Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 (25 page)

But of course, a future society must have the
desire
to apply the technology to cryonics. If we do not yield to a kind of temporo–centric insulation, and cease to be curious about representatives from a century before, I suspect we will have the cultural Energy to work out nanotech for cryonics purposes. (After all, much of it will be useful in curing and repairing ordinary, living people.) So I put this cultural Energy probability,
E
, at
E
=0.9.

Still, will they pay the bill? The first few revived cryonicists will probably get onto the 22nd century's talk shows. Famous suspended people, too. (Wouldn't you pay a bit to talk to Benjamin Franklin? He was the first American to speculate on means for preserving people for later revival. And the philosopher Francis Bacon died of pneumonia caught experimenting with suspension of animals.) But if there are ten thousand cryonicists waiting to be thawed...

This is a major, imponderable problem. Humanitarians will argue that spending money on the living is always morally superior to spending it on the dead–but–salvageable.

Will this argument win the day? Or, in the fullness of time, will nanotech make revival so cheap that the cost factor,
C
, becomes a non–issue? You can argue it either way—and science fiction writers already have.

Given such uncertainties, I'll guess that the cost probability factor
C
=0.5.

Finally, there is the truly unknowable factor,
H
, which stands for the contrariness of Humans. Some powerful social force may emerge which makes cryonics reprehensible. After all, many think it's creepy, a kind of Stephen King idea.

Maybe people will utterly lose interest in the past. I doubt this, noting that the world was fascinated with the frozen man found in the Alps in 1991. Considerable expense went into careful examination of this remarkably preserved inhabitant of about 4000 years ago, and his clothing and belongings will tell us much about his era—but still, he can't speak, as a revived cryonicist could.

Or perhaps some other grand issue will captivate human society, making cryonics and the whole problem of death irrelevant. Maybe we'll lose interest in technology itself. Factor in also the Second Coming of Christ, or arrival of aliens who spirit us all away—the choices are endless.

But all rather unlikely, I suspect. I'm rather optimistic about Humanity, so I'll take the odds that we'll still care about suspended cryonicists to be fairly large, perhaps
H
=0.9.

This means that the
TECH
issues multiply out to (0.5)(0.9)(0.5)(0.9)=0.2.

All this homework done, we can now savor our final result. The probability that cryonics will work, delivering you to a high–tech future, blinking in astonishment, is

MET x SOC x TECH
= 0.07

A 7 percent chance.

Do I "believe" this number? Of course not. It is very rough. Such calculations are worthwhile only if they sharpen our thinking, not as infallible guides. Some decry numerical estimates as hopelessly deceptive, too exact in matters which are slippery and qualitative. True, for some, but the goal here is to use some simple arithmetic means of assessing, then planning. This does not rule out emotional issues; it merely places them in perspective.

***

Science fiction invented cryonics; it is, after all, an assertion about the future. It first figured in a Neil R. Jones sf story in the 1931
Amazing Stories
, inspiring Dr. Robert Ettinger to propose the idea eventually in detail in
The Prospect of Immortality
(1964). It has since been explored in Clifford Simak's
Why Call Them Back From Heaven?
(1967), Fred Pohl's
The Age of the Pussyfoot
(1969), and in innumerable space flight stories (such as
2001: A Space Odyssey
) which use cryonics for long-term storage of the crew. Fred Pohl became a strong advocate of cryonics, even appearing on the Johnny Carson show to discuss it. Robert Heinlein used cryonics as part of a time–traveling plot in
The Door Into Summer
. Larry Niven coined "corpsicle" to describe such "deanimated" folk. All these stories considered the long-term aspects.

But even science fiction writers fascinated by it (Simak, Heinlein) never made arrangements to be "suspended,” as the cryonicists say. I know of no sf writer who has publicly endorsed cryonics as a plausible possibility, except for Charles Platt, with the further marginal exception of a deposition Arthur C. Clarke made several years ago to support a court case.

Why do even those intrigued not gamble? Maybe writers without much cash think it’s too chancy an investment. To wax numerical a bit more, suppose you regard cryonics purely as an investment. Does it yield a good return?

Well, what's a person worth? Most Americans will work about fifty years at a salary in the range of around $20,000 to $30,000 per year—that is the national average today. In other words, they will make somewhere between one and two million dollars in their lifetime.

One crude way to size up an investment is to take the probability of success (7% by our estimate here) times the expected return (a million dollars, earned by the revived person). Then compare with the amount you must invest to achieve your aim. This yields $70,000, which is in the range of what cryonics costs today. (Cryonicists buy a life insurance policy which pays off their organization upon their death; they don't finance it all at once.)

The goal of cryonics is not money but time—a future life. Another way to see if cryonics is a rational gamble is to take a person's expected life span (about 75 years) and divide it by the expected gain in years if they are revived in the future. This would be perhaps another 75 years, but if the technology for revival exists, people may quite possibly live for centuries. Then the ratio of gained years to present life span is, say, 150 years divided by 75 years, or a factor of 2. It could be higher, of course.

