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Cryonic Afterlife

Demonstrating proof of after-life using the body's hydrochloric acid to power batteries seems quaint if not juvenile in comparison to actually planning on coming back from the dead. Both essentially long tail phenomena at this time, though the desire for immortality is as old mankind itself.

When cryonics goes commercial anyone who could afford the service could in theory take a shot at immortality. That would not exclude the twenty life-term serving serial killer either. The Terri Schavio conundrum of cryonic future could get a lot worse. The ethics of convicting a criminal eternally would be in question and as would be the jurisdiction of courts over an individual's right to immortality. Litigation is already turning spiritual in anticipation of work ahead.

It is as Langdon Winner says in his book Autonomous Technology

"...A crucial turning point comes when one is able to acknowledge that modern techniques, much more than politics as conventionally understood, now legislates the conditions of human existence. New technologies are institutionalized structures within an existing constitution that gives shape to a new polity, the technopolis in which we do increasingly live. For the most part, this constitution still evolves with little public scrutiny or debate. Shielded by the conviction that technology is neutral and tool-like, a whole new order is built -- piecemeal, step by step, with the parts and pieces linked together in novel ways, without the slightest public awareness or opportunity to dispute the character of the changes underway. It is somnambulism (rather than determinism) that characterizes technological politics -- on the left, right, and center equally"

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