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Suspended Animation Tests Successful
chrisb33 writes "Wired News reports that suspended animation tests have been successfully carried out with pigs. From the article: 'Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems).'" The pig that was the subject of the article was kept in suspended animation for two hours, and Duggan and his team have successfully suspended hundreds of pigs for an hour at a time. It's still a far cry from a spaceship filled with sleep pods, but would be just the ticket for doctors who need to buy extra time to save lives.
Welcome.... To the wold of 2 hours later
I've got four pounds of bacon in my fridge right now.
When we get to the point of cryogenic suspension being used in space travel, it's not the process I would be worried about. *cough*HAL*cough*
... welcome our new frozen sus scrofa domesticus overlords.
A similar story was posted a while back about U.S. Scientists doing this to dogs.
I just type my sig in the reply form...
How can you freeze hundereds of pigs for an hour? (And thaw them at the same time?).
It will make a good business, freezing people so their savings would grow and they could see the future.
But it also means the meat in your freezer might be technically alive.
alive!
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
"presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems" ... there is no problem.
Sticky ethical problems exist only in the minds and eyes of retarded people. Its science, it can save lives, it can bring us to the stars, ethical what?????
As long as the subjects are volunteers, they know and accept the risks involved
People are stupid, i know, but why, oh why, cant we look at the benefits for once?
...I seem to recall Larry Niven wrote about the possible (mis)uses of suspended animation in his Known Space series of books.
One of Niven's ideas was of using executed criminals as a source for organ replacement; this led to the eventual application of the death penalty for most crimes. The general idea was that this would be made possible by using suspended animation to keep the organs alive and healthy for long periods after the "donor" had been killed, so that a suitable match might be found. Your new liver might come from someone who died years ago, and whose parts were kept in storage until a matching donor like yourself had need of them.
Niven also introduced the idea that illegal organ harvesting could also happen; "organleggers" kidnap and disassemble people to provide a black market service. He was writing this in the 60's, and since then there have been signs of both situations (legal and illegal execution as a source of organs) happening in thw world.
Assuming we could keep body parts alive in suspended animation after the host is dead, we could do exactly what Niven described. The question is, will we?
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
This calls for a muppet movie in which Miss Piggy wakes up in 2999 and befriends an alcoholic robot, one-eyed mutant girl, and muffle-voiced walking lobster.
Where were you when the voynix came?
May I be suspended for about 60 years (or whatever) and wake up filthy rich?
oh wait, my friends will all be dead, right?
Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Only if frozen after 10 p.m.
Everybody, sing along...
It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere,
I'm all alone, more or less,
Let me fly, far away from here,
Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
... and mostly dead is not the same as completely dead.
Can you imagine the lack of respect these researchers must recieve in certain circles?
Also I wish Wired would have elaborated a bit regarding the ethical issues of suspended animation. Saving people from gunshot wounds, the only example listed in the article, seems like a no-brainer to me.
50*F is 10*C, still not frozen (and who the hell uses Fahrenheit in a medical setting?!). There have been tests with cooled-down mammals including dogs and baboons since the 1950's. I'll get optimistic when they break the 0*C barrier.
Some people may think that this may end up being a way to deal with any sort of terminal illness. I don't think it is. And it has nothing to do with the technology.
The real problems are financial and political. Suppose you get yourself "frozen". At that point, are you legally alive or dead? In order to be able to pay for the perhaps hundreds of years you might be in storage, you'll have to have a sizable chunk of change set aside. Your heirs (or, more likely, their descendants) will almost certainly attempt to gain control over it, and so the question of whether or not you're legally alive will have to be answered. I wouldn't put good odds on the ruling coming out in your favor.
But suppose it does. Now the question becomes how you ensure that the organization that freezes you will survive for the amount of time it takes for a cure to your terminal illness to be found. The odds of that happening are not good. How many several-hundred-year-old organizations can one find right now? Damn few.
And on top of that, there's the problem of the political stability of the country the organization in question is based in, not to mention the world at large.
The bottom line is that getting yourself frozen in the face of a terminal illness is a very low-probability shot in the dark. But any chance of survival is better than no chance, so I'd take the risk if it were me.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Soylent ice cream is people!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
...but for the application the summary talks about, I would think it would be harder to cryogenically preserve people with some types of injuries or diseases.
Just great. Something else to make the coming high world population epidemic worse.
no text
This was my first though, actually: what ethical problems are we dealing with, here? It's not like we're killing anyone or anything... are there passages in holy texts that prohibit this sort of thing? It seems like an advanced sort of exceptionally effective anestesia, which hasn't, for the most part, inccured the wrath of those protesting lack of ethics in science.
There's testing on medicinal practices like this going on all the time; if the people aren't being tricked into it, and if it's being thoroughly tested, as I'm sure it is, and if it will save lives, as I'd guess it would, what's the problem?
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
The Doctor need to buy time? He can make his own, can't he?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Extra time" is usually needed when the patient is in critical condition. Critical patients, by definition, don't survive 'rough handling'.
Please help metamoderate.
Has it been tested on "long pig" yet?
Where were you when the voynix came?
suspended animation... ooh shit.. lets hope disney won't sue me
What would you do without a monitor? Sit and look stupid behind a keyboard and a mouse
I'm curious as to just how far we can go with this. We can keep a pig alive for an hour or two; how much longer? An hour or two is great for saving gunshot patients and the like, but we need at least a few months to make it matter for space travel. What limits are there on the current method? Why wouldn't this work for years on end?
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
>> How many several-hundred-year-old organizations can one find right now? Damn few. >>
The Catholic Church, as a corporate body and as its several dioceses. Several Protestant churches. Many universities in America and Europe. Lloyds Bank (of England). Wells Fargo. For that matter, any number of banking or insurance concerns in America or Europe.
The modern world has plenty of structures which are organized for perpetuity.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans
...or...
