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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.""
maybe not the best term?
http://www.baarbd.org - bay area adventure racing
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.
"A hotbed for the experimental & controversial process..."
Wouldn't that be the worst place to put a frozen body?
Michael C. Hollinger
I've suggested to our management that we freeze our COBOL programmers. When we needed one, we could unthaw them.
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
What happends when you wake up 2,000 years from now attached to the body of a goat? Whose to say these ice houses won't be bought out be a company that is genetically engineering a new form of pet that can regale you with stories of the great Internet crash.
On the other head, waking up on top of a genetically engineered body sounds like fun.
Here's a thought. Today you pay for the freezing, but isn't the thawing going to be much more expensive? How do you pay for that?
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.
that could be frozen and their job performance might improve...
Well -- AFAIK, there has not been much research dedicated to "bring back life to cyrogenically frozen heads".
All the while, the heads are getting more and more expensive to keep around, and if they were ever brought back to life, I would imagine there would be some serious bill left to pay. (like Valentine from Cowboy Bebop)
However, It is probabbly more interesting to note that this honestly is not much different than people of the ancient times burying their bodies in particular ways, adorned with jewery, in the hope of another life to come. Our case it has simply shifted the hope from a mysterious entity or belief in a higher order of the universe to ourselves and our competence in shaping the future.
All the while, maybe after several million years, future archeologists will come, find a head in a vat, and muse over the silly-ness of the past.
p.s. they should shoot the vats into space. natually cold, and probabbly survive much longer if the world was to end in our own hands. I am certain when WW3 rolls around, the last thing on people's minds is to keep some silly dude's head preserved in liquid N2
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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 don't have a life now, how could I get one when I'm dead?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Of course, techies just like cryogenics because it's the ultimate water-cooled case mod for carbon-based computers.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
True, but given the fact that all of our subjects are dead before we even get this far, this seems like the least of our worries.
Personally, I think the people who want to be frozen need therapy to deal with their oversized egos.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Bat: a wooden stick used for striking things.
Freezing: Making things cold.
Is: I forget -- ask Bill Clinton.
That should clear that up. Done and done!
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Aside from the heated (or icy) debate over whether or not cryonics is a good idea - that is, whether or not there is any hope for ever reanimating a frozen body - there is, in some places, just as heated a debate over whether or not it should be allowed at all.
t m
In France the law states that bodies must be buried or cremated, so cryonics effectively isn't legal.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1870301.s
There was also another discussion on this topic more recently on the BBC's site.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/2133961.stm
The angel in the oatmeal.
My first thought after reading the headline was that, instead of firing workers in a downturn, some conpanies would freeze them instead.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Read Heinlein's "The Door into Summer." In that book, they've solved the technological issues, cryonics is a part of the culture--people freezing themselves for a decade or two, but not for medical reasons, for financial reasons. The idea is to pre-pay for the cryonics and put the rest of your assets into investments so that you're rich when you wake up. Not to mention that you escape your pathetic personal problems.
Put an ancient egyptian mummy in a cryogenics tank. For extra laughs, put those gag nose-and-moustache glasses on him.
If you believe the technology will advance so that any disease can be cured, don't you believe also that they will be able to grow your body again from a DNA sample. Memory, and brains might be a bit more of an task - but saving around 1500 cm^3 and the DNA sample takes much less space anyway. Here's a related article about brain mapping.
If you force an otherwise singular embryo to split, is that considered cloning?
Why does this just strike me as more techno-geek technophilia? "I'm going to have my body cryogenically frozen" has the same nerd chest pounding tone as talk of CPU clocks, net-enabled everything, and naming children after esoteric SF novels.
Of course that 133 Pentium doesn't seem so much like a Tiny God anymore, some kid keeps on h4x0ring the AC to 5 degrees C, and your neighbors hit the deck everytime they see Undómiel throw on his black trenchcoat.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I guess people who don't have a life are hoping they will get one the next time around. Of course, by then their skills will be obsolete, they will run around using archaic phrases like "awesome" and "kludgy," they will bore everyone with their reminiscences and nostalgia for products and fads that no longer exist, and most predictable of all, when they hear the sounds people of the future are enjoying, they will grump "You call that stuff music?"
