marta sandberg]
    #29368: My journey to cryonics   Part V [marta sandberg]

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Message #29361
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:15:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: 2Arcturus <[email-masked]>
Subject: Living Alone

--0-1038600833-1175091348=:9813

Roland,
   
  Yes, the technology already exists.
  My favorite is 
  http://www.tadlifecare.com/index.php?id=197
   
  Clunkier are things like
  http://www.mypulsemonitor.com/
  http://www.alivetec.com/products.htm
   
  Greg

CryoNet <[email-masked]> wrote:
  It seems that this particular problem is well within reach of an 
affordable technical solution. That would be a wearable device, 
perhaps merely a kind of bracelet which could monitor pulse or maybe 
just motion inobtrusively, send an alarm sound/signal to the wearer, 
then, if no response to the cryonics provider or an intermediary 
emergency service provider or 911, all using currently available and 
relatively cheap cell phone technology. Such a device would have very 
wide utility, especially for anyone with a questionable health history 
or life-threatening condition. I assume that our society is gradually 
moving in this direction, anyway, but cryonicists have a special 
motivation to be early adopters of such devices. Please, someone, tell 
me that such services already exist, how they work, and what they cost. 
All those on this list should be kept current on the state-of-the-art 
in this area. I know I am not.
Ronald Havelock, CI member

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Message #29362
From: "Mark Plus" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Cryonicist muppets!
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:46:14 -0700

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5TR9peZGOM

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Message #29363
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 20:34:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: "John B. Krug" <[email-masked]>
Subject: Video From Trans Time Surfaces On Youtube

--0-437204287-1175139273=:91115

Hi:   After I viewed the cryonics muppets video, I found nearby this brief video shot at the Trans Time facility:
   
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYddSRqJXT0
   
  John Rodriquez runs TT these days....I assume one of the two people in the dewar is Dr. Paul Segall....Best Regards!   John B. Krug

Yes, you can turn me me on!  I'm on the radio! 
Surf City Sounds Plus:
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Message #29364
From: "marta sandberg" <[email-masked]>
Subject: My journey to cryonics
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:35:16 +0800

The subject of why people finally sign on cryonics and what it takes for 
them to become convinced has been brought up in a roundabout manner last 
week on the CryoNet.

I think it is an important question.  If we are trying to learn how to 
interest more people, it is probably a good idea to look at what worked for 
us.

I'll start as it might be easier for me.  It was an emotional journey for 
me, but as I have been interviewed quite a few times I have learnt how to 
express myself.

As it will be a longish article I will break it up into four postings.  
Anyone who is not interested in the subject is advised to just scroll down 
to the end of the postings.

It started early; I think I have always known about cryonics - it was part 
of my childhood. It fell into the same category as Zen Buddhism or hairless 
Mexican dogs. Something weird and wonderful that people did to make the 
world such a strange and interesting place to live in. But it didn't have 
any relevance to my life. It just made my world a curious place to discover.

On the other hand, I was never hostile to cryonics. A lot of people who 
first hear about cryonics feel disturbed by it, even repelled by it. 
Emotional neutrality was a start on my long road to cryonics.

It wasn't until I was in my early thirties that the first glimmer of serious 
interest was sparked. I read an article in ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION/SCIENCE 
FACT (yes, I'm sorry but I am one of those science fiction freaks). It was 
about the Dora Kent case and it made the whole endeavor seem real. Something 
that actually happened to normal people. I was intrigued and I decided to 
keep the article for the addresses printed at the end of it. One day I might 
follow it up.

But I moved, the article was lost, and that was that. . .

My next brush with cryonics was a lot more dramatic.

It was Saturday, 23 September 1989. My husband, Helmer, woke up in the 
morning feeling under the weather. As the day progressed he got worse. In 
the end, we went to see the doctor who diagnosed an ulcer. I spent the next 
couple of hours phoning my friends to put off a dinner party we had planned. 
It was still a normal day. Neither of us suspected that we had anything 
serious to worry about.

Helmer kept on getting worse and worse. Finally, we called the doctor again 
and he - bless his soul - was one of the few doctors who still did house 
calls. The doctor changed his diagnosis to a bleeding ulcer and called an 
ambulance. At the hospital, they decided to keep him under observation until 
morning when they would run more tests. The diagnosis was still a bleeding 
ulcer.

