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Become Your Own Heir After Being Frozen
destinyland writes "A science writer discovered it's possible to finance your cryogenic preservation using life insurance — and then leave a huge death benefit to your future thawed self. From the article, 'Most in the middle class, if they seriously want it, can afford it now. So by taking the right steps, you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money!' There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"
Given the assumption that cryogenic revival will be possible, this may work in principle-- but the insurance industry doesn't exactly function on immutable code-like rules that can be hacked for fun and profit.
It's much more a game-- and moreover, the game is owned by the insurance industry. You're just playing it. And if you figure out a particularly good trick to beat the house, they're either going to rationalize why certain technicalities mean they don't need to pay you (and thus 'easy money' becomes 'try to drag deep-pocketed defendants into court'), or they'll simply change the rules before you're revived, and you won't have been able to do anything about it because you were dead.
From a what-do-you-have-to-lose perspective, sure, it's worth a shot. But this simply can't be a dependable part of estate planning.
If nanotech can manufacture anything, it's tempting to think there will be no money. But I can guarantee you that women will find a way to keep pussy scarce, artificially inflating the value. That's always going to be a currency.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Suppose that you put yourself into cryogenic suspenion until the day that medical science is so advanced that it can revive you and restore you to the functionality of a 20-year-old adult. Would you want such a life? All your friends are dead. All the reference points -- music, politics, bridge game on Saturday, local Buddhist temple on Sunday, etc. -- that gave you a sense of fitting into your society are long extinct or dead. Would you want this life?
I would not. I would choose death with the people of my generation over eternal life without meaning.
More likely the criminals running the "deep freeze" will run off with your money and leave you to thaw out and rot in a mini-storage unit when all the LN2 in your dewer escapes.
They need to think about taking these people and placing them deep in a glacier or something, then maybe you have a chance of lasting for a while.
I'd probably just find a new bridge game.
At present, there's no way to thaw a living human after deep freezing. With present day technology, deep frozen person means dead person (not just "mostly dead", either).
Frozen meat can be cooked after thawing, so somebody in a dystopian future might benefit...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpsicle
I think Larry Niven's story says it all.
Great! no problem with the cash, if we are alive we'll surely think up something. If you have the brains, money is no problem.
Wemaster
www.thisismyindia.com
Can I have your lawn when you die? I promise to stay off it until then.
There are few things I consider impossible but reviving people after simple freezing is one of them. There's massive damage and it's still not cold enough to arrest decay. Even if you could freeze a body without damage you'd still need to be near absolute zero to arrest most of the breakdown. Freezing essentially explodes the cell walls so there's nothing to revive. Cloning is pointless because it's a middle aged twin at best with none of your memories and no you can't just program them in like a computer the memories are actual structures in the brain that involve growth. I'm not saying there won't be a way to place a body in stasis I'm saying current freezing technologies are at best a joke and at worst a scam.
The future will likely disallow this kind of inheritance. The main problem with cryogenics right now is that it is not possible to undo the damage caused by the cryogenic procedure. People who have invested in companies like Alcor have done so in the belief that a solution will soon be available. As soon as that happens the world will see a new set of laws that take care of all these loopholes. I would image that they will make sure you don't wake up with an advantage you do not deserve x years into the future. It will be more about people wanting to experience the future than benefiting from it
"some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance."
Uh huh, sure. And we'll all have flying cars, and we won't need to work because we will have created new ways produce food. And there'll be no wars, and free ice-cream.
If your friends got frozen also then that won't be an issue. A related question, if there were a serious apocalyptic event say a nuclear war or a zombie attack or what have you. Would you kill yourself if you turned out to be one of the survivors? I suspect not even if everyone you know is dead. Don't underestimate the human will to live.
On the other hand, people in their 20s often pick up and go somewhere they know nobody, where the culture is very different and they have to pick up a whole new set of assumptions. It's called "college".
I think people in general are far more resilient than you give credit for, especially with the benefit of what would likely be advanced counselling methods.
Perhaps it's not to your liking, that's fine. Some people are more embedded in their world than others. I think I would manage fine, a whole new world to learn would be fascinating! Besides, you could likely still make the decision at that time that you didn't want to continue, no need to make it *now*!
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
Before coming to my senses, I used to be a law student. Trusts, including estates, was probably my favourite subject. The main vehicle for transmitting wealth between generations is trusts, because they are reliable and well-understood.
However, in Australia, and other common-law countries such as the UK, Canada and the USA, trusts have a limited life-time. The basic principle is that the dead cannot rule the living. It's called the "rule against perpetuities". If trusts could last forever, more and more of the world's resources would be tied up in trusts with narrow aims and the eventually all the world would be divided between trustees and beneficiaries. So goes the argument, anyhow (this is different from conditional gifts and foundations, by the way, before you start yammering about scholarships and charitable organisations).