Shoot them into space and wait for Cmdr. Data to find them when the Enterprise runs across yet-another-cryosleep-ship several hundred years from now.
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!
The copy of the social contract in my EULA didn't mention an obligation to revive long-dead and effectively useless people.
To the contrary, it said that I will live, add my unique contribution to society and give rise to a new generation. Then I'll die. This paradigm has worked really, really well for the last 10 billion years or so, so I'm not going to fuck with it.
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.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Why do all these people wanting to be frozen assume that a world of X billions will want to thaw out some sick crank from the past just to add to their burdens?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If this technology is ever perfected (or made good enough), it would be extremely useful for space exploration, although it would probably be obseleted by any warp drive-like inventions.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I've seen the terrible consequences of cryogenics gone wrong one too many times.
Throwing yet another pack of spoilt hamburgers into the trash
Count me out.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Ummm.... you all do realize that the entire cryonics industry is a plot conceived by time-travelling cannibals from the future to ensure an endless supply of TV-Dinners....
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
The colder it is, the fewer chemical reactions take place in the cell. A cell whose molecules aren't bouncing around doing anything doesn't need food to maintain its current state.
'samatter, didn't you see Ice Age? :-)
I play Nerd-Folk!
We have legal medical marijuana, we're allways lookin for better ways to cool the smoke :)
.______________
O
o
The "moral community" is opposed to cloning because every day we come closer and closer to being able to do what people thought only god could (or should) do. It raises philosophical questions that religion isn't prepaired to answer. Imagine we can build and grow a baby from scratch. How do the iniquities of the father pass on to a baby without parents? Does the child need to be baptised for adams transgressions? Is it one of god's creations or one of mans? Does it even have a soul? Do we?
Forget "Techies On Ice" the more general rule is that only stereotypes are frozen.
In the case of that first season episode: a confused housewife, a singer looking for a party, and a rich Texan financier with a cowboy hat. I guess they just missed the other ships housing a bunch of frozen computer geeks and eccentric scientists (probably because they were all dressed up like trekkies and that would be too self-referential).
And then you can add eugenic super villians, famous baseball players, and hunch backed nuclear power plant owners to the list of the stereotypically frozen.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
I went to a funeral service for someone who was being put into cryonic suspension. It was unlike any I had been to before. Everyone sat around a piano and sang "freeze a jolly good fellow, freeze a jolly good fellow..."
But if it ever works, it's probably going to be more like recovery from backup onto new hardware than a restart.
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
You know what? It's a beautiful sub-scalding day in Florida and I'm leaving the office early to sit under a live oak and do some asanas. Blow your money on cryonics or enjoy this day--it's your choice.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
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.
There's also no proof that humans will ever live much beyond 75 years old.
Besides the people living into their hundreds?
That could be a very solid barrier that no amount of gene therapy and wishful pseudoreligious pride in technology can repair.
On the other hand, there's decent evidence that evolution doesn't drive most creatures to have long lifespans. Gorillas live to about 35; chimps can reach their late 50s - I think it safe to assume that our most recent common ancestor lived at most into its 50s. Considering that evolution added 40% to 100% to the max age in a few million years, and with life expectancies in the 30s for primitive man, there's no reason to believe that it was biochemical cutoff instead of minimal effect on natural selection that stopped the increase in max age.
What now?
All your friends are dead (save for the ones who were frozen, probably not many), your stuff is long gone, and your money...well, I haven't heard of any of these cryogenic companies socking away cab fare for their clients. What bank would preserve your accounts while you're technically dead?
My point is, yes you're thawed and alive, but your life basically sucks. And nobody knows you, or cares about you. Suddenly immortality doesn't sound so appealing...
