Cryonics background material available
H Keith Henson
suspensions done by Alcor. Any budding SF writers who would like copies
are welcome. If only a few are interested, I will send by email,
if more, will just post here or in alt.callahans with a pointer to it.
Keith Henson hkhe...@cup.portal.com
masmith@apollo
I read an interesting Judge Dredd strip once regarding cryonics. It
showed this old guy being "woken up," and expressing surprise at the short time
he'd been "asleep." He asked the doctors, "Have they found a cure for my
cancer already?" The doctors replied, "No, but you were diagnosed as having
six months to live, and we think that's about how long the world has. We
thought you might enjoy spending them awake."
Putting off 'til tomorrow sometimes just isn't possible.
************************************************************************
* Russell Nash * "Hey, hey, hey, clear the way! *
* sca Lord Kern Damon Mauer Hall* There's no escape from my authority.*
* mka Marshall Smith * I am the one, the only one! *
* MAS...@DAVIDSON.BITNET * I am the god of kingdom come! *
* MAS...@APOLLO.DAVIDSON.EDU * GIMME THE PRIZE!" *
************************************************************************
Stephen Morris
the "science" of cryonics should read the section on it in
"The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition" by Ed Regis.
S.
H Keith Henson
Since someone else brought it up, I will post two reviews and an
interview with Ed Regis. Regis does not think cryonics is for him,
but he has no doubts at all about us being serious about it. (The
County Coroner's office did provide plenty of humor though.)
Keith Henson
------
Reprinted from *Cryonics*, November, 1990. Copyright 1990 by
Alcor Life Extension Foundation; 12327 Doherty St.; Riverside, CA
92503. Tel:(714) 736-1703. al...@cup.portal.com. Permission
granted to reproduce with this credit.
The Common Thread: A Review of Ed Regis'
"Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition"
Addison-Wesley; 1990, $18.95
review by Mike Darwin and Ralph Whelan
"When Saul Kent had the suspension team at the Alcor Life
Extension Foundation in Riverside, California, surgically
remove the head of Dora Kent, Saul's mother, from her body,
his hope was that she could eventually be restored to life
and health, probably even youth. The *last* thing on his
mind was that they'd all wind up being investigated for
murder."
So opens the first chapter of *Great Mambo Chicken and the
Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over The Edge*. Every
cryonicist will want to read this book. Not just because of the
Dora Kent story, or the disparate doings of the people from Alcor
who appear on its pages, or because it is full of interesting
people with exciting, challenging ideas. You'll want to read it
because this book is *just plain fun*.
Regis has achieved quite a number of special and extremely
rare things with this book. Any one of them would have made
*Great Mambo Chicken* worth your time and money. The combination
of them makes the book irresistible.
First, Regis tells the tale of cryonics, Alcor, and the Dora
Kent saga in a highly readable, clever and *accurate* way. He
uses the Dora Kent case and cryonics as a recurring theme
throughout the book, to be picked up and put down with great
finesse, a unifying element to tie a number of seemingly
disconnected characters together. And he does all this with
humor, decency, and wit. To non-cryonicists, the Dora Kent story
must seem more than a little bizarre, to say the least (even to
those of us who lived it, it was bizarre!), and it would have
been easy for Regis to follow in the well-worn tracks of others
who have covered it by evoking laughter with cheap shots and
petty viciousness. Not once does he fall prey to that approach,
and yet he manages to tell the tale in a way that exposes the
craziness of what happened.
Part of the reason he succeeds in doing this is that he
tells *all* of the story, including the balancing background on
the opposing side, such as Ray Carrillo's Keystone Coroners
scandals with "Tissuegate", wherein the Riverside County
Coroner's Office was found to be allowing employees to cut up
corpses on the picnic bench in their back yard and leave buckets
and bags of body parts for the new owners of their house to
discover upon moving in. It obviously took Regis a long time to
write this book, and he paid attention to every detail, doing the
year or two of background work required to get everything just
right, subscribing to and reading *Cryonics* magazine for several
years, and attending Alcor-sponsored conferences to listen to
what we had to say and to meet and mingle with Alcor members (he
even covers the debate over which word to use in describing the
condition of patients who are legally dead but not *really*
dead).
