Slashdot Mirror
Techies On Ice: The Coming Age of Cryonics
Frozen dinner writes: "SiliconValley.com is running a great article about technology workers' fascination with cryonics. From the article: "[the] otherworldly possibility of life after death [tantalizes] techies of all stripes -- mathematicians, physicists, software developers, computer programmers -- who make up a vast majority of those who have signed up for cryonics suspension. The family feud over deep-freezing baseball slugger Ted Williams has only intensified interest in cryonics in Silicon Valley and in the greater Bay Area, already a hotbed for the experimental and controversial process.""
in a capitalist society.
Let's assume the technical problems are solved..
As long as the service of being cryogenically preserved is a commodity, unsubsidized by the government or most insurance, the rich, prominent, and powerful will be the people self selected to undergo the service.
These people will also set up bank trusts, etc. to preserve their interests as they lie dead and frozen. They will influence politics to preserve their property rights as they lie dead, concentrating more and more property and political control in the hands of the dead and their trustees.
I can even imagine the trusteeships being battered back and forth in the marketplace, as the companies that control the wealth of the dead compete with each other.
All in all a fucked up scenario. What do people think about existing or prospective national and international law to deal with this problem? Mind you, I'm partial to the belief that either we have to live in a differnet economic system, or we must make cryogenics a state supported medical service available to all - decided by lot, democratic selection, condition of health or some other scientific standard.
uhhhhhh, if they solved that problem there would be no reason to freeze you...
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
The presumption is that if full blown nanotech comes into being, society would be rich enough to revive you. Part of the role of the cryonics firms doing the freezing would be to advocate for your revival if/when it could be successfully performed.
>> People who are so afraid of death or who feel their lives weren't long enough need therapy to cure their over-inflated feeling of self-importance. >> If you run when you see a bus coming at you on the street, maybe you just have an overinflated feeling of self importance?
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
the information that is "me" (stored in the brain) is still recoverable, and as science advances, that information may well be recovered , and I will live again, hopefully.
cryonics: gateway to the future? www.cryonet.org
Cryonics fans generally assume that the Miracle of Nanotechnology will solve this, just like everything else... Now, while I can buy nanotech fixing up whatever caused death in the first place, and I can sort of buy its rebooting a brain that's been offline for centuries, I find it a little difficult to accept that they'll be able to reconstitute a mess of meat shredded at the molecular level.
If you have nanotech, you should be able to rebuild the body to any degree you like, atom by atom.
I personally think that we aren't likely to reconstitute the frozen bodies. A solution requiring less miraculous technology would be to slice up the brain and map out the synapse connection patterns and strengths to load into a computer-emulated brain. This would require very hefty amounts of computing power, but if we were reviving people at all, we'd be at a point where we had the resources necessary.
I'm not hopeful for the frozen, though. Firstly, between the time you die and the time you're frozen, I strongly suspect that the brain will likely have degraded to the point where most of the critical information in it has been lost. Secondly, I'm doubtful of any cryonics company keeeping its frozen members stored under the required conditions for the century or two they'll be waiting for revival.
What possible motivation would any future society have to thaw these people out?
PURE ALTRUISM. That's the beauty of the whole thing. If they wake you, it's probably good news.
C//
I just wanted to take the chance to burn some karma and plug the miniwebsite I advertise in my sig: Dealing With Mortality: A Skeptic's Guide or: Kirk's Big Fun Pages O' Inevitable Death. From the lead paragraph:
Coming to grips with mortality- this is the biggest personal issue that every one of us will have to deal with. It can be especially difficult for people who don't believe that there's an afterlife waiting for them. To contemplate the end of our selves in this world is frightening; to not convince yourself that there is life after this world requires a special kind of bravery. This site is here to try to share the thoughts that have allowed me to understand and accept the situation.
I went through a time when I was thinking about Cryonics. And other times when I've gone through paralyzing anxiety about death in general. This site is the result of all that, and might help others in the same boat.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Were we really meant to use defibrillators?
Every day we revive people who are "dead" under any definition any doctor would have recognized until this century.
It's considered routine medicine now, just like chess playing is not "AI" any more because we know how to do it.
Every disease conquered, every accident prevented is a step closer to immortality.
I think the greatest obstacle is the damage done by freezing. I don't care what their advocates say. If you destroy ever single cell in your body (when the water expands and solidifies, cracking all your cells), there is a MASSIVE amount of repair to do. "We can rebuild him", indeed, Mr. Austin. Can you think of the technology required to create nanodevices which have the *specialied* ability to repair the unique characteristics of every different type of body cell?
And then there is the problem that actually killed you that you need to have repaired. And that not all freezing techniques are not done in whatever "special way" which will be discovered later for something like this to even be attempted.
Further, all the electro-chemical reactions have stopped 100%. Has anyone revived a brain that was 100% "brain dead" as seen on a EEG? Nope. Oh. Looks like someone will have to discover what makes that "spark of life" in the brain. And that whatever they end up producing is still YOU.
And frankly, if they could bring back frozen people, then they'd be just as likely (if not more likely) to reanimate people who have been dead for a few hours.