Was that out loud?
Sure, we there is a problem with ice crystals. Sure, we haven't actually brought anyone back. Heck, maybe the companies that offer this service won't survive until these discoveries are made. Maybe it will never be possible to bring someone back from the dead that were frozen with today's primitive techniques. Even if it is, why would our decendents do it?
Then again, you're dead. Any odds are good, don't you think?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
In an attempt to cash in on the popularity of cryonics amongst techies, CryoGen Inc. of San Fransisco are now offering a caffeinated blood-replacement coolant.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Money. Your savings will be growing exponentially while you are frozen and this will add up to an enormous amount if you either start out with a lot of money or are frozen for a long time. Consider a simple case where your savings are making a paltry 3% per year above inflation. If you stay frozen for 100 years, your savings will have multiplied to 20 times their original value and since inflation is already taken into account you will have 20 times the purchasing power that you would today. If you stay frozen for 200 years, your savings will grow to 370 times their original value. If you stay frozen for 500 years, your savings will grow to a whopping 2.6 million times their original value, and again, that is already adjusted for inflation! Just include a clause in your cryo-contract that your maintainers will get 50% of your savings when they revive you, and they will have the motivation to revive you once the decreasing cost of reviving somebody intersects the increasing real value of your savings.
So, if you put a mere $1 into a relatively safe investment and froze yourself today, you could wake up in 500 years and be rich (a multi-millionare in today's dollars). I'm surprised we haven't seen any get-rich-quick schemes touting this aspect of freezing yourself (well OK, it would be more like a get-rich-in-what-you-perceive-as-quick-since-you'r e-frozen scheme).
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
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.
By the year 3000, we'll have the technology to keep human heads alive in jars, even those of people like Nixon ;-)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
You're betting that your consciousness is totally phyiscally based. All a special combination of molecules with electrical and chemical reactions. Nothing more.
You're also betting that, with a little repair and a jump-start, your consciousness would continue from the moment it left off. YOU would still be YOU. (I wonder how important the ONGOING electro-chemical reaction is to consciousness.)
That is what you're betting on, after all, when you bet on cryogenics. Further, if you believe that the chemical and electrical is all there is to a person, then there isn't much point in bringing you back. Because you will finally be dead not too long after, and you don't matter anymore because you cease to exist.
So, if you believe that you will cease to exist, but that it is important to have a long as life as possible, then cryogenics is for you.
That seems to be the opposite of Pascal's Wager, isn't it? You're betting $100k+ that you will cease to exist.
Personally, I'm a fan of the meat-puppet theory. These bodies exist, and the brain has a purpose in interfacing with this physical world, but *I* exist elsewhere.
"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
Take it to the next step: Just copy minds. Brainwash someone into reading/believing all the Slashdot/Usenet posts that were written by some guy a couple thousand years earlier. They become the earlier person.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And then there is the problem that actually killed you that you need to have repaired.
Smithers: "Mr. Smithers plus guest"...huh. There's only one person I would want to bring.
[pulls a frozen Mr. Burns from a slot in the wall]
Oh, Mr. Burns, we'll thaw you out the second they discover the cure for seventeen stab wounds in the back. How're we doing, boys?
Frink: Well, we're up to fifteen!
Scientists: Yay!
"Techies On Ice: The Coming Age of Cryonics" Is this like the Lion King on ice?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
"This? This is ice. This is what happens to water when it gets too cold. This? This is Kent. This is what happens to people when they get too sexually frustrated."
This article? It's about cryonics. This is what happens to people when they get too rich, too dead, and then too cold.
Actually, we're all *already* frozen. The reason that the world's OSes seem more bug-and-sploit-ridden,ungainly and defective with every major new release (witness, for instance, XP and the 2.4.[0-7] kernels) is a direct effect of Jory.