The lifetime of a trust is specified at its creation. In the old days you could make it $DEATH_DATE_OF_SOMEONE + 21 years. So you'd have stuff like "For the life of the Prince of Wales and 21 years", the theory being that it's easy to know when the Prince of Wales carks it. More recently, most jurisdictions have introduced legislation allowing an optional ability to simply fix some time period, usually up to 80 years.
And that's the problem. If you go into cryo-storage for 81 years, then on awakening you may find that your trust was dissolved and the benefits distributed to your descendants. And until it's proved that you can really come back from death via cryogenic storage, I'd be amazed if the courts changed their stance. Because too many people would try to break the rule against perpetuities by being "frozen".
Of course, IANAL, this isn't legal advice, YMMV yadda yadda.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Just leave 93 cents in the bank. After 1000 years accruing interest you'll have 4.3 billion dollars.
I do suggest changing your PIN number though, just in case.
#DeleteChrome
Just be prepared for what is bound to happen. Your bike will likely get stolen.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
My answer- "yes". I would give anything to experience the world 200 years from now even if it means starting off with nothing. And if I'm that disappointed with "social issues" there's always the option that exists today to end it. Don't generalize.
Your cryogenic machine will be unplugged by some of the 78 trillion inhabitants of earth and your body will be used for food. Power shortages will have already rendered your flesh ripe and unpalatable, but you will be consumed regardless.
But worry not, your fortunes would have been confiscated by the corrupt state, and were you to be revived, you would owe a small fortune for the "maintenance" of your rotted corpse, despite the fact that your machine has too been cannibalized for it's parts and scrap.
Had you awoken in the future, you'd have felt you left a virtual paradise, for a poisoned and hellish war zone, your debilitated body and mind only barely aware that the band of rogues that revived you only did so for profit, and are holding you hostage, with yourself as the source of ransom. When it's found you are without value, your decayed body will be allowed to die it's second and final death.
Great plan as long as your frozen head can withstand the blunt force trauma of being hit like a baseball.
It'll be pretty awesome when this actually works, and becomes popular, and inflation adjusts for the fact that thousands of people who have done nothing but use electricity for a century or two all have an amount of money equal to a sizable life insurance payout. :V
"If you take a large amount of money and invest it carefully, at a good rate of return, compounded annually, it will eventually be worth nothing" Robert Heinlein. How much is a Drachma worth today? or a Lira, or a Spanish, or a Deutch Mark - yeah, they don't exist anymore and are worth diddly squat...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I recommend you to read Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
It may change the way you think. While some idiots would simply laugh at his predictions, consider reading Ray's earlier predictions.
Before you decide to put yourself on ice, listen to the "This American Life" podcast.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1291
Right.
Let me decompose into wormfood quietly, please.
Yeah, having one's head shoved in a vat with someone else's corpse in the garage of a flake who is trying to save on dry ice bills, while he worries about the health inspectors coming down on him for illegally storing human remains w/o a permit is not too encouraging a start to one's goal of a future full of compound interest and sci-fi hotties, really.
Looks like Heinlein was right again.
Time to buy some more Hired Girl stock!
By then, we'd be playing DNF on ReactOS or Hurd 3.0, running on our mega-core phones.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Larry Niven short story about Gil the ARM and the organleggers.
Let's say you're cryogenically frozen, and that cryogenic freezing is lethal as seems to be the case.
Either:
1) You are already dead, and thus revival is already a moot point
2) The freeze kills you, revival is impossible, and the cryoplant is now on the hook for murder.
Given the current evidence against revival, anyone that places you in cryostasis while you are still alive is guilty of murder since they ought to know damn well you won't be coming back.
And if you're already dead, well, even if cryostasis didn't damage you any further you'd still be just as dead as before.
Of course it is a bad scam preying on old people. But there are many such scams. The brilliant thing about cryogenics or whatever they call it is that the scammers can never be discovered. Let's face it it will not be possible to revive those poor dead people for a long time and probably forever. Even if micro biology advances it will not be possible because freezing tissue destroys all the cells and turns everything into mush. They need more than micro biology they need someone to reverse entropy, and good luck with that.
But anyways, let's imagine, for the sake of argument that it does become possible to revive those ppl. Even if that happens it will be far far in the future. And then of course when the people discover that everything has been stolen and there is no money in those funds, the perpetrators will be looong gone. Of course it is likely that by that time someone will have stopped paying the bills, the freezers would be switched off and some unlucky municipal government will have a hundred thousand rapidly thawing severed human heads to deal with.
good news everyone!
http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/
Dunno... it would still be fun.
Besides, if nothing else I could have a blast screwing with the heads of future historians.
("...of course, the fourth Nazi regime of Central California did try to establish a state religion. The dogma was a bit strange, but it went a bit like this..." [then I'd insert some real wild-assed stuff straight out of alt.slack's glory days] )
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Life without meaning? A new world with a new culture and new politics and new sciences and new games to learn?! Are you kidding! That would be the greatest thing ever.
Make new friends. Form a new family. Only this time if they can resuscitate a head then I'm probably nearly immortal so I have at least 10k years before I'm statistically killed in an accident. That's more than enough time to learn a few hundred lifetimes of insights.