...or...
...or (I triple dare you)...
Let's see how it would make Wired sound if we changed the original sentence to apply to some more popular and better armed belief systems:
Long the domain of Christian nut-jobs, cosmologists report that the age of the universe is an overestimate and now believe it to be closer to the Biblical six thousand years.
Long the domain of Muslim nut-jobs, researchers at the Royal Madrassa Institute announced hard evidence that martyrs instantly ascend to heaven.
Long the domain of Mormon nut-jobs, archaeologists have rediscovered the golden plates that Joseph Smith claimed were given to him by the angel Moroni.
Long the domain of Scientology nut-jobs, paleontologists have reported a heretofore undiscovered volcano in Hawaii showing traces of ancient alien visitors.
Would Wired have the balls to print any of the above sentences? I doubt it. Too scared of being boycotted, firebombed, or sued. So are these cowards getting a few cheap laughs at the expense of our beliefs about the soul and life after death because they know there aren't enough of us nut-jobs to fight back? At least our beliefs are slowly coming closer to realization, unlike the anti-scientific belief systems portrayed above. Why are we the nutjobs then?
What, you're into tolerance and respect for other people's beliefs unless you outnumber them by a comfortable margin, is that the true extent of your commitment to civil liberties? Screw you Wired bigots. And the inevitable flood of Slashdot bigots who will think it's fun to bully people who have never done them or anybody else any harm whatsoever.
To clarify: I'm not saying Wired should be sued, bombed, or censored. They have a right to say what they like. Just like I have the right to say they're low-lifes for going out of their way for no particular reason to insult me and other people who share my beliefs.
So, how are critical patients going to survive extremely harsh freezing and thawing?
"Ok Bob, he has a few gunshot wounds, so be careful when putting him in the freezer..."
Simple. You keep your bank account details secret, in a strongly encrypted form, stored in a bank safe (but you don't tell anyone which bank, or where) so that no one but yourself can access the money.
Want to get my money? You'll have to wake me up first -- only I won't be legally dead anymore =oP
It's cool to see work in this area, though only dropping them to 50 Fahrenheit is rather "No, duh." That's been feasible for a long time. The first, biggest problem was always the immediate damage done by freezing, which destroys cell walls. I always figured it was a problem of devising the right sort of non-toxic anti-freeze chemicals to add to the body before freezing. All those guys who get frozen at the moment of death prior to this sort of development will have a pretty small chance of making it -- they basically need workable nanodocs to repair their bodies when you thaw them. :)
Long-term storage has a second problem, though -- radioactive carbon-14 in your body does very little damage per year, and your body can normally repair it quickly. However, being frozen prevents that from happening, so any long-term freezer jockey will have to be pulled out and thawed every 50 to 100 years to allow his body to repair the damage, so as to prevent radiation sickness and possible cancers.
That is, unless the aforementioned nanotech advances happen and make it possible to fix radiation burns before thawing and find and repair/kill cancerous cells.
Getting frozen now is still a fairly decent option from a financial point of view. The cost is relatively small if you've saved for it, the potential payoff is huge, and so it's a viable investment even though the chance of hitting such a payoff is remote. The other options, of course, are to leave a bit more for your relatives, which is not a sound investment for you, or blow it yourself before you die, which only works if you know exactly when you're going to die. Guess wrong and you're either eating cat food, or you're right back to your relatives getting it all. No wonder some people choose to get frozen.
- mantar
A little dream theatre for the masses, eh?
I'm missing something here. What are the ethical problems? It is my belief that my soul is encoded in my pattern of neural connections, and therefore the only way for me to preserve my soul at this time is to preserve my physical brain. In accordance with my belief, I spend my own money on a life insurance policy and name a cryonics company as the beneficiary. Of my own free will I enter into a contract with this cryonics company whereby they agree to place me in suspended animation as soon as possible after I am prounounced dead. Some people want to be cremated, some want to be buried, I want to be frozen. Explain to me the ethical problem here.
Oh, you must mean the ethical problem of society being full of reactionary sanctimonous busy-bodies who think they know what's best for me. I agree, this is a big ethical problem, and thank you for agreeing that they should get off our backs and let us do as we like with our bodies and our estates.
From the article: 'Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs...
Bold words from Wired, the official newsletter of transhumanist nut-jobs.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
The biggest problem with cryogenic freezing, assuming you get past that whole "freezing things destroys living cells" problem, is that you are not legally allowed to freeze someone until they are dead. That means that currently, you cannot begin cryogenic procedures (like the ones described in TFA) until the person has died of natural causes.
So I guess the idea is that you get cryogenically frozen and then, someday, when society has come up with a cure for death, you will be revived and live long into the future!
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Pigs! I hear pigs, any advance on pigs? Come on, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you've frozen more impressive animals than pigs. Dogs! Thank you sirs. Dogs to the group of US scientists in the corner. Dogs are bid. Dogs is the bid. Do I hear any advance on dogs? Dogs going once... Going twice... WALT DISNEY! Sold! Sold to the gentleman with the large ears and his trouserless sailor friend.
Long-term suspension is "science fiction" in the sense that space travel was science fiction back in the 1930s. Then in the 1960s we landed on the moon. That's how fast science fiction can become reality.
How do you really think somebody will have to be suspended before we have the technology to revive them? A hundred years? Two hundred? Those are not likely guesses, from my standpoint. If nanotechnology-based reconstruction will work for this purpose as we "transhumanist nut-jobs" hope, we'll probably have it in about 40 or 50 years, or maybe 60 or 70 at the very longest. On the other hand, if it turns out, for whatever reason, that nanomachines can't do this, then it will probably never be possible to revive them.
Anyhow. . . What they are doing with the pigs is not particularly interesting from a transhumanist cryosuspension standpoint.
I think a lot of the financial issues could be outlined in some sort of legal document. Something like a "living will" perhaps?
