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The Cryonics Institute Offers a Chance at Immortality (Video)
Do you want to be frozen after you die, in hopes of being revived a century or two (or maybe ten) in the future? It can cost less than an electric car. That's what the Cryonics Institute (CI) offers. David Ettinger, today's interviewee, is both the son of CI founder Robert Ettinger and CI's lawyer. In this video, among other things, he talks about arrangements that were made for his father's demise, and how they were able to start the cryopreservation process almost immediately after he expired. Is Cryonics the best chance at immortality for those of us likely to die before the Singularity arrives, and gives all of us the tools we need to live forever? David Ettinger obviously thinks so. (This is Video #1 of 2. The second one is scheduled to run tomorrow. It's an interview with CI Director Andy Zawacki, who takes us into the facility where the frozen bodies are stored.)
I know a couple guys whose wives have been freezing cold for awhile and still move around and spend money.........
Also, it's not immortality if they freeze you after you die.
Immortality means not to die at all.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Okay, I had to say it.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
First, the crude cryonics they use today is not going to work well, and may well not leave anything that can be revived behind.
Second, why would anybody want to revive some corpses at huge expense when making a few children more is so much easier? Or why would anybody go through the effort of reviving anybody, when the world is over-populated in the first place? Well, maybe if you freeze some truly exceptionally people (like Fields-medal winners), that one may be different, but I doubt it. Everybody else is just going into the trash at some indefinite time in the future.
And third, why would anybody reasonably want to be unfrozen, when the world is massively changed and everybody they knew and cared about is gone? There are a few SF books that use long-term "storage" as punishment for the criminal, and they have it right.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I know people that read the Bible and are now dead. Do they get a refund or what?
Permanent brain damage starts within 5 minutes of not receiving red blood cells with oxygen. So you would have to be frozen before then, and in such a way as to prevent ice crystalization from permanently damaging cells, which is not done with current cryogenic techniques. Otherwise you would lose so much of your personality, intellect, memories, and consciousness from brain damage, that even if they could regenerate all of that grey matter in the future, your brain would no longer be you, but would be someone else. (So what is the point?)
Aside from that, no matter how cheap it is to freeze someone, it's is likely going to cost a lot more to revive someone who is frozen, and regenerate their body into a functional state. How many people looking at cryogenics are budgeting for revival costs? Maybe they hope the future will be some socialist utopia, which is funny considering the global tend for wealth concentration and reduction of public services, including healthcare for the living.
Not if they found a million Neanderthals, all of whom would want jobs and a place to live.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
It's funny. When I was in my 20's I wanted to live forever. Now, in my 40's, I sometimes wonder if it will ever end.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
How 'dead' do you want the organism to be?
Plenty of organisms can survive nontrivial periods of complete metabolic shutdown, combined with some amount of cellular damage, and rehydrate and go on without significant trouble. Tardigrades are probably the most charismatic ones (survives 10 days of unprotected exposure to spaceflight and looks like an adorable little alien bear!); but extremophilic bacteria are even tougher.
Even humans will (with odds lousy enough that you don't want to try it; but good enough that documentation is available) survive short periods of total circulatory shutdown or longer ones of inactivity in very cold water.
'Resurrection' of an organism in a more advanced state of damage (or an organism for which precise brain configuration is considered important) is likely more fundamentally problematic. Even if you had indistinguishable-from-magic nanobots and the option to rebuild atom by atom, if you don't have somebody's 'correct' neural state on file, there are any number of configurations that would work; but wouldn't be the person you are trying to revive.
Have people been resuscitated after say, 30 mins or even an hour, and managed to have their brain functions relatively intact?
Absolutely. Look up "Mammalian Diving Reflex".
Brain damage from short-term clinical death happens primarily after revival. The valves routing blood to the parts of the brain that need it stick in the state they were in when the oxygen finally failed.
Muscles contract with stored energy and require metabolism to relax. "Valve off" is contracted, so when blood flow and oxygen is restored, the valves for regions of the brain that were turned down don't get oxygen and can't reopen - and without the blood flow they can't get oxygen, in a viscous circle. Raising the blood pressure to try to force them just blows the vessels, causing a stroke. The
nerves die over a half hour to an hour (and kill each other off through glutamate cascade, as dying nerves release glutamate that causes others to fire, deplete their remaining energy reserves, and die in turn.
Mammals, though, have a reflex related to deep diving. When diving deep, the increased pressure increases the partial pressure of oxygen, keeping things running until most of the oxygen is used up. Then coming back back up lowers the pressure further and can leaver the brain oxygen starved for long enough to produce the "valves stuck" phenomenon. To prevent this, mammals have the following reflex: When oxygen is running out AND the body (I think it's the back of the neck) is cold, the valves all open up, so any that get stuck are in the open position. Once oxygen is restored the blood flows, the nerves survive, the muscle gets repowered, and all is well - if thing hadn't been shut down long enough that too many cells died meanwhile.
This was discovered when some victims of drowning in cold water recovered just fine, with no brain damage, after half an hour or more of clinical death. I think the time before damage sets in is something between 25 and 45 minutes.
I don't know how CI's current protocols work. But ALCOR's are designed to include activating the diving reflex, if possible, so the brain's valves stick in the open position.
(This is more to encourage better perfusion of cryoprotectants than to try to make the brain restartable: As of the last time I looked the thought was that brains preserved - even by the best techniques available at the time - would require rebuilding by nanotechnology, so the idea was to preserve as much as possible of whatever might encode memory and personality.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way