I started to read Jonathan Weiner's Long For This World: The Strange Science of Immortality, and by page 70 I already wonder whether I should bother to finish it. I can tell that the book's author doesn't share many individuals' sense of urgency about survival (especially cryonicists') when he invokes mythology and history to illustrate previous failures in the quest.
By way of comparison, suppose someone wrote a book about the quest to, say, plug an oil gusher under the Gulf of Mexico, and started out by recounting the biblical story of the Tower of Babel to show the futility of man's efforts to reach areas where he allegedly doesn't belong (a message Leon Kass might appreciate). That would frame the book's message in a way hostile to its subject matter.
I get a similar impression of disrespecting the subject matter from what I've read of Weiner's book so far.
Cryonicists, especially, see death as an emergency that needs technological solutions just as urgently as we need technological solutions to the Gulf disaster. The dilatory efforts to find these solutions doesn't make the need for them any less important. The fact that people have expected, and demanded, the application of The Power of Man's MindTM (I bet Objectivists would like to trademark that phrase) to controlling the oil gusher shows that we still have a latent belief in human efficacy when a sufficiently dire emergency backs us to the wall. Cryonicists would like to see that same belief, and the social energy behind it, applied towards our more basic emergency which threatens us all.
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