Manned space travel, running on fumes.

I've finished skimming through the ebook version of Mary Roach's Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.

I found it sadness-inducing, because it gave me the sense that manned space travel currently runs on fumes, or to change the metaphor, precariously survives from a depleting supply of capital built up and set aside for it 40-50 years ago, without the ability to replenish the supply and keep it thriving. Its increasingly marginal role in our society relates to the problem of framing cryonics as part of a "future" based on a space-faring civilization, when the historical trend doesn't point in that direction.

In fact, cryoncists now have a problem when some of us say we expect to do this or that as space explorers in a few centuries, assuming that the trauma medicine of an advanced civilization in Future World could revive us in a sufficiently functional state. People under the age of 40 or so alive now can't relate that to anything they've experienced in their lifetimes, apart from unambitious near-Earth activities. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if in a few years someone hears of NASA and asks, "Doesn't that company rescue trapped miners or something?"

You can see an example of a space-motivated cryonicist in the following video, around time 3:09:



So I point out again: We need to reframe and rebrand cryonics in a way that younger people, who've grown up with experiences and expectations different from mine, at least, can understand.

BTW, I don't care for this video. Parts of it make me think of Cialis commercials. And, of course, its case for cryonics depends on discredited fantasies about "nanotechnology."