The SUSPENDED ANIMATION conference is being held May 20-22 in Ft. Lauderdale in south Florida. It will be worth the trip, whether you are coming from California, New York, or Australia.
The program is going to be superb. You will meet and personally interact with the scientists and leaders who are the doing the research to save your precious life.
Sorry, I don't feel so confident about cryonics' "scientists and leaders" these days. I don't say I suspect their motives. Quite the contrary; I know they want to find solutions to the Emergency as badly as I do.
I do say that they need to break out of the Not Invented Here trap which has caused progress in cryonics to stagnate for the past 20 years. The model I'd like to pursue, based on open innovation and inducement prizes, has empirical evidence in its favor as a way forward; and it would also cleverly motivate people outside of cryonics to spend their own time and money in trying to solve our problems.
I also don't find it persuasive to hear that cryonics requires such specialized knowledge and training in its assumptions that outsiders can't acquire useful insight into it readily. What if it turns out instead that over-specialization and narrow focus have contributed to cryonics' stagnation?
Perhaps egoism plays a role in this as well. Cryonicists tend to display the Great Man view of history, where in many cases "great" means something like "freakishly smart (like how we view our idealized future selves)." A certain amount of command-economy thinking probably plays a role here as well, despite the prevalence of free-market advocates in cryonics. Cryonicists tend to assume that a handful of very smart technocrats have to run cryonics organizations and make cryonics work, based on the assumptions that other people can't or won't contribute because "they don't get it," and that we can't trust those people any way if they don't want cryonic suspension for themselves. (I do see the wisdom of not entrusting newcomers with too much responsibility within cryonics organizations, however, until we have plenty of experience with them to get a good reading of their competence and character.)
But in reality progress comes from networking many human minds of varying and dissimilar abilities and world views together through markets and other social mechanisms, as Matt Ridley points in out in his answer to the current Edge Question. The success of the cryonics project will require just this sort of networking together of as many human minds as we can access, to find or infer the dispersed and tacit knowledge we need, even if the overwhelming majority of them don't care for, or even know about, cryonic suspension.
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