They were halfway right. He certainly was bleeding into the abdominal 
cavity, but it wasn't from an ulcer. He had an abdominal arterial aneurysm. 
In simple terms, it means that there was a weakness on the biggest artery in 
your whole body. It was leaking and was close to rupturing.

During the night it burst.

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Message #29365
From: "marta sandberg" <[email-masked]>
Subject: My journey to cryonics   Part II
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:37:33 +0800

The police came knocking at my door and told me to phone the hospital. He 
had collapsed with a scream and had been taken into emergency surgery. They 
operated on him through that long night. In the morning he came out of the 
operating room and I saw him in the intensive care ward. He was simply lying 
there, like a beached blue whale, surrounded by machines that kept him 
alive. He couldn't even breath, but was attached to a ventilator that pushed 
air into him with a soft rhythmic "whoosh...click...whoosh...click..."

That is one sound I will never forget. Nor will I forget when the doctors 
told me he was brain-dead. He had lost too much blood, too quickly. During 
the night-surgery, his heart had stopped four times and now they couldn't 
find any sign of brain activity. He had died and it was only the machines 
that kept his body functioning. They would turn off those machines as soon 
as they could legally establish death; that takes about forty hours. 
Although they couldn't declare him death yet, they didn't give me any hope. 
This time they were sure of their diagnosis. He would not recover. Nobody 
could survive what he had been through.

. . .that was when I thought about cryonics again. My beloved Helmer could 
not be dead. I wouldn't allow him to be dead. If the only chance was 
freezing, then I would do it.

I don't know if I could have carried it through. I was in shock. I couldn't 
walk down a corridor without drunkenly reeling from wall to wall. Even 
breathing was difficult. I tried to collect myself enough to recall the 
relevant phone number, but it was like swimming through treacle upstream.

I never had to make that phone call. Helmer, my magnificent stubborn 
bastard, refused to stay dead. After a few hours his hand started to twitch 
- a voluntary movement that proved that he wasn't brain-dead.

He had survived.

The recovery, such as it was, was slow. It was almost three months before he 
left the hospital. And that was only the beginning of a long protracted 
healing process.

I forgot about cryonics again. It was a decision born out of desperation. 
Once I knew that Helmer was alive, it slid from my mind.

All my energy was focused on making Helmer well again. It took almost a year 
to get him out of wheelchair and walking under his own steam. Inch by inch 
we built up what had been lost in a single night.

When we thought we where over the hump we decided to celebrate and booked 
into a resort hotel for a week. It was the most luxurious and idyllic place 
I have ever stayed in - cottages built out over a lake on stilts so you 
could fish trout from your balcony or simply sit and relax. As fate would 
have it, it turned out to be a total waste of money.

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Message #29366
From: "marta sandberg" <[email-masked]>
Subject: My journey to cryonics   Part III
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:39:12 +0800

I knew that Helmer needed to rest a lot so I had bought a couple of books to 
have something to do when he slept. One of them was 'Engines of Creation' by 
Eric Drexler. The first book on nanotechnology.

It hit me like a sledgehammer blow. With my background in mathematics (and a 
keen interest in science in general) and the practical mind-set of an 
engineer that I had absorbed from Helmer, I recognized that this was not a 
pipedream. It was a blueprint for something that would happen, and it was 
starting right now. I alternated from abject fear to incredible hope. My 
world has changing; new frightening/tantalizing possibilities were opening 
up.

Then I came to the chapter on cryonics. Drexler had very cunningly sneaked 
up on the subject. First, he talked about the medical possibilities of 
nanotechnology. He dealt with emergency medicine, outlining how in the 
future it would be possible to stabilize a body with nanomachines to suspend 
all life signs until the patient could be bought to a hospital where real 
healing could take place. Finally, he asked how far away that technology 
was. His answer. . . you can divide the problem into two parts - stabilizing 
the patient and healing the patient. We can do the first part right now by 
freezing people and then wait for medicine to catch up with the problem of 
healing them. WHAM.

I was stunned.

It made sense.

There must be a catch...