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Anyone see the Mel Gibson movie?
I wonder if after the 1st long term test, the subject will begin to age rapidly.
You could have a pay-on-reanimation scheme. You put some money in a high interest account before you got frozen, and by the time you were reanimated you could pay for the costs of being kept, and also for "re-education" into the new society you've woken up in. (Assuming, of course, that people are frozen for at least a decade...you'd probably have to do something else if you were being frozen for a year for tax purposes or similar)
http://www.familybusinessmagazine.com/oldworld.htm l
That's just the family owned ones too. Took three minutes of google searching, but hey, thanks for playing.
Or do a Rimmer on Red Dwarf and instead of sitting around bored for a few hours bank them in stasis, then you'll have more hours to spend doing what you enjoy.
I don't know who Red Dwarf is, but no thanks.
Hell, even Nintendo has been around 117 years.
Yeah, this is old news. Duke Nukem went in years ago.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Bringing things back to life seems within reach now, but what about freezer burn ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Bah.. that's nothing. Zildjian has been around since 1623. That's 383 years.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Please don't confuse Suspension which has been tested for many years at "high temps" e.g., cold but frozen with the COMBINATION of Suspension + Freezing which of course if it could work would work for a long time period.
The problem is really cold makes water into crystals which destroy cells and makes the corpsical very brittle.. Esp. true if they are using liquid nitrog. which is very very cold..
http://www.hawknest.com/
Quirks and Quarks had an episode on human hibernation discussing the known mechanisms and methods within the realm of immediate possibility. It is well established that cold-water near-drowning victims have survived several hours without oxygen. From an ethical point of view the first human subjects would have to be "last hope" interventions, where death would be inevitable if hibernation were not induced.
That wouldn't work very well. That's would be like a very long term loan. Maybe they could start doing this with houses, instead of having mortgages. You put your payment into a high interest account every month, and when you move out of the house you pay for it. Sounds like a brilliant scheme. I wonder if they offer this kind of payment plan on cars. I'll pay for it in 5 years when I'm done driving it. It would be like a bank giving you a negative interest loan.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Now they can litterally use the same pig in every sequel. -- I'm not smart, I'm just not dumb, or wait....
Actually, suspended animation is exactly what WOULD save a guy who was blown in half. It buys you time do do as complex a surgical procedure as you want, over as long a time as it takes to put the key bits back together again. You get a bloodless field to work in and can do microsurgical anastamoses to your hearts content.
So blown-in-half guy gets aorta and cava put back together; bone grafting and wiring or rodding his spinal column and an anastamosis of the spinal cord or cord amputation; clean up the damage to the kidneys and pancreas; do splenectomy if needed; multiple gut anastamoses and/or resections; and layered closures of the whole body wall. Nothing we don't do now - we just don't have time to do it.
Yes, but long-term suspension was ALSO science fiction in the 1930s.
> What are the ethical problems?
When are you actually dead? When can they just burry your corpse(?) and move on? Are you a popsicle or a person (or some weird hybrid)?
In the USA, almost none. Here in the UK there are loads - schools, hospitals, guilds, universities, civic corporations, etc.
Just in my own experience, my first-year room at college was built about 600 years ago and my school was founded about a century later.
Automated orbital system?
Unless the number of organ donors skyrockets there would be no need to "store" organs. There is no lack of matches for donated organs today.
I was hoping time was cyclical so I could go back in time.
This seems really fascinating in principle. It would be nice to know if they did any brain wave readings (usually a difference between healthy and brain dead people can be readily discerned). Perhaps more subtle changes in brain wave patterns could even be measured. That way we would know atleast one indication of how 'intact' the mind is after recovery. Memory storage and recall are not well understood...how 'hardwired' are we, really? For the /. crowd, is our mind in the non-volatile or the volatile storage medium. I fear that might all be lost mentally upon cryopreservation.
Watching something as boring golf on TV puts me in a state very similar to suspended animation anyway
Scroll up. "News for nerds."
I think I saw this somewhere...
Vader where is that mofo? I need to talk to him. He got all powerful and shit...pwned some damn rebels and choked some bitches to death. He must have gotten it from his rehab.
For some reason, the thought of having all my bodily fluids turn to a cold, crystalline form gives me the creeps.
Cool, all the same.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Russian scientists did this kind of work on dogs in the 1940's. There's video of the procedures on archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/Experime1940
WARNING: Not for the squeemish...
The Cremation of Sam McGee
by Robert W. Service
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell."
On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.
And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."
Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
"It's the cursed cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet 'taint being dead--it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."
A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.
There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows--O God! how I loathed the thing.
And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.
Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May."
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."
Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared--such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.
Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began
What human in their "right mind" would risk death for human trial of this?
\
This has already been done in humans, to a degree. Something similar to this is done in treating brain anuerisms when caught early. They redirect the blood and chill it, slowly lowering the body to 70 degrees. Where, all brain function and heart function stop. By controlling this, they can surgically remove the anuerism before it bursts, which they couldn't do when the person is 'awake'. It's not really suspended animation, because the machine is pumping your blood and breathing for your. Unlike these pigs where I presume the stop everything for the hour or two and don't have a machine.
The ethical considerations of this short term procedure are more legal than anything else. Although there is the hipocratic oath in which doctors swear to do no harm where this practially kills people (even though things like surgery actually violate the oath...). In many states, the definition of dead includes when brain activity ceases. So, procedures like what I mentioned above can not be performed on people in those states. Common use of this procedure would change the definition of dead dramatically. Also ethical from a religious perspective. Although most people would say do this if necessary. What happens if a doctor does this without permission to someone who will not even take a blood donation because of their faith? This also had the unfortunate situation of being a 'neat' idea. 'neat' ideas in a hospital setting are dangerous.
And, you all are ignoring the emphasis on the word sticky in the phrase sticky ethical problems. Filling a chest with salty, nutrient rich, viscous fluid just plain sounds perverse....
