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most egocentric people of the pre-dystopian past
Tuesday, April 22 2008
It wasn't difficult to remove most of the rest of the objects inside the hatchback's cab. The two front seats were each held down by only four bolts, and with them out of the way the subcompact had the spaciousness of a minivan. Tearing up the benchlike backseat revealed a set of thick overlapping steel plates protecting the front of the gas tank and helping to provide a strong-but-collapsible horizontal column to maintain the car's width during an impact from the side. I was also amused to find simple styrofoam blocks had been inserted between the car's metallic outer shell and the vinyl panels that define the interior walls. These are just a few of the marvelous revelations that I would have never learned had I not launched into a prolonged dissection of the car. When I see them, I think about all the crash tests, experiments, and improvisations that led to such interesting artifacts of the assembly.
At some point today I climbed up on the solar deck and painted the new particleboard backing of the large homebrew panel. The color I used was white and the paint itself was just a latex primer, but at some point I intend to paint a mural on large 60 square foot surface. It has the potential to be the most spectacular human artifact visible from Dug Hill Road.
As I worked, I found myself listening and relistening to the latest MP3 podcast available of a This American Life broadcast. It's the one entitled "Mistakes Were Made," and features a wonderful lingering history of the early, imperfect years of the cryonics movement. Cryonics is the low-temperature preservation of a person until such time as medicine can advance to the point of being able to revive and heal that person. The story focused on Bob Nelson, the guy responsible for some of the first human freezings in California back in the 1960s and early 1970s. Unfortunately for Bob and the folks he froze, many of these freezings were done pro bono or with very little money, so there weren't the necessary endowments to maintain the low temperatures and ricketing preservation capsules. Eventually two capsules, each packed with frozen corpses, fail. And Bob Nelson ends up a disgrace to the cryonics movement.
The thing that struck me as I listened to the show over and over was this: why would the future have any interest in adding to its presumably overpopulated dystopia by thawing out the most egocentric people of the pre-dystopian past? People who sign up for cryonic preservation can, I suppose, die a little easier knowing that at least there is potential for a future, one a wee bit more grounded in reality than, say, the Christian notion of Heaven.
The first people cryonically preserved had it done with such small endowments that they bought only a couple years in the deep freeze, not even enough time to get to the age of stem cells and primitive manmade nanostructures. The corpses of the people frozen with bigger endowments are fine for now, but the things they are demanding of the future are enormous, and won't come about for a very long time.
This is enough time for bad things to happen: failure of the power grid, political instability, and the financial collapse of responsible parties. And who will be left to care enough to thaw these people out even if the technology does arrive?
I've never heard of anyone suggesting the need to revive the mummies of Egypt, the original people preserved with thoughts of some uncertain future. Mummies may not have been used as firewood, but they'd been known for a long time before anyone cared about their value as former humans, and then only for archaeological reasons. I suspect that if cryonically-preserved people play any role in the future at all, it will also be entirely archeological.
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