And you'd hope that society will continue to evolve technically and medically. And that their deep freeze. And the company doesn't go out of business. And that the legal system doesn't reclassify them as medical parts which can be used for other purposes since they are dead (cyborg, transplants, research, whatever). And that people decide that those 90's and 00's guys were really cool enough to bring back en mass. (Yeah, right.)
And even then, you're buying a number of years in a world that you are completely inept to understand and for all practical purposes will be worthless after the novelty wears off in a year (assuming they are able to revive you in a way that doesn't leave you brain damaged or in a poor quality of life). And then you're going to die anyways.
It just isn't worth it. If they paid me $100k, then I might be tempted to let all the people around me in my life go through the inconvenience of my being frozen (are my assets tied up, or distributed as normal?). Oh, and what a legacy I would leave behind. "Yeah, he was that nutball who had his head frozen. Hahaha."
I'm sorry. It just doesn't work for me.
If you were to allow people to set up unmanaged estates to continue on in perpetuity, you'd end up with a large portion of the world's wealth owned by dead people. It'd only be a matter of time before the living adjusted the laws and raided the funds (and who's going to stop them? The corpsicles?)
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"These people will also set up bank trusts, etc. to preserve their interests as they lie dead and frozen. They will influence politics to preserve their property rights as they lie dead, concentrating more and more property and political control in the hands of the dead and their trustees."
There's an easy fix to your dystopian scenario...
Join them.
Or get your butt to work on revival and repair technology *NOW*, so they don't accumulate too much power. The shorter they stay under before they can resume their lives, the better off you will be.
-- Terry
Star Trek Trivia Question: Does Captain Kirk die every time he steps into the transporter and gets rematerialized elsewhere?
UNIX Trivia Question: Does your program halt when it calls fork(), and you kill -9 the parent process, but not the child process?
I'd say "no" in both cases, as I believe that a copy of the data in my brain, running on a copy of my brain, is indistinguishable from me.
I'm serious; I am truly surprised by this thread's outpouring of fear and revulsion at the very idea of cryonics. "Won't work, you'll be ground hamburger. Even if it did, nobody would revive you, you sicko egomaniac."
I haven't signed up, but I'm interested. Along with a few others here, I figure that if it doesn't work, I'm dead anyway. More than that, I'm optimistic about my chances, but I'm not going to argue that here. What I *will* argue is that I am neither avoiding living now, nor arrogantly imposing myself on an unwilling future society, any more than anyone who takes advantage of a risky lifesaving medical procedure.
Would you tell a cancer patient who is about to undergo an expensive treatment regime with little chance of success not to be such a selfish bastard , to die already, and to leave the money to charity?
I suppose some of you would. Sheesh.
The oldest of them are hitting college this year or last year: the first birth from a previously frozen embryo happened in 1984. So, we can freeze and bring back at least a few cells without water cracking them. Not the same thing as 70 trillion cells (100 billion of which containing intricate connections i.e. neurons), but its a start.
What possible motivation would any future society have to thaw these people out?
...)
I can think of a few who might be interested.
- History departments. (Benjamin Franklin wanted to be pickled in a wine barrel after death and revivied in a century or three to see how things had come out. Wouldn't you like to interview HIM? Or see Jefferson's reaction to what the Democratic Party has become? B-) There's been a lot of history since then and eyewitnesses can help sort it out.)
- Techie version of above: Anyone trying to fix a bug in a frozen programmer's code. B-)
- Political splinter groups of many sorts.
- Charities. (If you will donate to save a random starving child in Africa, would you donate to revive someone you knew or had heard of from your own history?)
- The entertainment industry. (LOTS of possibilities there...)
- Hobbiests. (Imagine the science-fiction convention you could have with every currently-dead author and fan in attendence... B-) Now do the same with civil-war recreationists, yachtsmen, skiers, archers. Want Karate lessons from an old master?)
- Previous revivees. (History department revives historical figure, who revives his wife and children, who revive their fellow cryonics club members...)
- Anybody with a bit of money and a bee in his bonnet. Do you have any idea how RICH (by current standards) the poorest of the poor would be when tech is up to reviving people frozen by current techniques? Try this: Think of the standard of living of a current welfare recipient - food - including imported fruit virtually year-round, medical care, recorded music, cable TV, electricity, etc. Now imagine how rich someone in 1812 would have to be to afford the equivalent. (Remember: No penicillin, no refrigeration, entertainment is live and rare for anyone less than a king,
and of course:
- CURRENT cryonicists, who will revive PAST cryonicists in the hope that FUTURE cryonicists will revive THEM. (Just because they can repair somebody who died of cancer in the naughties doesn't mean that they'll be able to keep people from dying from Arcturian Whooping Sneeze in the '80s. So there will likely still be cryonicists.)
Why would we need more people, especially those who can't accept their own mortality?
"... can't accept their own motality."? Sounds like you're believing pro-death propaganda.
We know damned well we're mortal. But that's no reason not to "Rage at the dying of the light" - and then see about repairing or replacing the lightbulb - as many times as possible.
Do you WANT to die? You can ALWAYS arrange it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way