So, how many people did you kill today, Doc?
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
Technologies present lots of ethical problems, but I'm not worried about this one. Two reasons.
1) It would never happen. As others point out, we're so worried about the potential problem that we don't allow death row inmates to become organ donors. Why would making organ donation easier and more successful change our already legally established position on the subject?
2) Research into construction and growth of replacement organs is already well advanced for many organs. The technologies include 3-D tissue printers, growth of cells on a scaffolding, and in some cases regrowth from stem cells. Within a couple decades of suspended animation becoming a medical reality we will have plenty of lower-cost options for replacing most organs anyway. Transplantation is more expensive since it requires *two* surgeries.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I speak of the ethical problems of overpopulation. There are >6 Billion people walking on the Earth this very minute, and 6 Billion humans dead in the ground.
That's right, there are more people alive today than have ever previously existed in the history of our species.
Why do you get to artificially prolong your consumption of limited resources simply because you want to?
I want a pony!
i imagine a long lost floating ship many years in the future carrying a band of genetically engineered augments that will be launched after a war breaking out on earth and.... you know the rest...
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/ Ron Paul for President 2008 http://www.infowars.com/
Woohoo
...the pig now thinks he's a tunafish sandwich.
I'd like to be suspended while waiting in lines, around three pm at work, when politics or microsoft vs. apple come up....
From the government's standpoint, a saved life is an extra taxpayer for many years. Considering how much the average person pays in taxes, unless the cost of saving a single person runs into the millions, I'd say the government would probably back it.
But 78-6 is, in fact, only mostly dead
the thing that brought her back to life was TRUE LOVE...
Cooling the body doesn't stop the processes that happen in the body. It slows them down. So you still age. You don't end up like Fry from Futurama or Jason from Jason X. Just like "freezin" food in your freezer doesn't kill the germs it just slows them down, so that you can eat the food before the germs on the food can eat it and multiply.
...but who knows maybe I'll end up delivering a pizza to some lab at midnight and get knocked into a cryogen pod. Personally I think it would suck because every single loved one you've ever known would be dead. Sure you might have a ton of money assuming the government doesn't snatch it up for itself during some war.
I don't see why we couldn't put people away for a bit in cold storage and bring them back out, but I think for periods of decades is a very far stretch with current tech. Down the road this might be possible and I hope it is from a space exploration stand point.
You're not dead in suspended animation. A suspension doesn't mean stopped and animation doesn't mean non-motion. Not to mention a person isn't declared dead unless they are brain dead. Since you technically aren't brain dead while in suspended animation I fail to see why anyone would assume a person is dead if put in suspension. Unless of course they haven't read any science books, taken science in either HS or college as both of the basics of these topics are covered.
Which brings up another good point. You're only ok in suspension if the building you are located in is ok. There are a million things that could go wrong that would be out of the hands of the people looking over you. World Wars don't typically have boundries. We still have yet to be invaded by a foreign power, which as the decades go by I see more and more likely at some point. Not in my lifetime I'm sure, but hell Rome fell. Why can't we?
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Actually, I remember some apartment buildings in Korea work like that. If you can put down like $10,000 upfront, the interest pays the rent and then you get the money back when you leave. Of course with decreasing interest rates, more places are switching to plain rent.
The Disney corporation has transferred all it's copyrights to an employee, who has now entered a state of cyrogenic suspension.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Now that's some fresh meat delivered straight from the farm!
Cryogenic Incarceration anyone?
Sounds like a version of Cryonics that might actually work. Anyone remember seeing news items on those vaults full of corpses frozen in liquid nitrogen since the 60's?
"A suspension doesn't mean stopped and animation doesn't mean non-motion."
What kind of bunk is this? If suspended meant stopped (it does; with the caveat that it can start again), and animation meant 'non-motion', suspended animation would mean "stopped non-motion". Are you claiming that the parent thought suspended animation was 'stopped non-motion'? Wtf, double negative batman.
Suspend (v.): To cause to stop for a period; interrupt: suspended the trial.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Few organizations are carefully designed and planned especially to last a long time. Besides, nanotech probably won't take more than a hundred years or so to develop, and probably a lot less. I don't understand why people have such a hard time believing that we will soon posses the technology to scan and reconstruct or replicate the molecules of the brain.
As for legal issues and such, there's no need to speculate. People have already been preserved for decades. I haven't heard of many problems.
World war and such still remains a major concern. I think the facilities are typically placed in relatively safe locations so there is a decent chance of their survival. There are no guaranties, but not dying is a pretty big payoff. Of course you will have a little more money to spend while you are alive if you don't invest in one of the life insurance policies that are used to fund the preservation, so there is something to loose. But you can get yourself preserved for an amazingly small amount like $30/month (paid to an insurance policy while you're alive).
Another consideration is that if you're not too old today, then you stand a good chance of seeing the singularity (the explosion of artificial intelligence) or nanotechnology that will halt aging, before the end of your natural life span. Consider a child of today. It's kind of shocking when you realize that a child today can expect to easily live another 80 years, and by that time super intelligence will very likely have arrived, and death from old age will no longer be an issue. Children of today can figure they probably won't ever die of old age! The old saying that everybody dies someday, can no longer be justified! But people are still saying it. They haven't got it yet. Can you imagine what technology will be like in 80 years? Sure, huge advances might not happen, but I can't see much reason to think they won't.
Actually, Niven didn't really focus on suspended animation relating to organ donation. He just posited solving extraction, storage and rejection problems. He had a totally different storyline on people put in cryogenic storage, using a popular theory of memory being stored in RNA. They would take a convincted criminal and replace their mind with the memory RNA extracted from a "corpsicle" - a cryogenically preserved person. Assumedly, there was no way to thaw out the body so they did this instead.
....signed Warren Buffet.