So what you're saying is that if your family and friends all died in an accident you would want to die with them and no live your life? If you were orphaned and adopted by a foreign family you think life wouldn't be worth living or have meaning?
...he could change his mind, then have that lawn frozen with him.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Walt Disney here, where's my money?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"The largest cryonics organization today, in terms of membership, was established as a nonprofit organization by Fred and Linda Chamberlain in California in 1972 as the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia (ALCOR)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundation
It was PROVEN that were you to emerge from a tunnel at a speed of greater then 30 miles an hour, the air blast would kill you. How hard do you drive?
Lots of things were impossible, before someone did them.
No, I don't see how someone's frozen head could be revived but think this. HOW many of you think it is possible to create an animal from a cell?
Yet the idea in Jurassic Park is not nearly as far fetched anymore is it? Used to be that dinosaurs came back in movie land because someone found some eggs that magically survived a million years. Suddenly a drop of blood will do.
And in fact, we might not even need that. Don't our genes contain the obsolete code from animals we were in the past? You could breed a toothed chicken.
No, I don't think that sticking your head in liquid nitrogen will work, but saying that the idea of cryogenics is impossible... that to me is ignoring that this has been said about way to many things. The impossible is only impossible until it becomes possible, after that everyone says "oh I could have thought of that". But you didn't because you thought it was impossible.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Shutup Terry
*DrugCheese rants*
Damn skippy I would, yes it would suck to lose people and there'd probably be some depression and disorientation and culture shock, but you'd be alive and vital to experience a whole new world instead of dead and rotting. Then again I don't assign special meaning to life beyond its experience, if I was very spiritual my answer might be different.
Forget cryogenic temperatures. After I die I want my brain to preserved by injecting it with a polymer that can preserve the positions of all of my neurons. Forget saving my DNA and cells, my DNA is already a mess. Just preserve my neural patterns and do it so my brain can survive at room temperatures for thousands of years. Think of an insect trapped in amber. You can never revive it, but you can take scans of it in a computer to make a "virtual" copy of it in computer memory. That way your "consciousness" can survive onwards, even if no atom of your original body is ever involved. Then later you may even have the opportunity to be transferred into a living flesh body, but you may not want to, why be a flesh and blood human with obvious weaknesses. Exist instead in a prosthetic body and a virtual mind. At home you can have a few extra spare bodies lying around and if you don't check in for a few years the hard copy you made of yourself will activate and copy itself into a fresh body and you live yet again!!!
There are techniques that can polymerize tissue, like in the body work 3-D exhibit, not sure if that can preserve discrete neuron positions and connections. But I could imagine if done properly you could preserve enough information from your brain to save your hopes, dreams fears and ambitions, your very soul! CAT scan technology is getting quite advanced and soon we may have scans with high enough resolution to record the positions of neurons and what other neurons they are connected to.
Disadvantages: You won't be "Exactly your former self" You won't have the same DNA or maybe even ANY DNA. You may never be able to go back "into the flesh" as your old self and may have to put up with being inside of a android body built by some company in China. They might take your virtual mind and put it to work in some menial capacity such as teaching annoying brats about history or piloting space garbage trucks. You may spend an eternity on your distant offspring's knick knack box to be sold at a garage sale... They may not be able to scan your neurons and simulate your brain. You might "screw the pooch" and your frozen friends were right and you are screwed because they cannot de-plasticize your brain... In order to scan your brain you may have to have your brain all sliced up and it may be destructive process so if the tech screws up, sorry, you dead for good now....
Advantages: You will be more "immortal" than your frozen popsicle counterparts. If they lose Nitrogen in their dewers they are rancid spoiler meat. You can take room temperatures in a box in the attic and laugh at your thawed friends. Zombies won't want to eat you plasticized brain, "it taste bad..." No apocalypse survivors would want to eat you either and no organ market would want to use you to make a quick buck as the process on plasticizing is irreversible unless you have micro bots or something exotic and if you have them you won't need organs from dead plastic people. Advanced CAT scans and brain simulation seems to be a little closer technologically speaking than flesh re-animating defrosting nanobots. Having multiple hard backups of yourself is a lot easier. You can "burn" multiple backups of yourself on "Gamma Ray Holographic Disc". If you are not a data pattern you could be sent to Mars with ease and at light speed. They just need a computer at their end and a spare robot body. You can "deadhead" for many years if things get boring, (think of it like having a Fast Forward button on life, but you cannot rewind unless you want to live it virtually, heh).
Technology needed:
1. A chemical cocktail that can plasticize human cells at a cellular level and isn't destructive to neural connections and can remain stable after "setting up" in room temperatures. (we may already have this)
2. Scanning equipment than has cellular resolution or better than can record neural connections. (we are getting really close today to this)
3. A computer than can simulate a human mind based
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
But I discovered a cheaper way to achieve similar if not better results, there is a thing called sex.
My heir currently fills his diapers.
Well, that's your choice.