Then even if the probability of success is 1%, say, the probable yield from the investment of your time would be 2 x 1% = 2%. It would make sense to invest 2% of your time in this gamble. Then 2% of your lifetime earnings (a million dollars) would be at least $20,000, which you could use to pay your cryonics fees.

Or you could choose to invest 2% of your time—half an hour a day—to working for cryonics. Make it a hobby. You would meet interesting people and might enjoy it. Most people spend more time than that in the bathroom.

Take another angle. Probability estimates should tell us the range of outcomes, not just an average number like 7%. To be a flagrant optimist, I could go back and take all the loosely technical issues to be much more probable, so that
TECH
=0.9, say. Then we get 29% probability.

This is just about the upper end of the plausible range, for me. I could be a gloomy pessimist, with equal justification, and take the social issues to be
SOC
=0.05, say. Then my original 7% estimate becomes less than one percent.

So the realm of plausible probabilities, to me, is between one percent and about 30%.

Low odds like one percent emerge because we consider many factors, each of which is fairly probable, but the remorseless act of multiplying them together yields a final low estimate. This is entirely natural to us. Studies show that most people of even temperament, considering chains of events, are invariably optimistic. We don't atomize issues, but look for obliging conditions. This seems to be built into us.

I've dwelled on using this simple probability estimate to show some properties of the method. The deeper question is whether it truly makes sense to break up any future possibility into a set of mutually independent possibilities.

This comes powerfully into play in the
SOC
factors. Once the
TECH
issues look good, people will begin to change their minds about cryonics. The prospect of longer life may well make society more stable so
O
gets larger. Cryonics organizations will fare better, so
C
improves. The slicing up into factors assumes that the general fate of humankind is the same for the folk of the freezers, and this may not be so.

Cryonicists are a hard–nosed, practical lot, in my experience. They have many technical skills. Society might even crash badly, and they would keep their patients suspended through extraordinary effort. They have already done so. Police raided a cryonics company in the late 1980s (Alcor) and demanded that a recently frozen patient be handed over for autopsy. Someone spirited away and hid the patient until Alcor could get the police and district attorney off their back, but not before the police hauled five staff members off to jail and ransacked the facility.

Perhaps a better way to analyze this is to note that the biggest uncertainties lie in the intertwined
SOC
and
TECH
factors. A techno–optimist might say that cryonics will probably work on technical grounds, but social factors lessen the odds, maybe to the 50/50 range.

***

Of course, numbers don't tell the whole tale. Ray Bradbury once said he was interested in any chance of seeing the future, but when he thought over cryonics, he realized that he would be torn away from everything he loved. What would the future be worth without his wife, his children, his friends? No, he told me, he wouldn't take the option at any price.

Still, he came into this world without all those associations. And further, why assume that nobody else would go with him? This is an example of the "neighborhood" argument, which says that mature people are so entwined with their surroundings, people and habits of mind, that to yank them out is a trauma worse than death. One is fond of one's own era, certainly. But it seems to me that ordinary immigrants often face similar challenges and manage to come through.

Still, if you truly feel this way, no arithmetic argument will dissuade you. For many, I suspect, the future isn't open to rational gambles, because it is too deeply embedded in emotional issues.

So it must be with any way of thinking quantitatively about our future. We cannot see the range of possibilities without imposing our own values and views, mired in our time, culture, and place. Often, these are the things we value most—our idiosyncratic angles on the world.

But there is one clear advantage to cryonics: It allows one to die with some sliver of hope.

Copyright © 2007 by Gregory Benford

Barry Malzberg won the very first Campbell Memorial Award, and is a multiple Hugo and Nebula nominee. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 books.

--------------

FROM THE HEART’S BASEMENT

by Barry N. Malzberg

WHAT WE NEED

“I am going to ask you nicely to please exclude the Fee Department from your constant appeals demanding contributions for birthdays, job exits, engagements, etc. Persons in the Fee Department, poorly socialized, are so employed because the job combines our intellectual arrogance with our need to be humiliated.”

David Schiller

1984 Memo to the Scott Meredith Literary

Agency Bookkeeper

***

Richard E. Geis, one of the most prominent of all our fanzine editors, died in March, a few months ago as you read this. He was 86 and had been silent for a long time—but from the late ’60s to the early ’80s his fanzine under a variety of titles—
Psychotic, Science Fiction Review
,
The Alien Critic
, and finally, simply
Richard E. Geis
,
ca
me out three or four times a year and virtually dominated the critical apparatus of science fiction.
Science Fiction Review
(to pick the title of greatest convenience) was essentially a 60-to-70-page monologue by Geis, frequently interrupted by letters, reviews from many sources including Geis himself, and articles by professionals and fans of varying degrees of prominence. The then-
Psychotic
constituted in 1968 my introduction to fanzines and fandom: I had recently been appointed editor of
Amazing
and
Fantastic
and Ted White conducted a brief phone interview which he then transcribed (with occasional accuracy) for Geis’s magazine. Not to put too fine a point on this, White depicted me as a foolish, babbling nonentity “with big plans” for these wretched publications and lesser plans for its publisher, Sol Cohen, who I described with contempt. It was to shudder even as it opened the door to an amphitheatre I had never known existed. The pages—not only those few devoted to me—teemed with hostility and mutual contempt. They were composed by a number of people who seemed to know one another very well and who with some exceptions pretty well hated one another. Fans, pros, editors wrote venomously to and about one another. Geis moderated with a very light hand, and now and then tossed in some lighter fluid. An edifyingly unpleasant compilation.

