Comments on: 1968 AD > Cryonics > Reboot

By: John de Rivaz

John de Rivaz — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 10:10:49 +0000

You could get a simple addition version of the slide rule
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiator
Anyone good at mental arithmetic could easily add up faster, which is why I was given one for free!
and the multifunctional version of the pocket calculator was about the size of a hand grenade
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta_calculator
The latter very very expensive. Inflation adjusted, they cost far more than a tablet computer. As I recall the money cost was about the same.
Another relevant point to future shock is the fact that in the 1950s/60s it was easy to make electronic goods like radios and tape recorders. I even knew someone who made a tape recorder deck completely from scratch from sheets of mild steel. Although today you can assemble desktop computers to your own design quite easily, you are only plugging parts. Making a laptop or tablet would be impossible. You can make electronic products from board computers like the Raspberry Pi, but it is a very different process to making a tape deck from sheet steel.

By: admin

admin — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 21:33:45 +0000

Kurt Vonnegut was a native of Indianapolis, IN, just like moi. There must be something in the drinking water there (Jim Jones was from Indy, too :-(). I hadn’t heard that quote from Vonnegut before, but it is both profound and true. When I was very young (in my early teens) I read some of Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle was the first. I didn’t get him at all. I thought the idea of Ice 9 was cool, but I couldn’t understand what he was really saying.

If you want a good start, before jumping headlong into his very unusual sensibility, read Welcome to the Monkey House, which is a collection of very accessible short stories.

The “Russian version” of Vonnegut, though not written by a Russian, is Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Yossarian has a lot to say about the human condition, and about the position of sane people who just want to go on living in a world full of crazy people, who don’t. I’ve always thought that Catch-22 would be the Catcher in the Rye equivalent for disaffected immortalist youth. Except there aren’t any – immortalist youths, disaffected or otherwise. — Mike Darwin

By: unperson

unperson — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 20:41:54 +0000

you wrote “In Russia we see the failure of the effort to create a secularized utopia; only the utopia part failed, not the secularization part. ”

Or was soviet empire simply something promised the people, i.e., socialism, but the upper class, those in power, stole everything for themselves and made it work for themselves. Those with the gold made the rules there, too, same as everywhere else. Just no private property. The state did not belong to the people there, but to the party elite. It was socialism with quotes around it. Same thing in ‘communist’ china.

Long story short–just because those in power say “This is X,” that don’t mean it is X.

The American elite prattle on about how democratic america is. Same deal. Very little democracy can happen in a large divided nation.

By: Mark Plus

Mark Plus — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 15:10:16 +0000

You haven’t lost your literary gift, Mike. I recognize the same mind which wrote “Transitions” back in 1984, which I have found moving. I’ve copied out your lines from the earlier composition and posted them in a couple of places:

“Despite the worry it is good to be alive.

“It is good to be alive.

“It is even worth waiting for.”

I’ve never read any of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels (I plan to remedy that soon; I have several on the Barnes & Noble wish list for my Nook), but I recall reading that towards the end of his life Vonnegut said that if you live long enough, you get to know “the future” of many of the people you knew earlier in life. I guess you, especially, now know “the future” of the American cryonics movement in the late 1960′s, and I can understand your disappointment with it. Perhaps cryonics tried to take root in the wrong society, and at the wrong time, In Russia we see the failure of the effort to create a secularized utopia; only the utopia part failed, not the secularization part. The survivors, after picking up the pieces and reassessing their potentials, just might have the right correlation of forces at their disposal to make cryonics succeed.