Num	Comments	Date
837	What about Pantheism for #26?	2006-09-01 13:37:13
846	I am 26 years old and the idea of Cryonics preserving my body for a possible awakening in a near or distant future has always intrigued me. I have always been somewhat of a futurist and the idea of being able to leapfrog into the future, however uncertain, is worth a shot. Recently I have been diagnosed with a treatable but dangerous medical condition. Since this diagnosis and going through the stages of of denial, fear, anger and acceptance I have also taken a closer look at God and the idea of Cryonics. There is much in life I want to accomplish but more importantly, there is much in my youth I do not want to be robbed of. I am still undecided whether "freezing" myself in an attempt to awaken in the future reveals a lack of spiritual faith on my part or a move to try and "cheat" death. I fear death, as I fear the unknown, but I also love life. If I were to ever need a heart transplant, I would go through with it to preserve my life, so I perhaps cryonics could be seen as a life and time transplant to the future. God has given me life and wants us all to cherish what he has given us. All I can say is I am a firm believer of God as my maker, Jesus as my savior and possibly Cryonics as my future. The only concerns I have is what happens to my soul. The unique essence that makes me...me. I grow uneasy when I hear of procedures such as "mind transfer" or the download/upload of memories and personality. A copy of me is not me but an impostor who thinks he is me. Someday memories and personality may be able to be transferred and copied but my unique soul can never be copied or split or shared. I support cryonics for the possiblity that it will in fact be "me" waking up in a future to continue my life.	2006-09-05 12:28:57
847	Could you make your questions more specific, or give examples of situations?	2006-09-06 16:03:12
853	reincarnation and beleving in God is confusing. Do you know in Islam people can live as long as they can and we believe that any one observe good life practise in the light of islamic doctrine can live beyond a 1000 years and as if I am talking to you now(sept.07.2006) that Imam mehdi is still alive among us and he is now over 1100 years old. i like your enthusiasm and optimistic nature which is in light of islam my advice to narrow your focus while continue to have an open mind. cheers	2006-09-07 17:13:43
854	Sounds like you believe in the scenario of "Door into Summer" by R.A. Heinlein. There was a Star Trek Next Gernation episode on this as well. These made me believe that being satisfied with life after jumping far into the future was unlikely.	2006-09-07 22:58:53
869	ITS GOOD FOR THE INTEREST OF PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION AND ALSO FOR THOSE SCIENTIST WITH UNCEASING SACRIFICE TO SERVE MANKIND...	2006-09-11 09:56:08
878	Rethink about this whole idea of life extension, because you might think differently once you see the future.	2006-09-13 19:26:49
892	I see that this survey steered towards Cryonics; however I dont think thats a realistic goal at this time, so i dont see why. Of course it can be a HOPEFULL goal, but so also can man evolving into some higher lifeform! ;)	2006-09-17 14:41:35
895	Am impressed with biological analysis of aging process. For the non technically trained person, the information presented on the Ben Best site is sufficiently comprehensible for the inquiring mind to add to its stock of knowledge. Pointers to significant nutritional pathways can offer real gains in health. Raw vegetible based food is an obvious starting point.	2006-09-18 08:25:41
899	A few lucky old people acquire wisdom, rare indeed in the young. Worth preserving, but not likely to happen. But the truth is, the present moment, in all it's complexity, was an extremely low order of probability. Plenty of wildcards and jokers in the deck: Will we soon mine the Earth-approaching asteroids? Will we set up outposts on Mars? Will we move high-pollution industries to high Earth-orbit? We are about to have some periods of extremely challenging living on Earth. Not for the faint of heart. Anthropositor	2006-09-19 04:55:04
906	we are GODs children and the BIBLE reads as how it shall be.	2006-09-21 16:56:43
908	I'm curious whether people would delay having children if they could remain fertile forever.	2006-09-21 20:12:35
909	confused as a choice! Wonderful!	2006-09-21 23:25:20
920	My thoughts on cryonics are that, if there is a soul, "who" would animate the body aupon regeneration? Would there be memories? Would this be a robot-like human with no soul or a new soul with old memories? I am not a religious person, but feel connected to the earth and life force in all of us. I am interested in living a long and healthy life, but when my time comes, I would be happy to see what is beyond the body.	2006-09-27 23:40:34
921	(16) Do you believe that cryonics is a life extension strategy? ( )Yes (*)No ( )No Opinion I imagine cryonics to be a life pausing technique rather than a life extension strategy. I am all for having it as a tool for those that want or need it, e.g. space travelers in suspended animation.	2006-09-27 23:39:11