- undoware.ca
That was an excllent article. It's rare that one reads something that's so balanced. Those interviewed really summed up my feelings; it's a gamble, but the cost is so small compared to the payoff. I doubt it will work, but I'm yet to be convinced it's impossible.
I had no idea the Bay Area was such a hotbed of Cryonics. Any other Alcor members out there?
coljac, "A-1868"
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
Space travel comes to mind... What if it's possible to freeze someone BEFORE they die? And what if that's easier than getting a spacecraft going faster than the speed of light (and having the crew survive the experience)?
On the other hand, there's decent evidence that evolution doesn't drive most creatures to have long lifespans
A fair bit of (theoretical!) work has been done on this topic in the last decade or so. Frankly I'm too tired right now to go look up the references, but I've been to a couple of population genetics seminars by people active in this area. The basic upshot is that the "aging process" (as measured by the inflection point in the curve describing the age-linked decline in metabolic function, repair efficiency, etc) for a given species tends to kick in at about the age of the average lifespan of that organism in the wild.
Humans in the wild presumably lived on average around 30-35 years before being snuffed out by cave bears, infections, or angry neighbours. There's no advantage to being able to live efficiently to 200 years if you're already dead at 35, so natural selection doesn't operate to keep your body in peak form for that extended time. If you suddenly develop a mutation that allows you to live to 200, it doesn't help any of your descendants a bit, since on average they are all dead at 35 as well.
One fellow even worked out a rough calculation for how long it's going to take natural selection to notice that we're living much longer on average, and for our descendants to start living longer on that basis (this was done by extrapolation from (IIRC) fruitfly data). Be of good cheer: 30000 years or so from now, people will be living much longer. :)
Of course we might come up with some biochemical hacks in the meantime to stretch things out, but I'm not holding my breath...
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.
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.
Of course we might come up with some biochemical hacks in the meantime to stretch things out, but I'm not holding my breath...
Why? Humans could also evolve a stronger response to bacteria based on antibiotics. But humans took a short cut, instead of waiting for evolution to design it. Ageing is certainly more complex, but especially after we can tweak the genes, it should be a similar matter to shortcut evolution.
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
Oh, I don't think it's impossible at all. I'm just not optimistic in the near term (say, 30-40 years). In the long term (>50 years) I actually think it is almost a certainty.
Maybe it's just a forest-for-the-trees effect, but working in a biochem lab I'm constantly struck by the gigantic complexity we're faced with in the metabolic processes of even the simplest cells, and by the sketchy nature of our understanding of the overall picture right now. This is not to put the field down - we know orders of magnitude more now than we did even a decade ago. The (real) work on the ageing process has only just begun, however.
That being said, there are a couple of hopeful threads. Some real progress is being made on understanding the nature of the caloric restriction effect, and it seems like the idea of a simple pill which mimics the effect isn't completely out of the question.
Personally I'm sure it will come out about five minutes after I die.
"Dammit! We had to suffer, let them suffer too" seemed to be the reaction from older generations of doctors. Some anti-cryonics people seem to be saying the same thing "We had to accept death, we had to suffer, no one gets to try to skip it." But why should death after after 80 years (121 the longest provable lifespan) be acceptable? We are starting to know about how lifespan works, why not try to extend it? In the past, when death after a few decades was inevitable, societies needed to come up with rules and ideas that kept people from wigging out over death. But you don't need the exact same rules if death doesn't have to happen in the same way.
Maybe 50 years ago it was noble to teach a young child to accept their upcoming death by leukemia. Nowadays that would be considered almost child-abuse, because childhood leukemia has a 95%+ cure rate. I think it is terrible when a child suffers through years of chemo and cancer treatment only to die- I see little that is noble about it. but I see little that is noble about death for anyone, and I don't believe we should give in just because "thats the way it always was." Living to 80 would look good to people who could only expect 40 years, and I wouldn't have wanted my ancestors to say "we only got 40 years, why should you have more?" Why shouldn't I think that 160 is a fine goal for next generations of people?