Second, he tackles a number of seemingly outrageous and
disconnected ideas, giving their protagonists an even and fair
hearing while retaining his objectivity. Telling someone else's
story fairly and thoroughly is almost impossible when the story
is at once complex, alien to common sensibilities, and just plain
hard to explain. Regis manages to communicate each and every
idea he touches simply, accurately, and with incredible
objectivity.
Meet, for instance, Bob Truax. His ambitions are humble:
All he wants is a chance to put the first man into space in a
*private spacecraft*. Well, that's not quite all he wants. He'd
like to "...cut the cost of space transportation down to the
point where it's affordable." while he's at it. And in case
that's not enough to keep him busy, he'd like to do away with
this aging business. That's if abolishing war doesn't take up
too much of his time.
And so what if he's side-tracked a bit along the way?
Rocketing Evel Knievel across Snake River Canyon in a
steam-powered craft may not be any giant leap for mankind, but
it's certainly interesting reading, and anyway *could you have
done it?*
Or how about Dave Jefferson? Realizing that he could
develop computer programs that simulate most (if not all) of the
processes once unique to "natural life", he set out to develop a
hard-disk habitat of flowchart flora and evolving "Programinals".
And for those of us eager for one less thing to worry about,
Dave Criswell has just the thing: a scenario to save our aging
sun. We can either squeeze out some of that profligate sun stuff
or just spin it off, depending, one would suppose, on whom we
contract to do the job.
And then there are the more familiar members of the cast:
Here's your chance at a fresh perspective on some of the old
faithfuls, to include Saul Kent, Ralph Merkle, Mike Darwin, Eric
Drexler, Hans Moravec, Bob Ettinger, and Keith Henson (who pops
up all over the book like a virulent meme).
A surprising thing about all these people is the degree to
which they relate to each other *despite* their disparate
starting points and wildly differing careers. How, for instance,
would a guy like Hans Moravec, who heads the Robotics Lab at
Carnegie-Mellon University and is a respected Artificial
Intelligence researcher, end up involved in the Dora Kent case?
Answer: Because of Moravec's theoretical work exploring
"uploading" human consciousness into "robot" bodies, he was
willing to give a legal declaration in favor of Alcor in our
successful attempt to block the Riverside County Coroner from
autopsying her brain.
And what about Bob Truax, the do-it-yourself rocket
scientist? Would you believe he was once a Bay Area Cryonics
Society Member, and is preoccupied with gerontological life
extension? Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said. And if there
is any unifying character in this book it is Keith Henson. Keith
is everywhere. He is seen early on founding the L5 space
colonization society. Then he pops up giving lectures on
nanotechnology at the Artificial Life Conference. And there he
is again in the thick of the Dora Kent affair, deeply involved in
cryonics. Indeed, *Great Mambo Chicken* might be more aptly
titled: *Gadfly Keith Henson's Guided Tour of Science Slightly
Over The Edge*.
And would a cross-section such as this be complete without a
side sample of Freeman Dyson, of Richard Feynman, of Robert
Forward? Rue the day that we neglect such pillars of speculative
science.
There can be no doubt that this book will be good for
cryonics. Here we are juxtaposed with the was-greats, the
greats, and the destined-to-be- greats. The content is
first-rate, the context is open and favorable, and the whole
thing is *well done*. If you want a style comparison, think of a
collaboration (however unlikely) between Tom Wolfe and Arthur C.
Clarke, the net result being an offhand, tongue-in-cheek
approach, something like: Well sure, it's looks to me like
they're nuts too, but *what if they're not?*
So don't be misled. If that's the current
state-of-the-attitude toward us and our ilk, then friend, *we are
making progress.*
THE CHICKEN AND THE MAN
AN INTERVIEW WITH ED REGIS
by Ralph Whelan
*He was born in the city, spent his childhood in Queens,
went to high school in Brooklyn, and to college in the
Bronx. If his first twenty years in New York didn't kill
him, and fifteen years as a philosophy professor at Howard
University couldn't finish the job, then Ed Regis may be
justified in putting off cryonic suspension arrangements for
himself. Besides, there's something of an aesthetic appeal,
perhaps, in achieving immortality through one's work, though
most of us would still prefer just *not dying*.
