Zombies!
We've created zombies! Cool! They say they will soon test it humans, too bad it won't work. It can't. It can work for a dog, but if a human is dead for a while it's soul will leave the body. Haha... did I have you going ;-)
It will be fun to see the book-huggers (the superset of bible huggers including all people who's beliefs come from an arbitrary book, including scientologists :) muddle there way through the idea of a soul if people are "frozen" for a while. Do there souls hover around or go to heaven/hell until they are revived? Or maybe they go to some bars in Limbo, they must have interesting drinks.
It will be fun to see the book-huggers (the superset of bible huggers including all people who's beliefs come from an arbitrary book, including scientologists :) muddle there way through the idea of a soul if people are "frozen" for a while. Do there souls hover around or go to heaven/hell until they are revived? Or maybe they go to some bars in Limbo, they must have interesting drinks.
posted by Eddie | 1:09 AM
17 Comments:
It's not just the religious people that freak out because of this stuff. Even regular scientists go nuts over it because it's just too weird for them.
Actually, these same experiments were already done over 20 years ago, so it's not really new. There was so much controversy over it then that the Society for Cryobiology refused to have the experiments published in their journal. See this link:
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/tbw.html
That's soo cool! Thanks! So do you think private research will continue in this field if public opposition dies up public funds?
Or do you think as long as it's touted as suspended animation Star Trek memories will make the disiction from zombies?
As far as I know, it's already happened. The closest thing to public funding for cryonics was a group in the states that did research on preserving organs for transplants, and they got shut down a while ago.
The website of the "zombie dog" people seems to be overloaded right now, so I can't tell exactly what it is they do. I'm guessing it's related to reviving people after they've had heart attacks. Whatever it is, it doesn't look to impressive if they're simply re-creating research that was done 20 years ago. But then again, you know my opinion on how impressive government-run anything is.
But if it was never published they would have to redo the research to get it officially published and to verify the results.
Do you think the book-huggers will start to condem the research?
As for government sponsorship I suppose the moonlanding should have waited until Pepsi wanted to advertise on it?
That particular study may not have been published, but many others have since then. Pubmed shows papers from at least three different groups: Cryovita, 21st Century Medicine and Critical Care Research. I believe all three are private.
Reviving dogs that had no pulse for a few hours is pretty cool, but I think the book-huggers are generally to stupid to understand the implications. You're going to see the real trouble starting once they can freeze a dog for a few months and bring it back. Imagine what they'll say then!
Right now, it can't be done because freezing anything bigger than a worm causes cracks that are fatal when the animal is thawed. 21st Century Medicine has managed to get around that by using a solution that turns into a glass-like solid instead of freezing. From what I understand, the solution is still too toxic to work on anything bigger than a worm. When they use it on a kidney for example, they can store it in liquid nitrogen practically forever, but the warm-up process takes so long that the toxicity of the solution kills the cells.
As for the moon landing, what exactly did it accomplish other than a propaganda victory for the US? Sure it sounds really impressive to say a man walked on the moon, but I don't think that's a good enough reason to make people pay for it against their will. If enough people wanted it to pay for it, it could have been done privately. Maybe it would have been 10 years later, but so what?
The moon landing was one of the greatest achievements of humanity. Every U.S. citizen had to pay (willing or unwilling) but that's fine by me. The pawns (or delta's if you want) exist to let the queen (or alpha's) maneuver and protect the king. All of humanities great achievements have come out of some public structure. Private industry won't build CERN. More importantly those feats (which mostly lack immediate practicallity) inspire the population. ids grow up dreaming about traveling through space not saving $120 dollars more a year so they can afford another NASCAR race! Big endevours give generations big dreams, that's worth more than advertosing "Stay in school" and "School is cool."
I wonder if they could just moderately thaw the subject and refreze to avoid cracking. I know (from last months SciAm) that they are finding there is a way to "sufficate" cells to lay dormant until full O2 is restored. Sound like it may be left over from our bacterial ancestors.