And I doubt future generations of people will resent the frozen few to the point of refusing to treat them. Why? For the same reasons we today don't resent our "past generations" from getting heart transplants or stroke treatments. In part it might be pragmatic- refuse treatment for the elderly and you might not get treatment yourself- but I think mostly it is because we want to be kind. We don't tell people- "hey, you're eighty now, that's all you get, you have to die." I don't know that future people will say to the cryonically suspended "you lived 40 or 80 years, thats all you'll get."
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
I know you're being funny, but maybe there IS a parallel to what you are saying. My personal belief (which is NOT scientific) is that there is a "key" that links your consciousness with your body (meat puppet).
Normally, the correspondance is very tight. However, it can be weakened (identical twins with a common lock on some pieces), or it can be insecure (a more generic lock with some pins missing in the tumbler), causing a multiple personality disorder.
Of course, if someone things this is hokey, then putting faith in the religion of technology is at least equally as suspect.
I always figured the real main problem is that there's very little gain for anyone to revive some cretin from the past
You're right as far as you go, but you must consider that in the future, Man will have wiped out most animal life on Earth.
But the kiddies will still want to go to zoos....
"Welcome to the year 3000, corpsicle! You'll be living in this diorama we call 'Mogadishu: The Years of Filth and Famine'!"
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
What will stop a crooked couple in the future from stealing some of Ted's frozen Dna
Perhaps the fact that, well, this experiment was already carried out: Ted William's son tried out for the major leagues, and didn't make it.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
the moral community [sees a] difference between cloning that is sanctioned and initiated by God (identical and fraternal twins) and that which is attempted by man (medical cloning.)
God initiated: good.
Man initiated: bad.
Famine and pestilence and nersightedness: good.
Fertilizer and antibiotics and glasses: bad.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Man, how do you use those things??? I don't get it.
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
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)
the brain is the substrate into which consciousness acts.
cryonics has a religious belief that our sense of Self in somehow built-up from the interaction of matter amongst itself.
however --
Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of the world.
For every attempt at an explanation must begin with the formation of
thoughts about the phenomena of the world.
Materialism thus begins with the thought of matter or material processes.
But, in doing so, it is already confronted by two different sets of
facts: the material world, and the thoughts about it.
The materialist seeks to make these latter intelligible by regarding
them as purely material processes. He believes that thinking takes
place in the brain, much in the same way that digestion takes place
in the animal organs.
Just as he attributes mechanical and organic effects to matter,
so he credits matter in certain circumstances with the capacity
to think.
He overlooks that, in doing so, he is merely shifting the problem
from one place to another. He ascribes the power of thinking to
matter instead of to himself.
And thus he is back again at his starting point.
How does matter come to think about its own nature?
Why is it not simply satisfied with itself and content
just to exist?
The materialist has turned his attention away
from the definite subject, his own I, and
has arrived at an image of something quite vague
and indefinite. Here the old riddle meets him again.
The materialistic conception cannot solve the problem;
it can only shift it from one place to another.
(Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter 2)
best regards,
john.
Maybe they would wake you because they needed a good laugh?
And then there is the kind of altruism you can do without.
On waking, someone tells you, "I have some good news and I have some bad news.
"The bad news is that we can't cure your cancer.
"The good news is that everyone on Earth has FOUND GOD . We are all going to live eternally! Those Heaven's Gate people from your own time were on the right path. Since eternity is around the corner, most of us have chosen to be promoted over to God's care.
But we just couldn't leave you and the other corpsicles to spend eternity in hell!
So we have been thawing you out to tell you the good word. It is amazing!
"Oh, you are still in pain? Oh, sorry, what with one thing and another we weren't able to get any painkillers out of storage for you guys.
"But I better get cracking here at page one, chapter one, of the first book of our new holy writ. If I read really quickly I should be able to finish the first book, and get you baptized, before your cancer polishes you off.
"No, don't try and thank me. Seeing you in Heaven is all the reward I need."