In “Time Enough For Love”, Heinlein has Lazarus Long rejecting the idea of using cold sleep to skip forwards a few centuries. He (Long) says that suppose some failsafe goes wrong and he ends up sleeping for the rest of the life of the universe, and then there turns out to be a Rapture after all? There he is, his corpsicle drifting through space not exactly dead and not exactly alive, and maybe he misses out on both reincarnation and being taken up bodily into Heaven.
Another character suggests this isn’t his real reason, but for anyone who seriously believes in the possibility of a Second Coming on the same timescale as cryonics, it’s something to consider.
It just amuses me to consider the people now in their 80′s—Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Jack Chick, Harold Camping, et al. - who have wasted their lives predicting an imminent rapture. I submit that the actuarial tables have a better chance of predicting their futures than bible prophecy.
Of course, I say the same thing about life-extension obsessives like Ray Kurzweil.
In “Time Enough For Love”, Heinlein has Lazarus Long rejecting the idea of using cold sleep to skip forwards a few centuries. He (Long) says that suppose some failsafe goes wrong and he ends up sleeping for the rest of the life of the universe, and then there turns out to be a Rapture after all? There he is, his corpsicle drifting through space not exactly dead and not exactly alive, and maybe he misses out on both reincarnation and being taken up bodily into Heaven.
Another character suggests this isn’t his real reason, but for anyone who seriously believes in the possibility of a Second Coming on the same timescale as cryonics, it’s something to consider.
It just amuses me to consider the people now in their 80′s—Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Jack Chick, Harold Camping, et al. - who have wasted their lives predicting an imminent rapture. I submit that the actuarial tables have a better chance of predicting their futures than bible prophecy.
Of course, I say the same thing about life-extension obsessives like Ray Kurzweil.