Yay! Slothfull dynasties of wealth for a fixed group of frozen/unfrozen/frozen/unfrozen humans!
"If you don't have eyes you shouldn't have wings" -- Carl Pilkington
You need to google "Ted Williams frozen head".
The story was titled "U.S. Scientists Create Zombie Dogs"
So yes, the dog or in this case the pig's body was reanimated but how do you know the
spirit of for example "Bowser" returns? God knows what kind of absolute evil could incarnate into
flesh when you do something like that. You could turn loose an evil spirit like Baddog
"the Biter of Carpets and Shredder of Newspapers"!
This is not news. The pioneering work was done by the late Dr Peter Safar and his group at the Safar Center of Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh.
Quick, someone revive Walt Disney so I can beat him back to death.
How about being someone's bitch for a lifetime?
Besides, what is the point of punishment anymore? My understanding is, punishment is what you do when you want someone changed. You spank them and say "No, no, no! Don't do that again!" And then maybe they won't. Whether that works with the current prison system is up for debate.
The other reason usually given is that it removes these people from society. This one I can buy. But doesn't life remove people as effectively as death?
Life costs more than death. So if you want to talk about a moral issue, I think it's far more ethical to kill a convict for their organs than to kill a convict because it costs more money to hold them. Only way I can see around that is to donate a lifetime's worth of prison upkeep to some charity everytime you kill someone... but that benefits the charity. If you burn the money, that causes inflation, which is certainly good for someone.
Ok, I know you're just the messenger, but I don't like this at all -- not to mention the whole dead innocents bit. But if I was in charge, I'd have to do some math -- how many innocent lives can be saved by finding someone now serving life wasn't guilty? How many innocent lives could be saved by donating that same amount of money to charity? Or even sending it back into the tax system, maybe put it in education, maybe raise more doctors, who can save someone else's life later?
In any case, tricky as it is, it's such a waste -- especially because I'm sure there are plenty of people on death row who still have some kind of ethics. You know, maybe some sick KKK bastard who rapes and murders little black girls, but would love to donate his organs to a good white family. It's not the family's fault he was a racist. Or maybe it's a psychopath, someone who went absolutely batshit crazy and killed 20 or 30 people, then reverted to a mostly normal human being -- someone who knows she can never live a good life, who knows she'll always have the capacity for that, but still has her good moments, and wants to do some good, even if it's the last thing she does.
I just don't see organs as being that much more powerful a motivator for the death penalty than money. Maybe I'm just used to the less morally ambiguous kind of corruption.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Theoretically, you could avoid ice crystals and break the 0C barrier by raising the atmospheric pressure. Ice crystals would tend to form at temperatures lower than 0C. Additionally, salinity levels in the body may slightly lower the ice formation point as well.
If they do break the 0*C barrier, it'll likely be at the cost of the patient's life. At the point where water freezes, cell's rupture from the ice crystals forming within. I don't know how the hell they could get around that, unless they can somehow dehydrate the body and rehydrate it on revival
Maybe I've been working on cars too much, but why not use anti-freeze? Obviously you can't use the same stuff. However, could there be an organic (or anything safe) form of anti-freeze injected into the blood stream prior to freezing below 0c?
Life is not for the lazy.
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand your "sticky ethical problems". What are the issues of concern here ?
I can imagine this going down gangbusters in our overcrowded emergency departments.
"Nurse, get this man into a suspended animation pod stat! We'll let the next shift worry about him . . . "
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
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Child Care!
If this technology could be refined and then mass-produced to where freezing someone for say 8 hours would be cheaper than day care then I can definitely see a market for that...
"Never miss your child's first steps, first words, or anything they do!" "*Always* be there for your kids!" "Never worry about where your children are at night!" "Freeze and Forget!" "Spend more time alone with your spouse without having to worry about the little ones barging in!"
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
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A relatively famous science communicator here in Australia maintains that "our" generation (ie, those currently in our 20's and 30's) will either be the last to die of old age or the first to live forever. I was going to put a mwahahaha on the end of that sentence, but it seemed too glib.
Honestly, a shot in the dark is better than some people have. In that situation I can't honestly say I wouldn't "chance it".
As for waking up rich, good luck there. If its hundreds of years, there are so many factors... but you never know, you could wake up a celebrity for being the oldest/first cured/first something person to come out of cryogenesis if your money doesn't meet you there for whatever reason!
Remember, adding a random "do:loop" into someone else's code is a damn good time!
AVALANCHE VICTIMS?
Perhaps you meant frostbite victims?
Avalanche victims who DIE rarely have hypothermia as a cause of death. They are usually killed by suffocation, CO2 tox, or trauma.
Avalanche victims who LIVE rarely have profound/severe hypothermia because they are rescued relatively quickly (which is why they lived) or they weren't fully buried. Additionally, snow is a good insulator and most avalanche victims are dressed for conditions.
HYPOTHERMIA
Field hypothermia treatment is generally passive rewarming (ie, stop any further heat loss). Active rewarming of hypothermia patients is done in controlled settings due primarily to the time and effort to rewarm the victims, cardiac complications that can arrise from profound/severe hypothermia, and the effectivness of hospital rewarming (gastric lavage, extracorporeal blood rewarming). Field rewarming is very difficult and time consuming, if not damned near impossible. It is generally only done if we cannot evac.
FROSBITE
Frostbite tx is to prevent any further freezing. You can field rewarm if you can do it properly AND be assured that the area will not refreeze during evac because the damage will be compounded. That is different than previously frostbitten, then healed, areas being more prone to frostbite due to circulation issues.
Oh, I just can't wait until airlines decide to save money on flights by forcing passengers into suspended animation, under the guise of preventing terrorism, just so they can stack people in boxes as cargo.
Airlines don't worry much about the health effects of passengers when they cut back on fresh air and increased the percentage of stale recirculated air. So I doubt that airlines will care about the health effects of passengers that are forced to undergo suspended animation.
