PS, have you seen MONEYBALL yet? — MD

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/05/stories-are-like-religion.html

I think Mike should put out an ebook version first, then see about a hard cover edition. The idea of a physical book sounds outdated to younger people:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_l6ddt62qb21qz82gvo1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI6WLSGT7Y3ET7ADQ&Expires=1337020503&Signature=ZPZktYrLa%2FbG%2Bb0YDjhnGkHrxLs%3D

http://www.almostzara.com/wp-content/uploads/library_cartoon-700×534.jpg

http://youtu.be/ibfx4AFlgH4

You could write a book detailing the history of cryonics. All of the stuff you’ve written on this blog would be the start material for that book. I can tell you that I would definitely buy a copy (hard cover at $25 or whatever) and I think many others would as well. Even the people who don’t like you personally respect your enormous accomplishments and your fine attention to detail.

I think history of past activities is important, if for no other reason but to learn from the mistakes of the past. All successful organizations and movements build upon their experiences and their past.

You book would make a nice counterpart to that atrocious junk written by Larry Johnson.

Oh, the irony. Cryonicists seem to have trouble understanding the idea that our own suspensions will depend on the efforts of generations of people currently unborn, in effect strangers who will have to assume the burden of caring for us. What would motivate them to do that, if these future people themselves lack an interest in history which includes the stories, or “myths” if you prefer, about the cryonauts in those dewars and about the values, dreams and passions which motivated us? As you said in your 1992 speech which has apparently fallen down the memory hole, apart from what I recall of it, in 1967 James Bedford became a mythic hero who started a fantastic journey; some day the Bedford myth could inspire people to reconstitute Bedford into a healthy, living man. How can we create something like an “apostolic succession” to ensure that we can get that kind of commitment to help us fulfill our own mythic journeys from our successors & benefactors?

And related to that, how can we keep updating the cryonics idea so that it still makes sense to each new generation? As I’ve tried to articulate, the whole “space age” shtick associated with cryonics from its origins (e.g., “The Jameson Satellite”) sounds phony to people under the age of 40 who can see with their own eyes that they don’t live in the “space age” their elders predicted for them. This absence probably contributes to their skepticism about the idea of progress in general. (Neal Stephenson, the science fiction writer, in a recent talk speculates that moon landing denialism could become the mainstream view in another century, while the people who argue that the moon landings happened will sound like the cranks & conspiracy theorists.) How can we set up institutions to make cryonics understandable to people born in 2012, 2052, 2102, etc., who will have fundamentally different experiences and expectations about “the future” from the ones we grew up with? I see little to no interest in dealing with these problems in the cryonics community, much less discussing them.