"All of humanities great achievements have come out of some public structure."
Yeah, right. Like vaccines, cures for various diseases, airplanes, cars, transistors, telephones and radios? How many people's lives were saved by CERN again?
If the moon landing and CERN are such great achievements, then people would have eventually paid for out of their own free will. If people wouldn't want to pay for it, then obviously they don't think they're such great achievements. Of course, the implicit idea behind socialism is that people are too stupid to know what they want and they need a powerful government to decide for them. You've basically said so yourself with your queens and pawns example.
Speaking of socialists, I think those are going to be the book-huggers who will cause the most problems for suspended animation. They already bitch enough about rich people having nicer cars and better schools then the poor. Once it becomes possible to escape death with suspended animation, can you imagine what they'll say about the fact that only the rich get the chance to live for ever?
Just like any new technology, it's going to be expensive at first, so there's no way everyone can have it. Since everyone can't have it, socialists will probably try to make it illegal. They're going to say it's about human rights and equality, but really that just means it's about jealousy. "If we can't have it then no else should" sounds about right.
You might think that sounds pretty crazy, but remember which country you live in. That's the system we already have. If you get a disease which can be cured, but the treatment is too expensive to be covered under medicare, the government will throw you in prison if you try to pay for it yourself. They figure if everyone can't have the treatment, then no one should.
Oh, and it's pretty funny how you say that, "Every U.S. citizen had to pay (willing or unwilling) but that's fine by me."
Really?! You don't mind if someone else paid for something that you wanted done? I never would have thought!
Yeah, I don't think anybody minds when someone else pays for something that they want. I've never heard anyone say "I want a cure for cancer, but only if I get to pay for it myself."
You can make the same argument about any public project. My point is that even if the majority supports something (or isn't so much against it that they're willing to vote out the government over that one issue) it doesn't mean that that everyone should be forced to pay for it.
"The government was the one handling the project because it came up with the idea, and logistically there are few organizations that can handle such multi-billion dollar projects."
I don't know where you're coming up with these ideas. People have been talking about going way before the JFK administration decided to do it. And why would the government be better able to handle a multi-billion dollar project better than anyone else? It's not like people suddenly get smarter when their paycheque is comes from the government instead of from a private company. You're telling me that NASA couldn't have did what it did if it was a private company that won a bid on government contract for a moon mission?
The only thing the X prize demonstrated was how long private industry was screwed up by government intereference. Obviously you're never to have a true market in space flight research as long as NASA exists. No matter how efficient your company is, you can never beat a government-funded competitor that does it for "free". The X prize specifically excluded government agencies and all of a sudden private space flight happened. Do you think that's a coincidence?
"Without it, and the years of research that went into researching and developing aero-space technology, there probably wouldn't be a market for it nor the means to achieve it."
Where do I even begin? This reminds me of a funny presentation someone once gave at my school on the subject of doorknobs. They said that we should all be very grateful to the person who invented the doorknob, because without them we would all be trapped inside our houses and eventually starve to death. Now you're asking me to apply that same kind of logic except you're not joking.
Just because the government does something doesn't mean it's free. All those years of R&D into aerospace were paid for with taxes. If the government hadn't taken that money, it's not like it would have disappeared. It could have been spent on aerospace research by private companies (or on other things that people wanted). You can't just ignore the costs and look at the benefits.
I just don't understand how someone can say "there probably wouldn't be a market for it nor the means to achieve it". If people want something, there's a market. If there's no market, it just means people don't want it badly enough to pay for it. The government didn't have to create a market for electricity or cars or airplanes.
The fact is that there just wasn't much demand for space flight in the 60s. Sure, people wanted it to happen, but not for anyone to actually pay for it themselves. Now that space flight actually has commercial applications for satellite communication, I can guarantee you you would have seen space flight happen if NASA never existed.
"The first one concerns the question: Has there been any benefit to the
moon landing and the technology that has been developed along the way? "
We're talking about two different things here. Like I said before, you can't just ignore the costs and only look at the benfits. The important question is not whether there has been *any* benefit, but whether there has been a *net* benefit.