The process the article describes requires having all your blood drained out and then replaced. Somehow I don't think that'll sell very well. I could be wrong.
Schweeet. I can now freeze myself, until Futurama comes out in 2008.
this is mrs piggy to ground control: Hiiiiii---Ya! (remember the muppets)
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your pig here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
What's that?
Make sausages
I thought you said "girls" and I was like "wtf, is this guy on crack?"
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Actually, its physicly possible. There are several ice phases (http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html/, and just above 10e9 Pa pressure and less than 200 K there are two forms of amorphous ice (LDA and HDA) that dont form crystals (to rupture cell membranes). So actually, one needs to raise the pressure to 10e9 Pa fisrt and start lowering the temperature. Bingo. And thats technologicaly feasible - dip a body in some fluid so that lungs are full of it, connect arteries to same fluid - start circulation to get rid of blood - then raise pressure to 10e9 Pa as fast as possible without creating shockwaves. Than cool as fast as possible to get to LDA.
For mpatient readers who can't be bothered to read the whole long parent post, here is a handy summary:
I am a transhumanist nut-job, you insensitive clod
sudo ergo sum
Actually, this is easy. In some places (possibly many) you need to be in a normal room temperature environment to be declared dead. Put another way, you need to be warmed up before you can be declared dead.
So really, as long as you've set aside enough money to cover the cooling process, the heirs will just have to live with it.
'Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems).'
That is easily resolved - just use it on terror-suspects. They are outside the law and mostly subhuman, like muslems and people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when American (business-) interests were enacted.
The exact procedure of tests to determine brain activity is a little bit more complicated in the medical reality.
/trying/ to drive respiration after unplug-ing is enough).
It's not only "EEG is flat ergo the patient is dead, let's pull happily the plug".
Mostly, a doctor is supposed to run a whole batch of several tests, mostly testing funciton of the brain stem (with the idea that nowaday one needs a functionning brain stem to live. Just as in the past centuries the pulse was tested because a functionning hearth seemed to be a sensible requirement)
Those test have to be repeated. They should be done at least twice by 2 different doctors.
Some part of the tests consider simple reflex loops (head-eye motion). But other tests require to see if there are sign that, once the machine is unplugged, spontaneous respiration may be able restart. (Not a spontaneous repiration after unplugging per se. Reflexes
Another important part is to exclude causes that may transitionnaly mimic brain death but that are reversible (hypothermia, drugs, etc... may be reversible once temperature is back to normal, once drug has been cleared, etc...). That's also one of the reasons why the test should be done at least 2 times.
Translated to some Sci-Fi suspended animation state, the person inside ISN'T considered dead, EVEN if the EEG is flat.
Under current definition of legal death in most juridictions, the death will be considered only AFTER the person is put OUT OF suspended state (must satisfy both the condition to see if anything can restart spontaneously and the necessity to clear any condition that mimic brain death). Until then, when the person is still in suspended animation, you can neither see the spontaneity (still plugged to the sleep pod) nor did your clear the cause that mimics brain death (suspended animation *will* mimic it, so you must first exclude it before asserting death).
Therefor, there's no legal issues with the suspended animation. The person is clearly still alive. The question will only come out when one tries to revive and get the person out of the sleeping pod. And then again the current juridiction is clear.
In fact the legal definition could be abused the other way around. Because the person in the sleeping pod is legally alive, this could be used to keep a government head (a king or dictator) in power "ad eternam" even if he's terminally ill. The politician won't be able to govern anymore. But his bureaucracy/administration may keep working "in his name". Add some cult of personnality and some "waiting for when the king wakes-up again" notions and you certainly found a key problem.
Imagine Ariel Sharon being kept indefinitly in suspended animation (and we're not far from it. He's kept in vegetative state and was still officially in his position until the successor got named, although probably, given the massive stroke series he endured, his brain is fried).
Or imagine Stalin being put in suspended animation and his bureaucracy continuing to perpetrate the terror in his name, until he wakes up again...
Quite spooky.
Note: I did graduate medicine in _Switzerland_ so some subtleties may vary in your specific juridiction. But the main idea seem to be valid most of the time.
More info in wikipedia
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Can we unfreeze Ted Williams yet? I think the sox could use some trade bait for more starting pitching.
That's a little bit different than what is described, however it's an interesting concept. I'm not sure what kind of interest they're using, but assuming all the money from interest goes to pay the rent, then you're still looking at quite a substantial interest rate to pull this off. Let's see. $1000 a month for rent = $12000 a year. That means you'd need to be collecting 120% interest on the money. Realistically, you'd probably have to put down $100,000.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
for I C Weiner?
ZOMGWTFPWNtKKTHNXBIBI!!!ONE!111!!!
I am rereading Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Saga right now. It presents an ethical problem that I havent seen brought up yet. In this story, the galaxy is governed by the planet Capitol. On Capitol, a new class system has developed through the use of a drug called Somec. Somec essentially allows for extended suspended animation. The rich and powerful sleep for many years, and wake for a very few, allowing them to seemingly live forever. This breeds coruption and stagnation, and ultimatly brings about the end of all civilization for thousands of years.
If suspended animation can be implemented, there must be strict regulation on how and when it can be used (space travel.) It should not be used as the play thing, or the escape from death, of only the rich and the "powerful." What if George W. was in power for the next 1000 years?
Of course 10e9 Pa is the equivalent of being about 616 miles underwater.
That's going to take a very long time to get back to normal atmospheric pressure without causing decompression sickness (the bends!). And the cold is just going to slow the offgassing as the pressure drops.
Some people choose to believe in a god because it makes them feel better. You choose to believe in 'the explosion of artificial intelligence' and 'nanotechnology' instead, but for the same reason. You are speculating on nothing but your own hopes. Could be 10 years (unlikely) or 100 years or 1000 years or 10000 years. It is simply unknown when or if such advances will take place. There is no data upon which to base a realistic estimate.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
That's rediculous. Why not one pig for a period of hundreds of hours? It's like they're trying to compensate for only being able to freeze a pig for two hours by freezing HUNDREDS of pigs at the SAME TIME!!! My God, think of the applications!
