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Scientists Cryo-Freeze Coral Reef
An anonymous reader writes "Due to rising ocean temperatures, scientists from the United States and Australia are attempting to freeze coral eggs and sperm in cryogenic suspension so that the endangered species can be preserved. Once frozen, the species may later be grown in a lab and implanted in reefs. This could be the only way to ensure the survival of certain endangered species at The Great Barrier Reef."
Huh. I always thought coral was more like plants than animals. Anyone here a coral expert or should I check out them wikipedias?
It would certainly be an impressive feat(and, if capable of being used on scene, sure would be handy for all those "He needs to be prepped and being worked on by the trauma surgeon 10 minutes ago or he'll die" ambulance calls...); but it would be of only modest use for the mortality problem...
While frozen, the organism is metabolically inactive(by design). Dead, albeit reversibly so. Simply being cryoed would be more or less identical to dying, save that they can wake you up at some future time. And, if they wake you up, you still have whatever issues you had when you went under. If you have sufficiently accommodating family and/or some clever flavor of legally immortal trust supervising your affairs, it might be a decent way of halting fatal diseases until other suckers have finished the clinical R&D and come up with something effective; but even in that best case it would actually be pretty weird:
Just imagine a situation where a serious accident, or the wrong diagnosis would mean going on ice for 20 years, before being revived and repaired. It wouldn't have quite the permanence of death; but it'd be weird if you, or people around you, could just 'get iced', starting a near-death process of absence and loss; and then pop back up in a decade or three with no time having passed for them. Somebody better than me could probably wring a neat sci-fi story out of it, a world where the risk of the separation and loss that accompanies death is still very real; but most 'deaths'(excluding things like explosions or intense fires and the like) are really just freeze periods of unknown duration.
How much would it fuck with your head to have your spouse or child 'die', and then show up again exactly as they were when they died, but with everybody else that much older, and having lived without them? It'd be weird...
Ocean acidification, although a daunting problem, isn't irreversible. The idea of saving just coral sperm and eggs doesn't sound like a well thought out solution, though. A coral reef is more than just bare coral. It is a matrix upon which an entire ecosystem is based. Does't the rest of habitat need saving as well? Imagine saving a place on land from soil erosion, but the hill or valley is completely barren with no plant or animal diversity.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Here is a cool trick, in the Summer take a hand full of M&M's, dive to the bottom of a pool and take a look. If you have more than about 4 feet of water over you you will not be able to tell the red from the blue. Red wavelengths of light are generally filtered out after a meter or so of water. The deeper you go the more color gets lost.