If someone breaks into your apartment, steals $500 of cash and leaves you a $200 TV, are you going to be grateful to them? Newton, Kepler, et al may not have worked for profit, but they worked for free. The people at NASA didn't. A thief is still a thief even if he leaves something valuable behind.
"The second issue concerns the question: If government agencies were not concerned with space flight, would we have the level of aerospace technology and the same market for it that we have today?"
Again, we're talking about two different things. My original point was that if we didn't have the same level of technology without government intervention it was because people didn't spend their money on it and therefore didn't want it as much as they wanted the things which they did
spend their money on. If people really did care enough to privately spend the same amount of money as NASA got, then I think we surely would have had the same or better level of technology today. To go back to the example of the thief, if the break-in didn't happen you may not have gotten that TV because you wanted to spend the cash on a bike instead. All that means is that, when given the choice, you value the bike more than the TV.
"Talk is cheap. I think the JFK administration was the first one to put their money where their mouth was."
Rather they put someone else's money where their mouth was. Isn't being a politician a wonderful thing? You take money from the taxpayers, give it to the engineers, and then you get the credit for the result even though you neither paid for it or did it yourself.
"The fact is that NASA was a government agency and it had a competent and experienced staff that could handle large projects. Was there a private company that had a comparable level of competency, or could build one up in a sufficiently short time? I don't know, but it seems the people who were waving around billion dollar bills in the 1960s didn't think so."
No there was private company doing it at the time, but NASA didn't exist either until the government put up the money for it. The problem wasn't a lack of expertise but a lack of funds. There simply wasn't anyone waving around billions of dollars for space flight at the time *except* the government. And when the government spent that money, they decided to do it in-house so private companies never even had a chance. If the money was availble to them, I see no reason to believe that a privately-run version of NASA couldn't have been created just as quickly as NASA itself was. You say that NASA had a competent and experienced staff, which may be true now but it certainly wasn't true before NASA existed.
Anyway, that's really a separate issue from whether the money should have been spent in the first place. But once they decided to spend it, it could have been done the same way the military does for large projects. The air
force doesn't try to design and build its own planes; it says we want a plane that can do X, Y and Z and then sells the contract to the lowest bidder. Private companies will spend their own money on research and prototypes to prove they can do it, but none of them actually have the capability to do it without the funding. It's exactly the same situation as we used to have with space flight because there is no private market for stealth bombers.
"Do you agree that it's hard to have a market for a widget that does not yet exist?"
Yes, it's hard to have a market for things that don't yet exist, but people keep making them anyway. There's no market for an HIV vaccine, yet Merck is developing one. There's no market for 10 GHz processors, but I'm sure Intel is working on them. These companies know that even though the market doesn't exist yet, people want them and they'll be willing to pay for them once they're developed. And it doesn't even matter if the payoff is decades away and it takes huge amounts of money to start; there are private companies which run power plants that costs hundreds of million of dollars and take years to build and then many more years of operations to pay for the cost of building them. They're willing to wait decades before they finally see a profit on their investment.
"Do you agree that there is value in creating widgets under motivation other than profit?"
Sure there is. But that doesn't mean that you can create more value than you destroy by *forcing* people to do such things (which is essentially what you're doing by forcing people to pay taxes and then paying someone else to do those things). Remember, the leftists consider profit to be a dirty word, but all it really means is that someone is trading something which they value less for something they value more. Profit in a free market is a good thing because it means people are getting what they want.
Sometimes people like Newton will create valuable ideas and give them away for free, but he wasn't destroying something else of value by taxing others in order to create them.
It seems like the crux of the whole arguement comes down to the taxation system in general. It doens't matter whether its Nasa's small allocation of the budget, or the whole budget itself. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Igor is of the opinion that government has the right to collect taxes from its citizens and spend the monies on various projects. Konrad takes the flip side of the coin, stating that whatever government does, the private sector can do better and that the money is best left in the hands of private citizens.