But how many of us can claim a betting chance at both? Ed
Regis, with four major publications to his name, is
certainly one of the few. Of his three previous books,
*Extraterrestrials* and *Gewirth's Ethical Rationalism* were
collections of essays that Regis edited and unified. Then,
in 1986, he *authored* his first book, *Who Got Einstein's
Office*, about the people who followed in Albert Einstein's
footsteps -- von Neumann, Oppenheimer, et al -- at Princeton
University's Institute for Advanced Study.
And that's the story of his life, but for a couple of
things. . . . *
Cryonics: Let's start at square one. What got you started as a
writer?
Regis: I think it goes back to when I was watching an episode of
*Cosmos*, Carl Sagan's TV program -- must've been eight or nine
years ago. I had always been interested in science as a boy, but
then I went into philosophy, for a variety of complex reasons,
and anyway, I saw this *Cosmos* program and I became
re-enthralled with the whole. . . scientific enterprise. He
talked in one of these episodes about an interstellar journey
which would take longer than a normal human lifespan. In other
words, this interstellar journey would be on a space *ark*, and
the journey would take four hundred years to complete. And as a
philosophy professor specializing in ethics at the time, I asked
myself, "Could this really be moral, to send a group of people on
this journey which would take four hundred years?" I mean,
people would be born on this journey, they'd die on the
spaceship. . . . Is it really *moral* to engage in an enterprise
like that?
Cryonics: So you wrote about it?
Regis: I wrote up a paper about this -- this is in connection
with a conference taking place at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory. They invited me out to give this paper analyzing
whether this journey could be moral or not, and at the same
conference I heard Dave Criswell give his paper about taking the
Sun apart. This was such a mind-boggling idea, I thought: "Why
not propose this to *Omni*?", which I was a very great fan of.
. . maybe do a little outside writing, besides the scholarly
stuff I was doing in philosophy. So I proposed an idea to
*Omni*, and they bought the idea, and I wrote the article, and
they published it with hardly any changes at all. It was one of
the easiest articles I had published. It wasn't too easy to
write, but there was no need for major revision at all. And
anyway, that's the long and short of how I got into the writing
business. Through that first article in *Omni*.
Cryonics: Can you tell us what your mindset was when you sat down
to write *Great Mambo Chicken*? What did you hope to accomplish?
Regis: Well, the intent of the book was to gather together a
bunch of people who had the furthest-out ideas, none of which,
however, violated any known scientific laws, or laws of nature.
In other words, people who were really doing "on the fringe"
thinking and pushing back the ideas of what's possible. I didn't
want to include any people who I thought were crackpots -- and by
a crackpot I mean someone who is proposing things which are known
to violate laws of science. For example, people who want to
build perpetual motion machines. . . that violates the second law
of thermodynamics, so those machines are impossible.
Cryonics: So you gathered these people together. . . .
Regis: Yes, and I made an outline of the book I wanted to
write. And I proposed it to my publisher, the same publisher who
did the Einstein book, and they liked it, so I started writing.
But the interesting thing about this is that my proposal -- which
I still have a copy of, naturally -- didn't have anything in
there about cryonics. Nothing at all. Cryonics was just not a
part of my original proposal. But my overriding goal as a writer
was to write a book that people were going to have fun reading.
Cryonics: So your criteria, then, were that these ideas be
interesting, and yet not in violation of any laws of physics?
Regis: Be interesting, way out -- way out to the point that it
sounds impossible and stupid at first. When I went to that
conference and heard Dave Criswell give his talk about
dismantling the Sun, I thought that it was the stupidest idea I'd
ever heard in my entire life. I couldn't imagine why the
taxpayers of this country were being asked to support this kind
of thing. The great Los Alamos National Laboratory! This
actually made me *mad*. When he gave this speech I was livid.
