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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...
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.
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.
I don't have a life now, how could I get one when I'm dead?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
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
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!
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
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..."
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
"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