I'm not particularly afraid of dying, but I'm also not afraid of living and experiencing new things.
As long as I'm reasonably healthy, I would like to go on. When I am seriously injured or sick, just let me die quickly.
..to the world of tomorrow!
Yeah, you are a head in a jar, your money got ripped off 30 minutes after you were frozen and you owe the government $100 squillion in cryo-tax and you will be kept in this cupboard till you pay up.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
So say I run an insurance company. Someone comes to me and says they'll give me a pile of money on the condition I give them a huge payout after they return from the dead. I know that the odds that they'll be back someday are essentially nil. So basically, they want to give me free money. YES PLEASE!
As a general rule, you shouldn't be surprised that insurance companies will insure you against X, if X is impossible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQZX64Z2-3I
You get thawed out after x number of years in a hospital, and find you can't get out. And you feeling sick all the time. Some times you are in horrible pain. Slowly you realize you are being used as a human guinea pig for all sorts of nasty and painful experiments.
"You can't do this to me!"
"Yes we can. Technically, your dead. Well, legally dead, and that is all that matters."
Convert what you can to gold and hide it somewhere, hopefully some place that won't be discovered for the next 1000 years, I guess that would be the difficulty.
I predict that there will be a bank, maybe in Switzerland, maybe some place else, that will provide services helping the folks like that to hide their money, including from the law of other countries, for a percentage of annual interest perhaps.
You can't handle the truth.
Feel free to die then. Just don't imply some kind of immorality associated with not wanting to die.
(Note: this comment doesn't necessarily assume that cryogenics represents a viable approach to life extension, but anything beats eternal nothing.)
Yeah. I'm not the least bit interested to see new tech, to learn new science.
I could never love a woman from another century -- that stuff only happens in movies. (Well, given that I'm on /., this may actually be true... ;))
Giving perspective and even completely lost information to historians and schoolkids? Man, that'd give my life practically negative meaning.
I don't think you've thought this through before you consigned this to "without meaning".
destinyland writes "A science writer discovered it's possible to finance your cryogenic preservation using life insurance -- and then leave a huge death benefit to your future thawed self. From the article, 'Most in the middle class, if they seriously want it, can afford it now. So by taking the right steps, you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money!' There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"
I would. A human can adapt to any environment. It's not like I'm so fixated on the life style I currently live, I could manage in a totally different environment, as long as it's a friendly one. Plus I'm curious and very interested in the future. Plus your friends can go in cryo too!
These guys should go read Larry Niven's novel A World Out of Time and decide if they still think being cryogenically frozen is a good idea.
lol, no difference for me then
This is not about putting you in ice and letting you freeze to death. It's cryogenics: dumping enough LN2 fast enough to freeze the cells without exploding their walls (as ice water doesn't get to form macroscopic ice crystal structure), and essentially stopping your organism cold in its tracks. AFAIK there are no decay processes at LN2 temperatures, and the little amount of chemical reactions that still occur should not affect the outcome.
Theoretically, recovering the organism to its standard 36.6C should suffice to restore it; it is done with single-cell organisms successfully. But we don't have a technology to heat up a body of human volume fast enough and uniformly enough to achieve that. With freezing, it doesn't matter if one part of the body goes to 80K and another to 110K in 3 seconds. It does matter if your brain goes to 30C on the edges or to 50C in the center though. There's also a bunch of other unknowns but as long as we can't bring a mass of 70 or so kg of mostly water in irregular shape from 70K to 310K in 0.1s with precision of +-3K throughout the whole volume, they are moot.
There's also the other approach, neatly described in Transmetropolitan: far-future freezing.
First off, you don't freeze the whole body, just the head. The body is buried.
Second, you keep it long enough that nanotechnology gets developed that can rebuild an organism from scratch. A thousand years is not out of question.
Next, the freezing damage gets repaired by nanobots, any damage so heavy that can't be rebuilt from existing tissue structure or DNA, gets rebuilt using "generic" data for "that genotype of a human". The rest of the body is rebuilt or regrown as a clone.
Next you wake up and promptly die from culture shock. After which you are revived again and remain alienated from the society forever.
Oh, and all your fortune and savings were lost in the Great Depression and following Revolution of 2642.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The cashier says "certainly sir, I just need you to provide some identification." And that's where it all falls apart. How does a person (who's officially dead) prove that they're not dead. Especially when all their money is being held by the bank who won't release it until the proof come s through. Even worse: where do you sleep that night, and thereafter until a court order comes through some days, weeks or months later? I doubt your credit cards would work, so you're destitute and would probably even have to walk from the popsicle farm to the bank.
[1] presuming the bank hasn't gone bust, changed it's name, relocated to an address you're not familiar with or simply become "virtual" with no high-street presence at all.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
This is akin to a feudal lord having himself frozen circa 1300 in the hope that enough serfs would breed in the meantime to farm his demesne more effectively. It also recalls the Jack Vance story where beautiful youths preserved in capsules are regarded as a delicacy by the brutish cannibal peasants who, from time to time, dig them out of the ruins of their civilisation.