All in all, it was a wasted holiday. I never got around to catching a single 
trout. Helmer and I did some gentle nature walking when he was up to it. 
When he slept or rested, I read and thought.

This time I was ready to accept cryonics. A lot had changed since the last 
time I became thought about it.

To begin with, I knew I was mortal. There are few things that can bring that 
point home to you quite as forcefully as sitting beside the man you love and 
hearing a machine breathing for him.

Whoosh...click...whoosh...click...

Knowing that in a few hours the doctors will turn the machine off and he 
will stop breathing.

I think that most people avoid cryonics because they don't like making 
arrangements for their own death. In the same way, they never quite get 
around to writing out a will or telling their family where the life 
insurance deeds are kept. Well, I knew I was mortal and so was Helmer.

I also knew that death is a complex thing, not the on-off switch that I had 
imagined. When the doctors said that Helmer was dead, they had been right. 
His body was not functioning and it was totally shut down. Even with the 
most extreme and painful methods, they could not elicit the slightest 
response from his brain. Most of his other systems had also quit. No life 
signs, nothing happening. One by one, I watched how they quivered back to 
life. I had developed a gut feeling for the difference between 'information 
death' and 'functional death'. That is one of the hardest things to grasp 
about cryonics.

And now the final hurdle (to me) was solved. Whenever I had read about 
cryonics before there had been a lot of vague hand-waving about 'future 
medicine' that would solve all the problems that cryonics created. But apart 
from a lecture in inevitable progress of technology, there had never been 
any solid blueprint given for how this might happen. Deep in my soul, I am a 
very practical person and I couldn't become excited about cloud castles. 
Nanotechnology was real. It built its dreams with solid atoms in provable 
ways that any biochemist would appreciate. That I could believe in.

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Message #29367
From: "marta sandberg" <[email-masked]>
Subject: My journey to cryonics   Part IV
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 14:41:15 +0800

You would be forgiven to think that I rushed straight into cryonics and 
signed my contract as soon as possible.

Wrong. I am far too practical and conservative to do anything like that. By 
the time we had arrived home from our holiday I had had time to cool down. 
To put it bluntly, cryonics sounded too good to be true. So I started my 
search to find out why cryonics COULDN'T work.

That took close to three years.

Part of the reason why it took so long was my refusal to contact any 
cryonics organization. I was convinced that they must be con-men trying to 
sell snake oil. I wanted my research to be uncontaminated by their 
self-serving influence. So I tried to find and absorb every bit of original 
research that could have any bearing on cryonics. I am proud to say that 
when I finally gave in and ordered 'Reaching for Tomorrow' by Alcor I had 
already read most of their references.

It was a long and meandering quest. Some topics are obvious, like cognitive 
neuroscience. Just hard to find good material on the subject. Others aren't 
so obvious, like the stability of organizations over a long timespan. That 
took me into some interesting areas of sociology and business structure. 
Then there was the problem with aging and the biochemistry of freezing and 
ischaemic injury. And, of course, nanotechnology had to be investigated 
further.

Nor did I forget to read every article and criticism of cryonics that I 
could lay my hands on. Only when I could refute all arguments to my own 
satisfaction was I willing to believe. As I said, that took close to three 
years.

But this was not the end of my journey.

Now the toughest battle began. A battle that took almost as long as my 
research had.

I believed in cryonics, but Helmer didn't. He had been deteriorating slowly. 
In retrospect, our holiday was the high point of his health. He had a heart 
attack shortly after we came back. Then he suffered partial liver failure. 
There were recurring bouts of pancreatitis. We found out he had an 
inoperable pituary brain tumor. And so on, . .  a series of things going 
wrong.

I got used to following a screaming ambulance into hospital and the long 
hard waiting that followed.

But he pulled through every time. He was a magnificent stubborn bastard. And 
he was MY magnificent bastard. I don't think I can ever admire anyone the 
way I admired Helmer's indomitable spirit to live. Three times the doctors 
gave up on him and straight out told me would die in hours. Twice they were 
wrong. Only the last time counts, and maybe that won't be forever.

But that was still in the future. I first had to convince him to give 
cryonics a go.

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Message #29368
From: [email-masked]
Subject: My journey to cryonics   Part V

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