Technology is what allows us our prosperity, and it must be funded and nurtured, but we must also avoid funding and nurturing parasites. Cargo-cult science and technologists are not only wasteful of money, they waste human capital. It makes me sad to see so many young people dedicating their lives to snake oil like “nanotechnology.” They’d be better off starting a business or learning a trade. “Vaporware technologist” would be a horrible epitaph to a misspent life.
As a potential customer of cryonic suspension, I must really, really insist that cryonics organizations heed the empirical failure of Eric Drexler's ideas after nearly 30 years, and start to look for better ideas, especially in the areas of improved brain cryopreservation and the proper training and qualifications of the people they send out to perform suspensions. (I also want them to stop feeding Drexler's parasite and its offshoots with our dues money, if they still do that.) Oh, and not to neglect the apparently too-boring-to-worry-about problem of reliably finding enough money to stay business!
In other words, I want them to do things which produce empirically observable progress in the here-and-now, instead of all the eye-rolling nonsense about mind-uploading, "nanomedicine" and other transhumanist fantasies. (At least Thomas Donaldson speculates about "24th Century Medicine" based on biological models, not on an attempt to force mechanical engineering to work at a level which defies physics and invites scorn from real scientists.)
Unfortunately that might not happen until some key cryonics leaders (mostly older than me), who have apparently lost the ability to integrate adverse information, have gone into the dewars or cryostats ahead of me. If I stay healthy and can make it to my 90's, like three of my grandparents, I might have some say about this after all. My father's apparent Alzheimer's in his early 80's has me worried, however; not the sort of thing you want in your family medical history. (It probably helps that I've lost nearly 40 lbs. since my branch retinal vein occlusion back in June. I get blood work next month to see whether my LDL has dropped down to a healthier level.)
BTW, my maternal grandmother, who lives in the same nursing home as my father, manages to hang on in her 90's, despite confinement to a wheel chair and her heart failure and kidney failure which cause edema in her legs; yet she still seems mentally competent. Weirdly so, in fact; when I got to see her last year, she talked just like I remembered her talking during my childhood in the 1960's. I wonder if she's reached the stage where, as Michael R. Rose argues, people step off the Gompertz curve, stop aging further and die off at a constant rate.
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