All hail our new zombie pig overlords!
I can see it now: I am the mayor of a small size city. Cryogenically frozen, I wake up years later to millions of dollars. The only bad thing is there are scattered floods, fire, and burned down buildings, and Godzilla is about to step on my pod. But hey, at least I made a lot of money! I can fix those pesky missing buildings and power outages later.
Ever see the original Star Trek series? Of course you have... but it was full of fanciful stuff that was thought not to happen in our lifetimes (I was 11 or 12 when it was new). Cell phones ("communicators"), automatically opening doors, flat screen computers; voice activated computers; touch screen computers; computer graphics; Space Shuttles; etc. About the only things we don't have yet that were on Star Trek were the warp drive, transporter, and matter replicator. Hell, we even have energy weapons for crowd control now ("phasers").
And at least one development we went PAST Star Trek. In one of the movies McCoy gives Kirk a pair of reading glasses, because the treatment for age related presbyopia (farsightedness) is some kind of eyedrops that Kirk is allergic to. Well, we don't have the eyedrops yet but we have something better. I was nearsighted since the first time my eyes were tested in 2nd grade, with 20/400 vision last exam; plus since I'm over 50 (like Kirk in the movie) I was farsighted. I wore contact lenses AND reading glasses. I then got a cataract, so they implanted an artificial lens last month. I'm now 20/16 (that's better than 20/20) and can read the date on a dime on a good day, and I'm still strengthing the atrophied, unused for 10 years focusing muscles! Yay, technology!
Today's science fiction is next decade's accepted boring reality.
I'd like to introduce some facts to this thread, being that people are claiming that tissue "freezing" is impossible.
This page has a list of journal articles supporting the scientific basis for cryonics. Yes, it is hosted at Alcor, spare me the ad-hominems if you please, the work is valid.
Selected Journal Articles Supporting the Scientific Basis of Cryonics
Science FAQ, including pre/post vitrification high magnification images of neural tissue.
Scientist's Open Letter on Cryonics - Letter of support from the science community.
Hope this helps clear things up for some.
kulakovich, transhumnanist nutjob.
Member Extropy Institute - extropy.org
Member World Transhumanist Association - transhumanism.org
Member Alcor Life Extension Foundation - alcor.org
Member Independent Game Developers Association - igda.org
etc.
etc.
(can't believe no one posted this already (well, not modded to 3+, anyway) Piiigs Iiiiin Spaaaaaace!!!!
Obligatory, movie reference - Demolition Man
In move, good behaviour problem solved by 'teaching' crimials through DMA.
"Well, of course we must respect the views of those who follow the transhumanist faith ..."
But then again... Transhumanism isn't a religion. At best it is an ideology like Technocratism, Marxism, or Singularitian.
Transhumanists don't believe in a messiah of technology or even go to church or pay dues. They just assume that technology will help them rise above their current limitations as a human.
As opposed to a Singularitian, who believes that currents trends make lead to a Singularity type of event through Strong AI. But that movement is secular and believes that such an event would be acheived via science and technology instead of magic and gods.
Then again... Many Transhumanists buy into the singularity and vice versa.
But both groups are pretty much secular and or humanists. No faith or belief or required.
Maybe a bit of over reaching optimism.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Or perhaps housing simply isn't as expensive there as you are assuming? In India, at least, building a (very modest) house costs less than $3000.
Wouldn't this give you a glimpse of what death is like? Or at least non-existance? Or maybe it would just be like a black-out on alcohol. Maybe that's what those other things are like too then though....
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
...a certain joke about Cobol programmers.
You have a valid point. I'm not concerned about this type of discontinuity for the reasons that the first child-post addresses. However I am concerned about non-Moraveckian uploads for this precise reason, and am thinking of having a stipulation in my will asking that I not be subjected to a destructive upload unless it's an incremental (neuron by neuron) one and I am conscious the whole time.
But that's getting beside the point of my original question-- I have a set of beliefs about the afterlife. By entering in a cryonics contract, I am acting in accordance with my beliefs and not hurting anybody else. Why should my opting for cryonics present the slightest ethical dilemma that anybody else should concern themselves with?
Yah, I was using the cost of korean housing in my example. In the states or UK, if they did that sort of thing, of course you'd have to plunk down as much as a house.
Even though techincal obstacles loom large, they're not what I'm worried about-- we're looking at an indefinite R&D time window, after all.
The real threats are...
1. The cryonics community failing to self-identify as a religion entitled to the same constitutional protections as any other collection of nut-jobs with a shared opinion about the soul and the afterlife. Without these protections, as we get on the public's radar, we will become easy prey for luddites like Jeremy Rifkin, Leon Kass, and Peter Singer.
2. Economic upheavals so extreme that they would cause even the very risk-averse cryonics companies to go under. At the moment, the leading candidates for triggering such upheavals are peak oil and climate change. So as cryonicists we need to do what we can during our brief first lifetimes to make society's transition away from petroleum and its adjustment to climate change as smooth as possible.
Wouldn't you say?
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
The common wood frog displays a rare trait called freeze tolerance. When the mercury falls, the animal becomes, to the eye and touch, a frog- shaped ice cube. The way it does this may eventually be copied to aid human organ transplants.
In reality, the frog's metabolism slows to a crawl, and its body temperature drops to between 21 and 30 Fahrenheit (-6 and -1 Celsius). The amphibian's heart and brain cease to function.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
http://www.freewebs.com/vhome/
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Money is based on scarcity, and technology continually works to minimize scarcity. Once technology advances to the point of eliminating the scarcity of all necessary goods and services, money will become obsolete.