Judy-Lynn del Rey, then the Assistant Editor of
Galaxy,
had alerted me to the White interview and suggested that I let her send me a copy. “The pleasure of this,” she said (and she did use the word “pleasure” in its broadest sense) is that after a while you find that you know everybody writing for this and it gives you some insights which you’d never expect.” This was true.

Psychotic
and its later incarnations was addictive of course, and Judy-Lynn was right, seemingly everyone wrote for Geis (who did not pay for letters but paid a cent a word in the ’70s for articles). Ted White, Harry Harrison, John Brunner, Joanna Russ, Robert Coulson, Terry Carr, Juanita Coulson, Donald A. Wollheim…there was hardly a pro or Big Name Fan of that era who did not eventually or sooner publish in this magazine. Geis presided like an intermittently benign or long-suffering Head Resident of a mental hospital ward and the debate, the confessions, the autobiography, envy, recriminations soared like the pre-disaster Hindenburg. My first published nonfiction—outraged letters and significantly clumsy reviews—appeared there.

Joanna Russ, who was then at the peak or depth of her feminism (good ideology, but it wrecked her fiction, may she rest in peace), wrote Geis in the mid-seventies demanding that he take her off the mailing list. It was a demand akin to a plea. Some of my readers might ask why Russ did not simply dispose of
Science Fiction Review
unread (she lived an unsupervised private life) but I would not be among them. Joanna was conceding the madly addictive nature of Geis’s publication. “You see it in your mailbox and you know that you are getting it because they are writing about
you
,” Dean Koontz said to me back then, “And as much as you hate it, you can’t keep your hands away.” He laughed uncomfortably. (Geis made a lot of us laugh uncomfortably.)

This was so, not really because of the informational content (which for non-professionals was simply gossip, and for the professionals only a sullen confirmation of their insight) but due to Geis’s special ability, a talent unduplicated I believe in the history of science fiction (only Ray Palmer could be seen as a lower-level rival) if not politics (Nixon notably had this and so did Lyndon Johnson and so did JFK, the latter in relation to adult women): Geis and his publication brought out the worst in everyone. The resentment, the envy, the slabs of rather disgraceful autobiography, all of these were laid out on the page (and then drawing responses in kind) like patients etherized upon a table. I would like to give specifics (and most of the principals at a distance of forty years are deceased) but it is simple courtesy not to do so. I will offer one example since the man, a great writer by the way, has been dead for 18 years and was quite willing
in situ
to reveal everything: John Brunner wrote of his artistic paralysis (due to excessive and improper medication for depression), his impotence (same etiology), his alarming financial situation (publishers were against him) with a searing vulnerability and detail which made me shudder. “Why is he doing this?” I thought. That was slightly before my understanding of Geis evolved. He brought out and celebrated with hand-rubbing pleasure the worst case, the default versions of ourselves. We paraded through his publication like the hundred-year-old Civil War veterans in a Flannery O’Connor story. We beat the drums and the drums were ourselves.

Geis’s Book of the Grotesque (pace Sherwood Anderson) won him six or eight or a dozen Hugos for best fanzine and more than a couple for Best Fan Writer. His publication was the most-read and probably the largest-circulated fan magazine (I exclude Richard Shaver-related material) in the history of the genre. Geis’s powerful, founding insight was very close to that of David Schiller, quoted as epigraph: science fiction writers (like fee department employees, and there was historically some overlap) needed to be humiliated. No less than their intellectual arrogance did self-abnegation drive them. Back then (and to some degree even now) it was
Herovit’s World
with all of its apparatus…contemptuous editors, contemptuous literary critics, contemptuous academics and spouses and friends. To write science fiction in mid-century (read Phil Dick’s introduction to his 1980 collection
The Golden Man
)
was to board Charon’s boat and take the Styx to a very known destination. Geis, a trouper (and a successful writer of soft-core pornography) was more than pleased and certainly possessed a Captain’s skills. Off we went, the mad saints of maddened and uncontrollable technology.
Science Fiction Review
, our very own private Objective Correlative.

Can’t say I miss the publication and—having never met Geis, who was unsurprisingly a recluse—can’t say I miss its editor either. But Richard Erwin Geis was an essential part of my continuing doomed education. He liked
Overlay
, by the way. “Light and funny and enjoyable.” He thought I should write more comedy.

New Jersey, March 2013

Copyright ©2013 by Barry N. Malzberg