Has the known interest of Ray Kurzweil, Eric Drexler, or Marvin Minsky encouraged anyone to sign up? Perhaps a few, but only a tiny fraction of the number who have read Kurzweil's books. And that readership constitutes an extremely promising audience. If celebrity sponsorship was going to work, we should have seen some sign of it by now.
The most common response to a cryonics sales pitch goes something like this: "Yes, I guess it makes sense, but not for me." There is an invisible but very large gap between "something those other people do" and "something that I will do myself."
Two years ago I made a conference presentation to a dozen or so people, one of whom was Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com. Bezos sat maybe ten feet from me, made eye contact, was friendly, asked numerous very smart questions, seemed genuinely fascinated, and was very receptive. At the end of it, he thanked me much, and walked off to learn about something else. I think he could see why other people were interested in doing it, but I don't think for a moment he considered doing it himself.
Mike Darwin is the only person I know who could goad people into leaping the gap. He seemed to do it by scaring them. "You are all going to die," was his opener. But that kind of thing requires charisma which I, for one, do not possess.
|