However, I thought about it and he sent me a copy of the thing
and I read it, and the more I read it, the more I learned about
it, the more plausible it seemed to me. And now. . . it's a way
out idea, but it doesn't make me mad anymore. So I was really
trying to bring together a bunch of ideas that were so far out
that they're almost crackpot, but not quite.
Cryonics: Were there any that were within the laws of physics
but were still too far out?
Regis: The only idea which I don't think violates any laws of
physics, but which I personally don't believe will ever happen is
time travel. I do not think time travel is possible. I think
time travels in one direction, *forward*, and I don't think it
can be recaptured. I don't think you can go back in time. I
just don't think it will ever happen. Even if the laws of
physics do permit it, I think the laws of what you might call
metaphysics do not permit it, so I don't anticipate that that
will ever happen.
Cryonics: What about time travel into the future? Are you
objecting just to time travel into the past?
Regis: Yes. Right.
Cryonics: So then, time travel into the future is fine?
Regis: Well. . . .
Cryonics: Using, probably, relativistic effects.
Regis: Right. There's no problem with that.
Cryonics: Is your objection basically one of causality, then?
Regis: Yeah, causality is part of it. But more fundamentally
than that, it's just not something I can believe. I just do not
believe that this will ever happen. Everything else in the
book I have no problem believing will work, or could happen, or
is possible. But time travel just doesn't hold anything for me
at all.
Cryonics: Were you ever a member of the L5 Society?
Regis: Nope. Nope. I first heard about it when I attended that
conference and found out one of the people who organized the
conference, Eric Jones, was an L5 member. But I had not heard of
it before that. And when I did hear of it, I thought that they
were a bunch of crackpots too. I was not a very forward-looking
thinker -- and still I'm not, I'm a journalist -- but for a long
time I couldn't accredit any of these ideas.
Cryonics: Let's back up for a moment. You told us what you
*hoped* to accomplish with *Great Mambo Chicken*. Do you feel
like you succeeded?
Regis: Oh, yeah. I think that the book is a hell of a lot of
fun to read and I love it! (*Laughs*.)
Cryonics: Would you consider yourself a futurist? A
"transhuman"?
Regis: Me? No, I'm a rather conventional, conservative guy.
Although I believe that all these things -- with the exception of
time travel -- are possible, I myself do not want to become a
computer. I myself don't want to be a computer program, or
anything even remotely approaching that stuff. I don't want
to go to Mars, I --
Cryonics: You don't want to be a bush robot?
Regis: No, I don't want to be a ro-- I *do not* want to be a
bush robot. (*Laughs.*) I'm more or less satisfied with my
body, with the circumstances that I enjoy here on Earth, in my
little farm out here in the mountains. I'm more or less
satisfied with the way things are; I do think the body could be
improved, I would like to live much longer than apparently I'm
going to live if nature just takes its unaided course. I'm in
favor of life extension -- to some degree -- but most of these
things I'm not a great fan of personally.
Cryonics: Do you have a personal interest. . . if not in taking
part, at least in finding out what happens with all these crazy
ideas?
Regis: Oh yeah. Yeah. I would love to live long enough to find
out if any of these things are going to come true. Like whether
cryonics will really work, whether. . . especially
nanotechnology. I mean, that's very fascinating to me. I would
love to know whether this will ever in fact be developed and come
on line and make a difference. I suspect it will, but it may
take much longer than Drexler and some of the other optimists are
thinking. There's a slogan that if we're lucky, it will happen
in thirty years, if we're unlucky it will happen in ten years.
To me, both of those estimates seem wildly optimistic. I don't
look for these things to happen in the next fifty years.
Cryonics: Can you tell us when you *do* look for them to happen?
Regis: No, but. . . (*laughs*) I'm rather pessimistic about
most things, and I don't think I'm a good one, really, to be
making predictions.
Cryonics: You don't even want to give us a worst-case scenario
here?
Regis: No. I wouldn't know. See, I just don't have any
principle on which to make a guess, so it would be fatuous to try
to do that, really.