You may also wake up in the future just to find out that revolution has swept away all laws that made self-inheritance possible. So now you're broke, don't speak the language or understand society, and the only work you're apt for is the okral mines on Neptune. So you have to either slave away there to earn your existence or face the molecular disintegrator.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
I don't understand what people think is so awesome about living that would make them want to come back from death for more.
Sure sex is fun, learning is fun, etc. But it's pretty much the same thing over and over and over and over again.
It's incredibly boring and pointless and it will continue to be so whenif people are revived.
I won't freeze myself when I die so I don't risk getting revived anytime soon, but being a materialist I can only hope that whenif people have the technology to build every possible brain (that has or will have lived) by recombining atoms in all possible permutations (or maybe inside a simulation), that they never get to revive me either.
Impossible is a big word-- temporize.
"Freezing essentially explodes the cell walls so there's nothing to revive."
Absolutely correct. The damage done in cryogenics happens at the start. It's likely not correctable going down the road with a few hundred years technology. Most substances reduce in volume when frozen/changed to a solid state, Water is a substance which expands on freezing..
The expansion upon freezing comes from the fact that water crystallizes into an open hexagonal form. This hexagonal lattice contains more space than the liquid state.
is there no way to attack this problem, by either
1.expanding cell size to allow for the minute volume increase to not burst cells
2. replacing the water in the body with an exotic substitute
3. finding a different way to freeze the water in the cells
according to this http://polymer.bu.edu/hes/articles/ds03.pdf
which I get a really small fraction of - some really low temperature states of water exist that do not require water becoming a crystal, but rather a glass..
so it's IMPOSSIBLE RIGHT NOW
-- it may yet be a way is found.... we''ve got what-- 1129 days left???
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
... All your friends are dead ...
Hey ... this is still slashdot isn't it?
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
It would be more tolerable if you could erase your memories and start fresh each time, much like reinstalling Windows from scratch to clear the crud out. I'd quite like the option of knowing that, although my current life may end for all practical purposes, I won't be consigned to oblivion.
Cowboy Bebop already predicted the outcome of this. So long Space Cowboy.......
When the machine AIs destroy the Earth, we won't be able to cash in though. But we can become famous and rich by writing about life in the 21st century!
For those that don't get it, read Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos, learn about Martin Silenus, and refer to my signature.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
There will always be meaning for money, though it changes over the generations. People like having a way to distinguish themselves and money is the easiest of these to flash around. Money will always have a place in society, even if we get to some highly enlightened place as a species (which is unlikely in the next few millennia.) We are a caste based species, whether we want to admit it or not, and money is the "new" deciding factor. It won't go away any time soon.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'
Which is obviously such a bad thing that you are better here with a few bucks in a world of scarcity...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
When we are able to "scan" the entirety of a living human body in any form that would be useful for its complete recreation, we will have 2 things.
Functional teleporters AND eternal life inside a computer/mechanical/cybernetic body.
Scanning it with today's technology would be akin to Thomas Stoltz Harvey photographing Einstein's brain to preserve its appearance before he cut it up into smaller pieces.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Douglas Adams already foreshadowed a scheme like this in order to be able to afford the fabulously expensive dinner at Milliway's.
Douglas Adams is only dead for tax purposes, BTW.
the future sounds like a cacophony of masturbating insurance attorneys from the 21st century?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Your death is permanent until you are revived - unless there is technology available that would allow reviving you periodically prior to the date when you want to be revived permanently.
And we lack that today.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That's worse than dying. Your memories are what make you unique. They are what make you, you. You might as well just die and leave a few DNA samples so they can make a clone out of you. It'd be the same effect, because it wouldn't really be you. How can you enjoy it if you're not yourself anymore.
"There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"
Neither will humans!
Sincerely,
Nanties
Niven seemed to like writing about the frozen traveler.World out of time IIRC...
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
But who knows what the future will be like, futurama, Idiocracy or maybe end up a frozen dinner for another alien race. I'm going to just stay unfrozen instead of risk it... not that futurama isn't a bad place to live in.
if someone were to put a bunch of money in the bank and just collect the interest earned...
epic sig..... ya i got nothing
I don't think so. What makes me me is the part of me that experiences. Call it the soul if you will, or an illusion created by the complexity of our brains - science has yet to quantify it. The idea that I could experience new things in a future life is enticing to me, even if I would forget everything about my current life.
Suppose for a second that you are a reincarnation of someone that lived in the 19th century. Is your life really that intolerable because you can't remember that past life?
Science fiction from decades past just called, they want their storyline back.
Hey, if this is idle I can be a smarty-pants about this.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"mega-abundance"
We could have abundance now, everyone, if people stopped thinking like cavemen and politicians stopped being lying criminals on behalf of giant corporations. Earth really could enter a Golden Age with fewer than 3000 selected incarcerations. But, no. You have to keep it just the way it is and go for mega-abundance.
