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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.""
Isn't there a problem with ice crystals forming in cells of frozen tissue, which destroy the cells' structure? Wouldn't it be smart to avoid this crystallization process when freezing, somehow?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
What possible motivation would any future society have to thaw these people out? Why would we need more people, especially those who can't accept their own mortality?
Sure, you'd thaw out one or two just to show you could, and you'd probably thaw out the interesting people like Walt Disney. Hey, you might even pull a person or two out of the fridge every so often to do historical research (wouldn't that be great -- you wake up in a room with a history grad student who asks you to explain why your generation felt it necessary to fuck the planet seven ways 'till Sunday and leave it for later generations to clean up).
Getting back to my original point, I don't see how this sort of thing would ever effect more than a few tens of people over a long timeline. Simply put: the future doesn't want you.
Personally, I believe that the cycle of life is the only thing that drives social and technological evolution. The greatest mistake we could make as a species would be to short-circuit this cycle for the sake of our own greedy, short-sighted interests.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
People try to debunk it as much as possible, but in truth, it's becoming more of a reality. Think stem cells. If you can harvest a few stem cells from a frozen body, and then help patch and repair the old body with them, could we not come back from the dead? Of course, as many have already stated, ice crystals screw ya up pretty bad, by breaking cell walls into little bitty bits. But, there are chemicals that help to keep this to a minimum, and, possibly in the future, low enough to not matter. So, cryo is a very plausible possibility.
Of course, i just wanna see Walt Disney die of a heart attack after he's rejuvinated, when he sees what crap his company's gone to. :P
I saw an interesting show on the Discovery channel about 3 months ago.
On the show, researchers put a living frog in the freezer. After a day,
they took the frozen frog out and let it "thaw" out. I was amazed
to see that the frogs heart started to beat again(after an hour or so).
After several hours it was moving around again! I think if researches
could harness this wonder, we may have the potential to "really"
utilize cryogenics for something useful (i.e space exploration?)
and not for freezing people that are already dead!
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old. That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
... a full twenty years (24%) longer than the hard limit you suggest. My family is hardly unique in that accomplishment.
Wrong.
There is no proof that the sun will rise in the east tommorow, though I think most of us fully expect it to.
However, there is ample proof that humans can live well beyond 75 years. There have been humans that have lived as much as 150 years, twice the hard limit you suggest. Indeed, my own grandmother lived to 101, and lived fully independently until she was 98. My great grandmothers on both sides made it into their mid-nineties
Cryogenics may or may not pan out. I think it is far more likely that the energy, or money, will run out and the freezers will be shut down than that anyone will be revivied, but even if the probability is only one in one billion that a frozen human will ever be revived, that is infinitely greater than the probability of someone buried in the earth, or creamated, ever returning from the grave, Christian, Islamic, and other assorted mythologies notwithstanding.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Here is an interesting test related to this topic:
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/games/identity.htm
Civilization would have to fall far for liquid nitrogen production to fail- you don't need electricity to keep the dewars cold, you just need to top them off each week.
A minor thought- Ok, what if you could slap somebody on ice and thaw them out later or even go a step further and prolonging death through cryo and curing the person in the future... What if you could? Great, you wake up in the rosey future, right? Uh-uh. Ed, the Nuclear Physicisist gets frozen and wake up in a future where his skills are useless. It took him the good part of 40 years to become an expert in his field only to find out that in the year 2280, the only place nuclear reactors are used is in cheap import hover cars from Alpha Proxima. Welcome to the future, where the only field Ed, the 6-digit salary guy with all his mocha-latte degrees is qualified to work in is as a glorified auto mechanic.
Not everybody would suffer this fate, of course. But anybody with any technical skills (from cars to software) better be prepared for a nasty case of chrono-shock. Then there would be those people who are curosities, who would have it made in the future. Lets freeze Elvis or somebody... He's always good for a laugh. A president who could give you first hand accounts of the history he shaped. But you and I? Better keep walking past the good ol' cryo tube and live life in the here and now.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
One of the often asked questions about Cryonics is why only about
600 people are signed up.
Many have said here that they oppose it. I am curious about the
reasons in particular you are not signed up.
Many who are signed up don't think reanimation is particularly
likely. They see all the risks, all the undeveloped technology.
They might feel that their estimation of the chances of it working
are one in a thousand or less.
Yet they are signed up because, simply put, the odds of success
if you don't do it are absolutely and surely zero, barring
religious faith in a non-material immortal soul.
If you don't do it, you're food for worms and permanently dead.
If you do it, you may also be permanently dead, but it's hard
to argue that you can be really sure there is no chance.
We simply don't know enough to say that it will work, but we
also don't know enough to say that it won't work. Predictions
that it will surely work as as doubtful as other famous early
scientific speculation, but predictions that it surely won't work
are as valid as the similar negative predictions that "experts"
have made over the years. Most were right (so far) but many were
also wrong.
We do know that when you take frozen brains and examine them
under the electron microscope that all the structures that modern
science believes to be important are still discernable. The
information about the connections is all there. The connections
are damaged of course. Many cell walls are ruptured, many dendrites
are sliced, but it's still clear what they were connected to.
If I cut a PC-board in half, the circuit would be ruined, but I
can certainly re-solder it, or build a new PC board and put the old
chips on it. The information is still there, and so it is with
frozen tissue. This is a matter of fact, not speculation, so to
say it's impossible to repair this seems nonsensical. Hard?
Certainly. Expensive? Quite possibly, though if it's all nanotech
and software it's only expensive to do it the first time. But
impossible? That's an extraordinary claim.
You might speculate there is more to the brain then the position of
all the neurons and how they are interconnected and all their receptors.
But that would be pure speculation. Science doesn't yet know enough about it
at all, not enough to say what can or can't be done.
So given that, why take the alternative of certain death over any chance,
no matter how slim? Is it the money? Is it that people are grossed
out?
Of course there are many things that could go wrong. The company holding
you could fail. (Though storing you is remarkably cheap. All it takes
is a liquid nitrogen truck once a week to top up the tanks.) The world
could change so that your descendents, friends or curious people have
no desire to revive you. The world could change to a place you are
incapable of living. Could. None of these are certain either. That
being cremated is final -- that seems pretty certain.
So what's your reason?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
The article talks about paying enough money to cover the 'freezing process' and the storage of your body, but it doesn't mention where the money will come from to re-animate these people, or cure them of their diseases, or hook their brains up to cameras and microphones. These procedures will cost much more than the actual freezing and storage of them, I'm sure.
Is that taken into consideration? If these people do become the first candidates for any human tests of reanimation (which it seems like they would) maybe the process would be funded by the researchers. But, I don't think I'd like to be in that situation...That sounds REALLY frankenstein...
-Frostilicus (ctar)