Cryonics: Well, that's a novel viewpoint these days. It's
refreshing to hear. So what about your view of cryonics? Since
you think that these developments are probably a long way off, do
you have a personal interest in cryonic suspension?
Regis: Well. . . um. . . the main difficulty with cryonic
suspension is all the goddam forms that you have to fill out. I
mean, I've been doing some radio interviews publicizing the book,
and I'm gonna be going on television. The answer that I have
worked out for this -- 'cause people have asked me this and are
going to ask me this -- is, one of the major obstacles I see in
cryonic suspension is all the forms. Alcor has this booklet
called "Signing Up Made Simple", and you *know* that if they have
to publish a booklet, it's not simple! Right? I mean, how many
pages long is that booklet?
Cryonics: Ah. . . too many.
Regis: Too many! Right! (*Laughs.*) I think that one of
things that Alcor and other cryonics organizations will have to
do is make signing up legitimately -- *actually* -- so very
simple that it will be like. . . I don't know, buying a car. You
know, as simple as that.
Cryonics: So, moving on, what are you working on now?
Regis: Well, I really don't have any book under contract right
now. I found this last book so difficult to write that I was
taking a good long time off as a breather, and after I finally
got to the point where I wanted to do something, I came up sort
of dry when I tried to put something together. So I really don't
have a book under contract right now. I'm thinking about
possibly doing something in the area of life extension, but
that's been done so often in the past, and books on that subject
don't sell well at all. With the colossal exception of Durk and
Sandy's book. But mostly it's not too popular a subject, and I
may or may not do it. I don't know.
Cryonics: Would this book be entertainment or education?
Regis: Well, it'd be sort of along the lines of *Great Mambo
Chicken*. I'd try to combine some hard science with things that
are fun to read about. It would not be scholarly at all, it
would be a fun read which also acquaints people with the
science.
Cryonics: Which of the people that you mentioned in *Mambo* --
Bob Truax, Keith Henson, Bob Forward -- which of these people did
you meet with?
Regis: Well I met with everybody, with the exception of Evel
Knievel. I've never met him. I could never get in contact with
him. And the people at OTRAG -- Lutz Kayser. . . God knows where
he is. He's over in Europe somewhere. I could never get a line
on him. With those two exceptions, I met with practically
everybody at one time or another.
Cryonics: Have you ever been in the Hensons' tunnels?
Regis: No, 'cause that was a *long* time ago, probably twenty
years ago. I met Keith Henson at his present home in San Jose.
Cryonics: How did cryonics find its way into the book?
Regis: I really got into cryonics when I was talking to Bob Truax
at his home and he was going on about the Snake River Canyon
shot. . . I don't remember what the context was, but he blurted
out -- more or less exactly like I have it in the book, in fact
-- that "One day, when I have enough money, I'd like to have my
head frozen." That was really my entree into cryonics. When I
took myself over to Trans Time and met Art Quaife and some of the
other guys there, Art Quaife told me about the dog Miles. I went
to Miles' house and met Miles and his. . . father, Paul Segall,
and that was my introduction to cryonics. It all blossomed from
there.
Cryonics: And this was how long ago?
Regis: This was in 1988. In fact, I interviewed Bob Truax on my
birthday, January 7, 1988, which was the same day that Michael
Darwin was arrested and taken in for questioning. And I also
interviewed Bob Truax the next day, 'cause the interview was so
long it took two days. We were talking about this, and I said
that I saw the paper that morning and this guy was taken into
custody for cutting some lady's head off. And I thought at the
time that this was so unimaginably *weird*, I just had to go and
find out about it and cover it.
Cryonics: Is that what led you to Saul Kent?
Regis: That's right. Uh-huh.
Cryonics: Okay. Well that about wraps it up. Will we see you
at the Far Edge Party?
Regis: (*Laughs*) Probably not. I don't like bean dip.
GREAT MAMBO CHICKEN AND THE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION by Ed Regis.
Addison Wesley, 1990, $18.95.