Losers.
in the future, we can all haz cheeseburger?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_X1IWXuEbgXI/SY_U2tV1tPI/AAAAAAAABAY/D1K3CBvtlpo/s1600-h/Hurley+I+can+haz+cheeseburger+lost.dib
that will be 50M in that year.
It's occurred to me that the relativity equations work better for me the faster I go.
It works out that I can reach the galactic hub in twenty-one years,ship's time, if I hold myself down to one gravity acceleration.
I'll see you in about seventy thousand years, your time. By then your precious State may have withered away...
"you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money!'"
Like how, once all electrical activity ceases in your brain, so do you ...
davecb5620@gmail.com
money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'
Then why would someone keep your corpse frozen if all you can offer them is money?
Besides, if nothing else I could have a blast screwing with the heads of future historians. ("...of course, the fourth Nazi regime of Central California did try to establish a state religion. The dogma was a bit strange, but it went a bit like this..." [then I'd insert some real wild-assed stuff straight out of alt.slack's glory days] )
Just quote Scientology tracts.
See, my fear is this:
The planet can support but so many people. We're already a bit high up on the scale there. Unless we stop breeding (unlikely), people HAVE to die to make room for new ones.
Who's to say that in 500 years they legislate that all cyrogenically frozen patients are to be disposed of due to population concerns - or not awaken unless absolutely necessary. You're putting a hell of a bit of faith into the ongoing maintenance of your body into the hands of future generations who might not give a damn - or may even actively dislike the concept. It's an incredibly vulnerable position to accept, and I'd say a gamble that you might not win.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
And so are jewels, Confederacy dollars, Reichsmarks and Enron shares and stocks.
Jewels can be replicated today - they are pricey because they are artificially kept pricey.
Gold will probably be attainable from led or even rocks in the future.
Companies and countries cease to exit.
Several things will have (increased) value after a period of time.
One is land.
There is a limited amount of it on the planet. Even if you dry out oceans to make more - "old land" will still have premium value due to being closer to human habitats of old. You know, where all the culture is.
The other is exactly that - culture.
Works of art of any kind will only increase in value.
Hey... Action Comics No.1 from 1938 was originally sold for $0.1 - today they go for half a million.
Statues last longer than paper and canvas - and you can still bury them somewhere on that piece of land you own.
"Lost" compositions, songs, books etc. by famous artists can also be stored - but you would have to be either very rich and have a famous artist make something just for you, or stalk him/her, steal the work of art and possibly kill the artist (sooner he/she is dead, sooner the value will start to grow).
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Even if it's possible, it's foolish to assume it would be without major risk. E.g., heart transplants are possible, but you're not going to be jumping off the operating table and going about your day the minute the surgeon's finished. Chances are you'd be in for all kinds of health problems - including neurological ones - after the thaw, and those will just be added to the fact that you were dead -- or nearly so -- when they froze you. So this is going to require quite a committment from future generations over which you have little control. You might find that to be a risk worth taking (if the alternative is death), but your fate will be in the hands of the living.
"proud owner of a bank account brimming with money"?
You're more likely to wake up as the proud owner of a pile of IOUs. The politicians and their loyal voters have already spent the future.
.....your banker doesn't do the other obvious sci-fi play and shave your interest off at regular intervals (the "Superman III scam") or a precipitous decline in fertility prevents your ever being thawed ("Children of Men"), or you're launched into space on a sleeper ship, and wake up to find not only wildly different economics (ST:TNG "The Neutral Zone") or that you're under the "command" of a psychotic genetically-engineered madman (ST:TOS "Space Seed", "Wrath of Khan").
Say you are able to be revived from cryo-statis. More than likely you wouldn't even be able to communicate with anyone, but your colleges unfrozen with you.
Non-profit just means that you don't allow shareholders. That means it is harder to raise capital to expand your business, but it also means that you don't owe any of your revenue to shareholders. There is no "profit" because you feed all the earnings back into the company expenses which included salaries, bonuses, and whatever else the people running the non-profit think they deserve. And on top of this you don't pay any taxes.
Non-profit corporations are fine structures for running scams, in addition to being good for legitimate charities.
"some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"
yeah, like flying cars and anti-gravity belts, right? :-P
It would be easier to revive the embalmed because the neural connections are preserved through plasticizing whereas they are scrambled through freezing. A plasticized nervous system should preserve all information.
I moved to another country when I was in my early 20s. I knew no one in this new country, I had very few reference points... but somehow, I survived.
It would be more difficult if you suddenly found yourself 500 years in the future, but it's really just a matter of learning the new society.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Under western law. The reason that governments want their cut of taxes eventually. A "trust" is a legal mechanism for the non-living (guardianships, wills foundations, corporations, etc.) to hold property. But there is needs to be a living beneficiary or a limited extensions (typically 30 years) beyond those currently alive, i.e your "great" relatives. A John Rockefellor or Joe Kennedy could not control the behavior of their descendents indefinately unless each generation agrees to regenerate the trust.
>> some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance
Are they also expecting the concept of profit-making businesses to go away then?