By all of the best estimates, the 'singularity' where this will happen is anywhere from 20 to 100 years away.
Therefore, you only need to worry about paying for the cost of your maintenance for as long as money still exists. Oh, and that same singularity will probably make it possible to wake you up and fix you about that same time, anyway.
Of course, there are always factions struggling to maintain the status quo so they can maintain their power, but they invariably eventually lose.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
So i guess this the cure for 17 stab wounds in the back...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Was it? I don't remember much about the subject from that period. . . But aside from that, the important difference is that nobody in the 1930s had any clue about the theory underlying cryo-suspension. They didn't even understand what the difficulties were (i.e. if you freeze and then thaw somebody, why don't they simply wake up?), much less have any strategy in mind for overcoming them. Space travel was different because a lot of rocketry enthusiasts had a fair grasp of the difficulties involved and a decent set of ideas for how to tackle them. (re: Robert Goddard, Hermann Oberth, the British Interplanetary Society, and even Buck Rogers comic strips) No such understanding existed for human cryo-suspension.
A comparable level of understanding with regard to cryonics didn't arrive until, roughly, the early 1990s. That's when we started to get a fair idea of the kind of tissue damage freezing causes (it's bad!), and of a technology that could, in theory, someday repair such damage. And there's still no guarantee it will ever be practical. But likewise, there doesn't seem to be anything in the laws of science that prevent it from being done. That's the basis of my guarded optimism.
It was only a while back that we learned that hydrogen sulfide gas could put a mouse into suspended animation, without freezing. I wonder how this method is working out. (I perused the science fairs locally and didn't see any kids farting on mice in jars...)
I suppose that the nature of pigs is such that they thrive on exposure to hydrogen sulfide gas, whereas a mouse tends to faint dead away.
I wonder, with this newfound ability to stop time, so to speak, what non-physical part of us will continue to propagate through the same medium of moments. Is there a way to use this technique to enable and examine parts of the consciousness that exist only in states of coma, near-death, etc? If nothing is found, I wonder if the body in this state becomes a shell of pure potential, in a state vunerable to abuse or reconfiguring or even mental replacement.
Transhumanists don't believe in a messiah of technology or even go to church or pay dues. They just assume that technology will help them rise above their current limitations as a human.
As opposed to a Singularitian, who believes that currents trends make lead to a Singularity type of event through Strong AI. But that movement is secular and believes that such an event would be acheived via science and technology instead of magic and gods.
Then again... Many Transhumanists buy into the singularity and vice versa.
But both groups are pretty much secular and or humanists. No faith or belief or required.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and almost by definition god is indistinguishable from magic. Technology after the singularity will also be, by definition, sufficiently advanced. I'd say that at some point transhumanists believe technology will be sufficiently advanced as well. I'd safely call both ideas religions in that they require trust and faith in science and technology that is not yet present.
If you decide to use this definition of soul... then there's not really anything to get upset about. Your consciousness would then be a state machine, whose output is a product of the current state and the inputs. If you duplicate the machine and its state, and then resume processing with both, then both of them are "you" at the moment they are started, however as the state of each machine begins to differentiate, they would no longer be the same person.
In that sense, "you" is a continuously changing variable. You derive your individuality from the address of your variable (the atoms of your body). You also derive continuity from the memories of important past states, much like edits to software with a change log. In that sense, cloning yourself would be like forking the project. Both have the old states of "you" in the change history. You could claim that one is more legitimate than the other based on variable address, but both contain the same value at the moment the cloning takes place.
In this mentality, "right to life" is the desire to continue the progress of your state machine. If RL had save points where you could upload a graph of your atomic structure, then you shouldn't worry about doing foolish things that might get you killed, since they could just recycle your matter into a replica of your saved state and resume execution. If your execution resumes, then the "you" of some recent state is still alive.
If you want to take the religious spin on this, things get a lot more complicated. Starting with the assumption that you have a soul, given to you by God, you have to assume that this Soul is driving the decisions of your mind. If you freeze your mind, the soul will either go dormant, or leave for Heaven, or reside in some temporary space until it can reclaim the body.
Cloning (like duplication, not embryonic cloning) gets even more crazy. Either God will give your soul control over both bodies (or maybe this will be an intrinsic property of a soul, that all bodies that it matches will be available for control), or leave one "soulless" in such a way that it has no proper judgement (like some sort of animal with advanced intellectual abilities), or grant a new soul to the new copy. It might also be possible that body, and not the soul, maintains state history (memory) and so each body would behave the same over time despite not knowing the thoughts or actions of the other body.
The interesting question there is whether a linked soul would be mutable or immutable, and whether race conditions would occour. This could lead to a buffer overflow that would allow us to hack into God's network and access the secrets we've always wanted to know.
And, once God realizes he's been hacked, he might just shut down the whole machine and call an early finish to the project. In short, Christians should be very worried about human suspension and duplication, and pass laws against it.
Mark of the Coder fades from you. You perform Opening on World of Warcraft. Warcraft crits GPA for 4. GPA dies.
So your point is, he is better off dead than getting fixed? You can't sell that position to any trauma surgeon in this country. People do usually think they are better off being alive, even with major permanent damage, than being dead. At least the guys I knew from 'Nam were glad to be still alive - absent a few of the bad days, that is. Not a 100% thing, of course, but who would you like to make the 'better off dead' decision? To twist Richard Coeur d'Leon's aphorism "Fix 'em all, and let God sort 'em out!"
Show me a world with unkillable soldiers, and I will show you some seriously weird lifers.
There was no such thing as companies in the modern sense then, of course. But still, some things really do survive that long. Having being present at the 700-year anniversary of a company seems a little unreal, in retrospect...
Just hope you don't get stuck in the B ark!!!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I just noticed your reply. Is there any point in me replying 11 days later? Is anyone listening? I'll post this just to see if I can reply this long later.