Reviewed by Steve Bridge
Just imagine it: a book about all of our favorite subjects
rolled up into one: cryonics and immortality, nanotechnology and
the complete control of matter, downloading, space colonies, star
travel, star *reconstruction*. And even better, the book is
written with humor (a lot of it), understanding and accuracy (a
combination I had grown to assume was impossible in discussion of
these subjects), empathy, and even panache. Stop imagining and
go buy this book; it is that good.
Ed Regis is the first non-cryonicist writer to understand
that cryonics is only part of a larger subculture, that of people
who want to control their own lives completely, which implies
immortality and total control of matter -- well, it implies that
if you follow the logical consequences far enough. Regis shows us
the great and wacky thinkers of our time who follow those
consequences as far as possible, right down to the end of the
universe. These are the people who wish to transcend human
limits and transform humans into "superhumans," "post-humans," or
"transhumans," depending on your name-brand modern philosopher.
The very fact that you are reading this magazine at all
means you have some sort of appreciation for what this means.
Humans are defined by their limits. We are limited to our own
bodies, to the earth, to a small and finite lifespan, to the
capabilities of our brains. While not all of you may want to
live in space colonies or have robot bodies, the first time you
say something like, "Cryonics might be right," or "I don't want
to die," you have become an aspirant to the state of transhuman.
Ed Regis understands that the cross-pollination between
these fields is what makes the interesting story. Keith Henson
(a featured character in the book) cannot be understood as a
cryonicist without understanding his interests in space flight,
transforming the galaxy, explosives, nanotechnology, goats, and
artificial intelligence. Other featured players include Bob
Truax (rocket designer), Eric Drexler (nanotechnology), Timothy
Leary (a little of everything), Robert Forward (anti-gravity and
space flight), Gerard O'Neill (space colonies), Robert C.W.
Ettinger (cryonics pioneer, who is given as much space for *Man
into Superman* as for *The Prospect of Immortality*, Hans Moravec
(downloading), Mike Darwin and other Alcorians, several attendees
at the "Artificial Life 4-H Show" (the 1987 Los Alamos Artificial
Life Workshop), David Criswell (dismantling the sun), and just
about everyone else you could think of who knows any of those
people.
Regis credits these persons' ideas and interests to what he
calls "fin- de-siecle hubristic mania" -- a phrase which calls
for some translation. "Fin-de-siecle" is a French phrase
literally meaning "end of the cycle" or "end of the century,"
used for people who think that "a new day is dawning" because of
some major change. "Hubris" is a Greek word which refers to that
particular sort of pride which makes a man think he can outrun
his fate and be equal to the gods (sounds OK to me). The Greeks
used it in a tragic sense, but from Regis it seems to be a sort
of compliment. "Mania": Well, I think you can figure that one
out. Regis suggests, or rather lets his subjects suggest, that
this "hubristic mania" may not be misplaced. We might actually
make this stuff work.
This is a *vastly* entertaining book, and one which explains
a lot of technical subjects in clear terms. It is a lot more fun
and interesting than most of the individual books written on
these subjects, because Regis concentrates as much on the
characters as he does on the ideas. And while the book is
sharply funny, it achieves the small miracle of being so without
sarcasm or condescension.
Please buy this book and tell all of your friends about it.
It would be very useful for us to put this book on the best
seller list, or at least to help it sell enough copies to get
into paperback. We might find other like-minded individuals. I
hope Alcor will be able to purchase copies to sell to its
members.
I have one slight criticism. On page 105, Regis is
describing the time when Keith Henson became involved in
cryonics. "Henson finally decided that he might as well take
advantage of what seemed to be an ever surer bet. *Besides,* he
thought to himself, *it would be really stupid to be one of the
last people to die."* [Italics are in the original.]
Now this is a serious mistake. Keith Henson never in his
life thought *any* thought only to "himself," as any of us who
have been around Keith know. Fortunately for Ed Regis -- and for
us -- none of these people keep their thoughts to themselves.
This book is like a big party filled with fascinating people with
ideas that are "full of wonder." Do yourself a favor and join
the party.