923	I believe that the Bible is true and that God cut our life span (120 years give or take)just as the Bible says. It is definitely possible to live a healthy life past 100. I am not against cryonics, I jsut want to live the life I have been given and see where I end up. Thanks for taking the time to put together this web-site. I am somewhat like you, I love history and believe in eating live foods, green foods, supplements etc. exercise, fresh air, and a positive outlook and attitude. I look forward to living past 100 and being healthy and active.	2006-09-29 08:30:21
926	You should be asking more questions about the measures people are prepared to take to delay aging. Most people are happy to consider the idea of longer life in the abstract, but they would probably change their "tune" if they were asked to make sacrifices to achieve this goal. Science already offers plenty of ways to delay aging, but the evidence suggests that most people would rather eat a Big Mac today and risk dying prematurely from a heart attack. Given this tendency in the population, the desire to stay young is clearly not enough for most people.	2006-09-29 17:54:25
927	Number 6 could use the option of "never". "No limit" is NOT an equal answer to "never".	2006-09-30 04:32:55
928	Not interested. Quality of life best, and have no interest in prolonged old age. I'm great now, and want to die great. Life has been terrific and I want to leave the party while I'm on top and not linger or be a pain in the ass.	2006-09-30 18:24:51
933	If it is possible to live a longer more fulfilling life, then I don't think we should think of that as "life extension". More accurately as a normal function of the life proccess.	2006-10-01 11:53:43
947	I do not know the names of any cryonic companies, thus the blank answer to 15.	2006-10-04 21:35:13
949	Hi In Question (15) Check the names of cryonics organizations that you recognize: I could not check for "No Answer" as there is no such options given. Thanks	2006-10-05 01:06:05
951	As far as the over population issue if people control their breeding then no it's not a problem.	2006-10-05 15:57:36
952	Reason I'm uncertain about whatever I will decide to preserve my own body is the distance to any cryonics organizations.	2006-10-06 05:49:49
953	natural life of people should be extended to as long as possible. But I insist memory transplantion into a new body and new brain can lead to reincarnation instead of cryonics.	2006-10-07 03:48:44
966	Why would anyone want to extend their life??? I think I'd rather shorten mine!	2006-10-10 13:57:11
967	Far out survey. God is in control>	2006-10-10 15:57:22
980	I worry about the future if it ever becomes possible to prolong life to the point where having children is outlawed. What a terrible world with no children to bring joy. I'm against efforts to entend our lifespans to that extreme.	2006-10-13 12:22:51
990	We can live as long as the spirit within us remains growing, loving, and conscious of every sentient being. There are no limits to man's possibility for groth. There are thousands of unrecognized Leonardo da Vinci's on this earth.	2006-10-18 04:44:00
991	cryonics : hurry up better vitrification ^_^ ! why not slice a brain before vitrification (since _small_ frogs have been successfuly revived) ? But I'm scared by the duplicates paradox. question 8 : could be heaven or hell overpopulation : choice between children or longevity, or AI children life boring : impossible (ex: artificial partial/total amnesia) When will a political party clearly support life extension !!? bye	2006-10-18 09:33:28
992	For the question #9 and 10, I think the overpopulation in the context of post-cryonics world does't necessarily mean food or land shortage, for it is highly likely that our body will be made of more robust materials without consuming other lives. Further more the idea of projecting our entities into the information space(so called mind-uploading),which requires virtualy no physical space to live in, is also plausible. I believe that the real problem that L.E. could cause to the society is job shortage or more seriously, lack of the purpose of life. About ethical and religious concerns of L.E., it might be a sin for it is God that determines our fate i.e. the span of life. Given the defects of overpopulation as mentioned above, it's ture that living too long could possibliy undermines the society we belong, like cancers. But there is virtualy no ethical basis for the reason we should die, it is simply because the times of human cell division is limited. Passing gene is one of the decent solutions to this problem, but life has't have any strategies to pass the complete information in our brain, and that is I believe, what cryonics aims for. I don't think it is a sin,but a form of evolution. For the question #29, I am Japanese.	2006-10-18 09:53:50
996	Question 4: I believe that eventually people will be able to download their minds into computers in order to continue living. Their biological bodies will deteriorate and die.	2006-10-19 15:23:29
1007	I hope to study life extension once I graduate from a university.	2006-10-22 02:25:25
1014	I intend to take every reasonable measure to remain as youthful and healthy as possible. I plan on enjoying my life. I don't want to spend my life worring about death. When the time to die comes it will be fine.	2006-10-25 11:23:45