Back in the 50's they said by the 70's electricity would be free because of nuclear power.
I'm still receiving (significant) electricity bills and its 2009.
The point is that we're not paying just to cover the cost of producing something, Comapnies will always charge about 5% more than whatever they can get away with.
A more viable possibility is scanning the frozen brain with a microscopic scanner of some kind and then recreating its function as a virtual emulation. If Moores Law even halves, the computer power for such will be around several decades from now. Hopefully freezing doesn't do enough damage to the memories themselves such that they cannot be re-constructed.
Table-ized A.I.
and gotten anything other than bad meat.
and the portions are too small, yes, that was the punchline, thanks for asking.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
What incentive is there for anyone to actually revive some dead person in say 100 years, except perhaps for novelty or science? Does anyone feel such a void left by their great-great grandparents that they feel compelled to resurrect them? Let's face it, we're all just average people. We might think that we're all wonderful, smart and special but in reality we're not sufficient outliers in society to the point where anyone's going to care.
I like how most people think all of our problems will be solved in the future instead of thinking that some of our problems will be solved, and then we get new ones. WHich, by the way, is generally what happens.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
... is not necessarily what it actually does. There doesn't have to be any logical consistency between the laws concerning incorporation, copyright, etc; and those governing trusts. And it seems that there isn't, in fact, any such consistency.
Sure, you're definitely not coming back if you've been cremated. And no one can say that your chance of revival after freezing is absolutely zero. But come on. The best evidence is that your probability of revival is very, very close to zero. And being frozen costs a significant amount of money. The argument is that the money would be better put to use by being either donated to charity or left to your heirs, rather than giving it to a business which is almost certainly not going to be able to live up to its promises. And don't tell me that they're not promising anything - yes, I'm sure there's fine print saying that nothing is guaranteed. But their advertising materials certainly imply that being revived is a realistic possibility, when in fact, it's anything but realistic. That's why this is a scam.
... at cost-benefit analysis. Scenario 1) natural death. Cost: a few hundred bucks if you get cremated. Chance of recovery: 0. Benefit: Your estate goes to your heirs or charity. Scenario 2) cryo-preservation. Cost: very high. Chance of recovery: so close to zero it's not worth mentioning. Benefit: probably none, and the cryo company gets your money.
So you do have something to lose. You could have done something worthwhile with your money, but instead you essentially burned it. Cryo-preservation is a scam. They imply that you have a reasonable chance of resurrection, when in fact you don't (burying the truth in legal disclaimers that they know people don't pay attention to).
Well said. I was just about to write a similar reply about how I hope I die before cryogenics is perfected and becomes common. What makes people believe that A) Anybody is going to actually want to revive them (contract or no contract), and B) that the world they wake up in is going to be one they want to live in.
Worse yet, what if you are not allowed to die, and instead get revived only to find that you are now someone's slave, or perhaps a toy, and they won't let you die? That would be absolutely hellish. So personally, I hope I die while I still have the right to stay dead, and nobody has the ability (or the presumption of the right to) revive me.
This must run afoul of the rule against perpetuities in some way . . . doesn't everything?
Unfortunately those of us who slept through the present end up smelling particularly foul in the future, to those who didn't sleep through it. (I think I'm referencing a short story by Larry Niven but I could be wrong; 10 minutes of searching couldn't find it, oh well. In the story, a ship is sent to Alpha Centauri; the inhabitants are awoken to claxons during the flight, with a giant flash showing on the screen, but nothing else, so go back to sleep; then when they eventually get there, they learn that the flash was the second generation ship which moved much faster, and arrived before them, and there's a thriving human population on a planet surrounding Alpha Centauri, and the first ship's inhabitants exude an odor that the future culture finds abhorrent.)
What a way to wake into the future! Only consolation being, now we know about nanotechnology and major technology changes, so in that particular future we'd be able to modify the odors exuded by anyone. But anyway, it was a great story about massive time scales. And, I agree with you: regardless of how few people or cultural artifacts I was (will be?) aware of, I intend to cling to life for as long as possible. In the immortal words of Woody Allen, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying!"
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I see this repeated over and over in the comments. If you do not know what you are talking about STFU and stop spreading misinformation.
The entire reason it costs so much is because they are doing more than just dumping you into a vat of liquid nitrogen. Talk to anyone at Alcor or any of their members and they will be the first to tell you that ice formation is the number #1 problem in cryonics. Which is why they are still doing R&D and making advances in their technique. They've come a long ways, if you look at the studies the vitrification process they are using on heads is pretty impressive.
So what you're saying is that if your family and friends all died in an accident you would want to die with them and no live your life?
Reread the parent post. He would want to die if his acquaintances died AND it became impossible to play bridge on Saturdays.
money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'
DAMN it! I hoped to wake up rich, but instead I woke up in the post-scarcity era! FUCK!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
We will almost certainly figure out how to revive the body. But will we figure out how to revive the mind? Isn't consciousness an ongoing process, rather than a state? What happens if we stop that process completely, then try and restart it? Will the organism still be able to function mentally as who and what it was? Until we do manage to revive a corpsicle (yes, I've read Niven :) ) we won't know.