On a more fundamental level, the question is: Does the government have the right to take an arbitrary and major portion of a person's imcome and transfer it some where IT deems proper? And if yes, where does it derive this right? I know where it derives its power to collect taxes, and that is through its monopolization of force. But morally, are they right in doing so? I fail to grasp the concept whereby a society will not tolerate an individual who uses coercion to earn a living but will tolerate it from their government. I pay taxes not because I chose to but because it is the only avenue that doesn't involve incurring the full wrath of the state.
Let me state that I admire Nasa's accomplishments, but I'm of the persuasion that the ends do not justify the means. Nasa was given a blank cheque in order to reach the moon, but was that fair? Lets look at the numbers from the era. JFK won the election with 34226731 votes to claim 49.7% of the popular vote versus the 49.5% that Nixon won. Very close indeed, but only 62.8% of eligible people voted. This means that of the people who could cast votes under american law, only 31.5 voted directly for JFK. Yet they all had to pay for the space program (and all other political pet programs of the time) in one way or another, whether it was their wish to or not. I know this is a gross simplification of the election, because there were many more issues on the front burner than just the moon mission. Anyways, the tax system is a weird beast because it assumes that a stuffed shirt in Ottawa or Washington can more wisely spend our money than we can ourselves.
Sorry if I'm off topic, I don't like paying taxes.
I'm not asking some philosophical question about the government's moral right to tax and do whatever it wants. As you've noted, it's got a monopoly on force, and that's the only thing that counts. As for these moral 'rights', I don't believe they exist. Like Heinlein once wrote, "What 'right' to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific?"
What I'm concerned with is the practical results. And those results are the same as for any other socialist enterprise: waste, loss of freedom, destruction of wealth and yet another iteration of socialist projects to fix the problems caused by the previous iteration.
All I wanted to do was say zombie's where cool! But alas let's have a go.
The fact is that taxes are practically necessary. We need roads, police, judges, firefighters etc. As I see it these are things that cannot be private since there allegence would incfluence their jobs. These are a necessary cost of civilization. So some taxes must be paid.
The remaining question then is what is the role of government. Philisophically my answer is: to do for the people what individual can't do for themselves. This is a lot of the problem the right has with the left (and it's not unfounded), why can't they do it for themselves. I think the best example is schooling for youngsters. Most parents today require the state to do all of it (not just acedemic). I agree. But there are real things that the individual can't do (guard against an army for instance) that's why we banded to gether in the first place.
It so happends that most of the big projects that where goverment funded I agree with, but I can see how some would disagree (for instance if tax money was used to make a statue of some saint). So I will draw a sharp disinction and try to be definitive. For the case of the advancement of science the use of the governments power monopoly is warrented. The reason is simple, the advancements can have benifits, whether they are medical, acedemic or profitable. It is true that most likely (as Igor pointed out) the discoveries are probably inevitable but I think the use of force is justified by the time gain. In the real world the "theft" of the masses money has accedentally created wealth many times (I stress accedentally) such as the internet and nuclear power.
I don't think profit is a dirty word, I think it's an irrelevant word. Isn't it amazing that most people in the developing world spend most of their lifes trying to convince someone they need something? I have nothing against that and it seems to work, but you then have a society that "needs" to see cars going in a circle and that's where there market forces lead us to: reality tv, infotainment, SUV's etc. I guess it's not market forces so much as advertising. But Kurts point about why some suit knows how to spend the money better is a valid one and has an interesting point. The person is given that right because he's elected to do just that by a mass of people who's desires are given by advertising (either directly or through owned news channels) and so they serve the profit of some company. So in the end government has the right to help profit. If the rest of us can squeeze in an awe inspiring feat or two cheers to us!
I do agree goverment needs trimming in some areas but I also think that the majority is better off paying taxes for the benifits they get, not everyone. I hope the market for monitoring potentialy deadly meteors picks up!