1017	Life extension would be awesome if it were perfected. I do believe that someday, it will be.	2006-10-25 17:38:57
1025	26 no religion 24 I do not believe in the God of religion, but I do believe in the Laws of Nature	2006-10-28 16:30:04
1030	Question #5 doesn't allow the likelihood of unforeseen breakthroughs which throw off any time projections or extrapolations. #7 - Since information can potentially combine in infinite ways, there will always be new things to learn or do, and new ways to be creative. Extremely long life might be frustrating, though, since memory is imperfect, and skills fade through disuse -- unless improvements can be made in those areas. #8 - I'm assuming no global calamities, and leaps forward not only in science, genetics, medicine, and standard of living, but in consciousness raising, rationality, and ethics. #9 - This is the one valid objection to life extension (other objections can be overcome, such as keeping our gene pool vital through mastery over genetics). #10 - By developing the mind and consciousness along with the body, a person's ideas can keep pace with current times and perhaps even, because of rich associations of ideas made possible by a vast storehouse of experiences, surge ahead. #11 - This is dependent entirely upon #9. I.e., the longer a person's lifetime the greater their experience, knowledge, and wisdom (ostensibly) and therefore the greater their potential contribution to society. But that is tempered by the limits to population growth and natural resources (even allowing for colonizing other worlds). #17 - I'm aware of work currently being done to replace the ordinary water content of cells with substitutes, but the work is far from perfected. #20 - This one involves many interacting variables, and I don't have enough relevant knowledge to predict this with any accuracy. #23 - If I were a healthy individual without obvious genetic flaws (I am not) I would consider this option. As it is I think I'd rather take my chances on the possibility of reincarnation. #25 - I've had compelling personal experiences (out-of-body experiences, past-life memories) that indicate this is a distinct possibility. But of course any of them could be explained away as anomalous brain states, if someone was so inclined. Nothing in my personal experience or that I’ve read about other people’s experiences unequivocally establishes the survival of the consciousness or personality after bodily death. People’s near-death experiences, ghost sightings, conversations with “God,” visitations by departed relatives, interventions by “angels,” etc. won’t do it, because they are entirely subjective, open to conventional psychological/cultural/physical explanations, and therefore can’t be used as evidence in any objective investigation. The only evidence worthy of serious mention that I'm aware of was this bit I heard on Art Bell’s Dreamland radio show, 6/4/00: The guest, Dr. Kenneth Ring, discussed his latest book, Lessons From the Light; What We Can Learn From the Near-Death Experience. He interviewed people who’d been blind from birth and who’d also had a near-death experience. These blind subjects all reported being able to see while in the NDE, and described scenes no different from those recounted by sighted NDE experiencers. Since someone blind from birth has no reference for what sight might be like, and their brains, lacking visual stimulation in childhood, have not even built up the neural structures needed to support vision (as Carl Sagan points out in his book The Dragons of Eden, “individuals blind from birth have auditory, not visual dreams”), these scenes could not have been imagined, a product of the random firing of neurons in the visual areas of the brain, nor hallucination produced by lack of oxygen. They apparently had no physical origin attributable to the body. #26 - I've actually long considered myself a spiritual atheist. That is, I allow -- even suspect -- the possibility of a spiritual nature to consciousness, but do not in any way see that we or the universe require a supreme being of any sort to explain our existence, and in fact if one understands chaos and complexity theory, the basics of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, and the way reality unfolds from fundamental principles (order out of chaos, space-time-dimension-matter-energy-force-information out of an original inchoate causative potential), then there is in fact no evidence for a God and no need to invoke one. As far as traditional religions go, I find the concept of a God or Devil or hierarchy of spiritual beings illogical and unlikely, the ideas of heaven and hell laughably childish, and traditional religions inconsistent, contradictory, and most parsimoniously explained as either elaborate fairy tales or attempts to impose social control through fear and absolute moral authority. Furthermore, any God who’d behave in the selfish, cruel, megalomanic, and mercurial way he, she, they, or it does in human religions is not someone I’d care to associate with. Even disregarding the anthropomorphisms that pervade religious teachings, a God who is responsible for life as it exists would have to be uncaring, sadistic, or really really incompetent. Well, more than you wanted? -- wade@inxpress.net	2006-10-31 14:48:29