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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.
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.
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Suspending someone in animation has at least one application: the military. I don't know how complicated the process is, but if you can suspend a wounded soldier in a forward area and ship him back to a proper hospital for treatment, then two hours would be an eternity. Of course, suspended animation won't keep a guy alive if he were blown in half, but the forward MASH could do some quick stabilization, freeze him, and send him back for delicate neurosurgery to remove shrapnel from his brain, for example, to minimize damage.
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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.
You might be right. But a key point to maintaining soldier morale is making sure they think everything will be done to save them if they are injured.
If you start withholding care that could save their buddies, they'll quickly realize that the care will be withheld from them too - and they're less likely to fight so well.
Soldiers can be pretty pragmatic too...
cult (n): a small, unpopular religion.
..."
religion (n): a large, popular cult.
That's really all there is to it. If there were large enough numbers of transhumanist nutjobs to gain recognition for their nutty beliefs, those beliefs would cease to be regarded as nutty, and when some transhumanist blowhard got up on TV to talk about his chosen brand of nuttiness, everyone would nod wisely and stroke their chins and say, "Well, of course we must respect the views of those who follow the transhumanist faith
So get out there and start converting the heathens, brother!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Well, it's worth asking how you could distinguish a "living" frozen person and a "dead" one - in the sense that, if I were to die and be frozen say 6 hours later, it's almost beyond argument that there would be no hope of reviving me. Would there be any good way of checking the status of a frozen person to determine whether they'd experienced catastrophic brain damage prior to death?