There's some famous quote about how both liberals and conservatives want to treat you like a child. It says something along these lines: The liberals want be your mommy and to treat you like a little toddler. They want to protect you from your own actions because you're too stupid to take care of yourself and it's OK if they they make you do things you don't want to do because you're too young to know what you "really" want. The conservatives want to be your daddy and treat you like a rebellious teenager. They assume that you're just itching to do something bad and that they need to control you to stop you from becoming a crack addict, getting pregnant or holding up a liquor store.
"I don't think profit is a dirty word, I think it's an irrelevant word. Isn't it amazing that most people in the developing world spend most of their lifes trying to convince someone they need something? I have nothing against that and it seems to work, but you then have a society that "needs" to see cars going in a circle and that's where there market forces lead us to: reality tv, infotainment, SUV's etc."
OK, so they don't really "need" those things; They want them and the market just gives people what they want. If we agree that profit is people getting what they want, then why do you consider it irrelevant? Is it because you think that even though people want one thing, what they really need is something else and the government should give it to them for their own good?
"The person is given that right because he's elected to do just that by a mass of people who's desires are given by advertising (either directly or through owned news channels) and so they serve the profit of some company."
So what you're saying is that people don't really know what they want because they've been brainwashed by adverstising? And I guess at that point what they want isn't important since it's controlled by the advertisers and it's not what they "really" want?
The "conservatives want to be your daddy" idea sounds exactly like the Christian right, who think anything people actually enjoy must be a sin and therefore a threat to society. And "liberals want to be your mommy" thing sounds like what you're trying to tell me here.
As I've said before Konrad, I agree that government should do for the people what people cannot do for themselves, but only the necessities (the definition of what is a necessity aside, since I'd put R&D into necessities others may not). My qualm about Libertiarian ideals is that market forces are not the grounds for a perfect model. I've admitted the socialist ideal is not perfect (I don't know one that is) but it seems to me that it would minimize suffereing. I know from previous discussions we differ on what is meant by suffering since you see loss of freedom as the greatest suffering. So my point is that market forces are inherently flawed.
One of the reasons is a want is created, by advertising and the social environment. The reason this is a problem is that people can want harmful and inhumane things. Lets remember it was market forces that drove (and drives) slavary. Women are kidnapped and sold into prostitution. Child porn is out there because there is a market for it! If someone is *free* to increase his pollution of the watershed to increase his profit, he gets richer and the rest of us have to find another water source (so we get poorer since we've lost an asset). It's not that I think profit is all wrong, only when it comes at the expense of others. I am happy to buy my clothing at American Apparel and pay the extra so that the profit goes to non-sweatshop labor and a factory owner not enslaving his workers.
I'd like the goverment to be in the necessities business only. The stuff that we can't do without: drinking water, roads, police, fire, electricity etc. The stuff that is too important or valuable to wait for a lawsuit. If you can't drink your tap water or power your business you can't function. Yes later on you can sue but that won;t help you when your stuck in an elevator. The reason to have government do something is to have the motivation soley to provide the service. If profit is involed one can take risks or cut corners to increase profit. That's fine for clothing and blender manifacuring but not the necessities.
To continue your analogy government should be the older brother (your big brother, lol) who lets you fall and hurt yourself (and may even laugh) and only interferes when absolutly necessary.
Eddie, I don't know what you're talking about. I never said that the loss of freedom was the greatest suffering. All I've said was that socialism doesn't do what it claims to do; it increases suffering instead of decreasing it.
You seem to be confusing free markets with anarchy. A free market means people are allowed to trade anything as long as they both agree to it, it doesn't mean you can kidnap people and sell them as slaves. The legal system already says that kids aren't mature enough to understand some things and therefore can't consent to them, so your child porn example has nothing to do with free markets.
I don't know why keep bringing up pollution, as I've already said that it needs to be government controlled and I explained why.
Eddie, if you agree that "real" socialism has never existed because it always leads to corruption, then why do you think people should keep trying it? If we know it didn't work the last 100 times, why will it work in the future?
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