Fight Aging!

Buried in a recent post at Chronosphere, the blog of cryonics community luminary Mike Darwin, is this:

There are perhaps something on the order of 2,000 living cryonicists in the world, the majority of them in the English speaking/reading world. Of these, optimistically, perhaps 15% are technically/scientifically/philosophically oriented "activists" with an interest in the mechanics of cryonics, as opposed to people who have chosen cryonics as a service or product "as is," and are content to accept it without further improvement as a result of their own efforts.

As I understand Darwin's chief concerns with cryonics as a whole, they amount to (a) that he doesn't like the way business is undertaken at Alcor and the Cryonics Institute, and, more importantly, (b) he thinks that there is a real risk of cryonics failing as a human endeavor in the future due to its lack of growth and comparatively narrow base of community support.

Insofar as point (a) goes, I'm sure that everyone in the community has at some point offered a back-seat driver's vision for what should change at Alcor - easy enough when all you have to do is write about it or talk about it, and you're done. Sitting in the driver's seat is somewhat more challenging, I believe. For my money, I don't think that Darwin approaches point (a) in his writing in a way that's going to win friends and influence people - though he clearly feels strongly on the matter, which one might choose to believe stems from point (b). As noted in the past:

What I'll here call hyperactivism is a poisonous sort of dysfunction that you'll find in activist and advocate communities associated with struggling industries or long-standing initiatives that have failed to fulfill early visions of growth. It comes about because the early supporters in any new field tend to be passionate, driven, ornery, and focused: if they didn't have these characteristics, they wouldn't be up for the job of fighting over and again to persuade people to see things their way.

...

But when things don't go according to plan, and what was intended to be great fails to achieve its original promise, or moves too slowly, then the problems start. Some of the early activists, untempered by large numbers of new volunteers and supporters, become poisonous. Their hyperactivism manifests itself in perfectionism, attacks on members of the community, and other displays of frustration or bitterness: to their eyes, failure was avoidable, and the problem must be the other people involved.

My take on dissatisfaction with existing practices in cryonics is this: if you feel strongly enough and are motivated enough to be one of the few who actually gets things done, and write what amounts to a book on the topic, then the best response is to start your own organization and do things differently. Or start a complementary, more narrowly focused organization that can addresses specific issues of concern and can make itself useful in the ecosystem. If I were sufficiently fired up about the present state of cryonics, I'd probably try to do better on the service provision side of the house: a luxury line of services, better customer service, or running a better middle man service to ease organization of the methods of payment through life insurance. That sort of thing.

Clearly I'm not yet sufficiently fired up. Give it another decade and I'll be starting to weigh the balance of supporting cryonics versus supporting rejuvenation biotechnology a little more evenly. Time waits for no man.

But let us talk about point (b) instead, the existential threat of cryonics declining and ultimately evaporating as an endeavor. To my eyes there is a legitimate concern about the robustness of cryonics over the long term - by which I mean more than a few decades out from here. Nothing happens without putting in the work, and it's easy enough to point out any number of sports, hobbies, and semi-professional scientific study groups of the past two centuries that came, occupied a niche for some decades, and left. As Darwin points out in a number of posts on the history of cryonics over the past four decades, it was a mere handful of people who turned early cryonics from a noble failure to a more rigorous branch of speculative medicine that was set up to run for decades.

When it comes to robustness, you don't want to see things that succeed or fail based on a critical handful of people. You want to know that there are many parallel groups, all of whom will do just fine independently of one another, and who connect with one another to form a larger community. Nonetheless, based on the narrow history of cryonics we should expect the endeavor to last decades more simply by virtue of having lasted decades to date: there is a community, there are established centers and processes, there is a steady if slow pace of progress in improving the technology. Inertia works both ways. Certainly the present younger leadership will be going strong twenty years from now, and they were attracted to cryonics when it had a good deal less press and far more hostile press than is presently the case. I would be surprised if the next generation is any less capable.

The real concern is not the foreseeable twenty to forty years ahead, however. It arises when you consider that, by its very nature, in order to succeed cryonics has to have a good chance of continuing to provide solid and unbroken cold-storage service for a century or more. I think that we'd all feel much more comfortable if those estimated 2,000 supporters were an estimated 20,000 supporters or 200,000 supporters when looking at that sort of timescale. Over the long term, it is all about risk: what is the risk of catastrophic failure for a small group versus a large group versus many equal small groups? Robustness over time consists of a lower risk of extinction resulting from any given set of accidents and random occurrences.

What can you achieve with a community of two thousand people, most of whom are going to put in a good word or a few dollars here and there, but little more? For comparison, you might look at the SENS Foundation and Methuselah Foundation: their support base is probably quite similar in size. The funds raised there over the past eight years are largely a matter of record: something on the order of $12M to $14M by now. Neither of those ventures is going away any time soon.

But equally there is much improvement to be had; more people, more funds, and more publicity are all needed. Cryonics providers are still small concerns - far more vital than their size indicates, which is par for the course in anything to do with extending human life at the present time.