I've been an atheist all my life, and I don't believe in a "soul". But I do believe that what we call consciousness is a whole lot more complicated than a simple 'state' which we can store and retrieve like a VM OS; at least simply by freezing it. Perhaps there may be some way of recording state like in a VM, and playing it back into a revived body. But when one considers the amount of data that just a snapshot of the "state" of a human nervous system must contain, the barriers against recording it all fast enough that it is all in sync, and the fact that the human nervous system does not operate at all like a computer, I suspect that revival of the sort we're talking about here is probably impossible.
I think we're better off focusing our efforts on how to extend human life both thru medical means and technological augmentation.
This is a fun subject tho :)
Weirdly enough, my sig is appropriate :)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
moist in the middle class.
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
Hmmm, lots of people over 90 can't wait for death. Dunno how many, dunno whether it's because of their quality of life or because of how long it lasted, but I'd suggest you wait until you're 100 before you wish to live 100 times longer. It's like all those people in their 20s and 30s claiming that life is short. Maybe it is if you get hit by a mad truck at the age of 14, but some people out there have lived through WWI, I mean shit, even Zsa Zsa Gabor and Kirk Douglas are still alive. I wouldn't call their lives short. And maybe it's even less short if you get to do anything you could have done and accomplished in your life long before you die.
Instead of worrying about how long you live, perhaps you should worry about what you do with your life for the time you can conservatively expect it to last, so maybe on your deathbed you'll have no regrets and will be only looking forward to see what happens next. You might be surprised.
You just got troll'd!
Sort of. Well that's the only example of a 200-year investment I know of.
You just got troll'd!
My compliments, you have just recreated a scenario depicted in the following film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072690/, which I highly recommend for watching by eager cryocitizens.
A lot of the mental state - especially long term - is encoded in chemical structure of neurons; trails of more conductive or less conductive electrolytes, concentrations of neurotransmitters and so on. So it's likely memory and general psyche could be recovered. Of course temporary states - electric charges on neurons - momentary thoughts, current moods, short-term memory - will be all gone, and worse yet, will be recovered to undefined state which most likely will correspond to quite extreme shock and confusion. How deep a shock and whether recoverable or not, is the question. So it would be less like recovering a VM, more like booting a system that was switched off, with the OS and all permanent data saved to hard drive, but volatile state gone.
We aren't sure if some of essential substances won't be destroyed by freezing too. Some substances decompose unrecoverably in low temperatures, but we don't know whether they are essential for organism or can be replaced/refilled in short order. Also, -some- damage is expected and is hoped to be repaired by normal healing process, the question is the allowable extent and possible permanent damages.
Of course, this is all sci-fi and a huge gamble. It's just not as impossible as some say. There are no known showstopper problems. There may be unknown ones, and there are known risks of unknown extent - which may, or may not be showstoppers - but best to our current knowledge, it may be possible sometime.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Im_thatoneguy gets it right. Objections -- knee jerk mostly -- boil down to "It's different, it's wrong, it'll never work." A manifestation of the human instinct to view the "strange" with suspicion. The good news is the "rejecters" will all die out, leaving more room for the "accepters". Then, after a time cryonics and extended life will become the norm, and adherents of "the natural way" will become a cultural oddity like the Amish. By the way, there is this default notion, accepted uncritically, that cryonic suspension is a "long shot" ie has a very low probability of success. This is nothing more than presumptive, prejudicial nay-saying, derived as it is from the "It's never been done so it must be impossible" school(sic) of logic(sic), and should be deleted in favor of a more fact-based approach. Consider: So long as you have a certain minimum degree of cellular integrity, biological function will proceed, ie you will live. Current suspension techniques (and rewarming techniques) cause a lethal degree of cellular damage. This defines the problem: to live again you need to fix the damage. Now, the good news:cryonic suspension perfectly preserves the "client" effectively with no time limit -- five hundred, five thousand, five million years. "No time limit" is a notion outside normal human experience, and needs pondering to get one's mind around the implications. Let me help you to jump ahead. All the technology that will come on stream in the next hundred, thousand, ten thousand, etc years is at your beck and call. Cellular biology provides a proof of principle for the manipulation of biological structures at the molecular level. The laws of physics clearly green light the repair of once-damaged cellular structures. The road ahead is unobstructed. From there it's little more than a numbers game. How many scientists, how many engineers, how many iterations of Moore's law, before we have sufficiently mature nanotech and the computational power to apply it to the task? Physics says "You have a go." Time says "Take as long as you need." And the trajectory of human technology is accelerating ever more rapidly in the right direction. So now, with this (putative) logic- and fact-based approach (by all means, critique this as severely as you need) , what probability would you assign to the likelihood of a successful cryonics outcome? My view: it's a near certainty. (Technically. If human screw-ups aren't factored in. Yeah, I know, huge flippin "if".)