Slashdot Mirror
The Cryonics Institute Offers a Chance at Immortality (Video #2)
Today's interviewee is Cryonics Institute (CI) Director Andy Zawacki, who takes Slashdot's Robert Rozeboom into the facility where they keep the tanks with frozen people in them. Yesterday, Rob talked with David Ettinger, who is both the group's lawyer and the son of CI founder Robert Ettinger. For those of you who are obsessed with the process of vitrification, here's a link to a story about The Cryonics Institute's 69th Patient and how she was taken care of, starting at the moment of her deanimation (AKA death). The story has anatomical drawings, charts, and color pictures of Andy carrying out the actual procedure. But Cryonics, while endorsed as a concept by numerous scientists, may not be as good a way to insure immortality as transplanting your brain into a fresh (probably robotic) body, as Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov hopes to do by 2035. There are also many groups that claim to offer spiritual (as opposed to corporeal) immortality. Which method of living forever works best? That remains to be seen, assuming any of them work at all. Perhaps we'll find out after the Singularity.
Slashdotsicles
The Cyronics Institute are a bunch of quacks and con men. Discuss.
Care to explain immortality after death to me? Just how does that work? I die, yet I'm immortal?
And who the hell is this Roblimo guy, and why does get such special treatment?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
How much carbon they going to add to the air generating the power to keep those carbon recycling units frozen? What happens if they all thaw at the same time? Checked to see if it is a new pyramid scheme?
I sure don't: After a couple of centuries, I'd get bored, and I don't really feel like going around insulting the universe.
I am officially gone from
...through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying" - Woody Allen
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The first video was loudly derided by the entire comments section and you post another one? The whole premise of cryogenics is ludicrous anyway. If this is the stuff that makes it to the front page, Slashdot is nosediving fast.
Can we please at least spell check the title? Thanks.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
I thought this subject was dead yesterday when the first story was published. How is it still viable? Why is it still kicking? Aren't we just beating a dead horse at this point? Why oh why won't it die!?
She was clinically dead for 42 minutes.
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health-fitness/miracle-patient-clinically-dead-woman-revived-after-42-minutes/story-fneuzlbd-1226700018382
It's no more an "institure" than it is an actual "institute".
OH, I see the Cryogenics dipshits are applying their moderation points again. Fuck off, we don't want your stupid video today any more than we wanted it yesterday, we don't want to support your slashdot advertising, and we don't want to hear about how you've been freezing corpses in an effort to pocket more money from stupid people.
Care to explain immortality after death to me? Just how does that work? I die, yet I'm immortal?
The religious answer is generally that there is some essential component of you (i.e. a soul) that persists after death and enjoys some sort of continued existence after death, most commonly with an element or reward or punishment for how you lived in life. It isn't "you" that dies when your flesh does.
The scientific answer is that death is merely a broad word for a set of bodily failures that lead to the breakdown and dissolution of the biological machinery that sustains your consciousness and/or metabolism. As science advances, we roll back those defects and in some cases cure them.
Many wounds that were inevitably fatal are imminently curable now. Gut wounds used to ensure a horrible death due to sepsis. Antibiotics stopped that. Heart wounds used to ensure bleeding to death. Blood transplants and open-heart surgery stopped that. We are now at the point that we have to base death on the cessation and decay of the brain.
Soon, we may have to refine that to a question of information loss. If we can freeze the brain before any irreversible damage is done to it, then we may later be able to restore it or copy the information (i.e "you") off of it to another medium. And given advances in repairing the body, even "irreversible" may be subject to redefinition over time. The nice thing is that once your brain is frozen, we have all the time in the world to figure out how to undo whatever did you in.
And once restored in a new body, what reason is there to expect that you can't be periodically backed up in case of the worst? If you can die and still live, then are you not immortal for all practical purposes?
But this is, of course, all highly unproven technology. Scientific or not, it's still essentially a leap of faith. However, if you don't have a religious reason to believe that you will live on in some other fashion after death, and you've got the money to spare for it then it seems like a much fairer wager than Pascal's.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Entropy always wins in the end folks
What's all this "we" stuff? I'm quite capable of voicing my own displeasure at this dreck, thank-you very much.
If we can freeze the brain before any irreversible damage is done to it[...] The nice thing is that once your brain is frozen, we have all the time in the world to figure out how to undo whatever did you in.
P.S. Yes, I know I shouldn't have said "frozen." Freezing implies ice formation, which means destruction of the cell structure. A large part of cryonics is avoiding that while still preserving the tissues against decay. I was speaking off the cuff and forgot to be more precise. I know someone's going to rag me for it anyway.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I tried clicking that "Disable advertising" checkbox, but this story keeps coming up.
Sounds good.
Do you want to hire a 29-year old boy who has never held down an actual job and whose only post-secondary education is as a "recording engineer"?
Because I wouldn't pay him minimum wage to shovel cowshit.
So either we as a society will need to pay him $200 per month so he doesn't starve (which is less than minimum wage, and he'll stay out of the way so actual work can get done) or we need to put him in a camp or something. Which would probably be more expensive by the time you finished all the paperwork.
What a strange musical sound to have at the beginning and end. The end one sounds like it comes from the pits of hell.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Slashdot is run by some fairly evil people.
This place is starting to remind me of Microsoft forums where every other post is an exact duplicate.
"The course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge. [But it is impossible to] predict by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our scientific knowledge [because doing so would require us to know that future knowledge, and, if we did, it would be present knowledge, not future knowledge.] We cannot therefore predict the future course of human history." - Karl Popper paraphrased from the book Future Babble by Dan Gardner
This is why Cryonics is currently a waste of money and resources.
-Matt
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Just in case any of this shit actually works add a note so that the future people don't wake him up.
No matter what "this is", everything that "is" will always be.
Nothing lasts but nothing is lost.
Everything is a part of everything else.
Connected as one.
Enjoy.
There really is nothing TO discuss because if they haven't come up with some magical potion that keeps 100% of the ice crystals from forming AND a way to unfreeze without damage all they are gonna end up with when they thaw it is mush anyway. The way it was explained to me its not the flash freezing that is the biggest problem, after all you dunk a head in liquid nitrogen and it'll flash freeze alright, the problem is in the thawing as THAT is where all the damage occurs.
Actually, it's typically done these days using organ vitrification, which prevents ice crystals from forming. For most crypoprotectants used in the process of vitrification, you are limited to one cell type one which it has best effect. The CI folks mostly try their best to preserve the brain without freezing damage, at the expense of some of the other cell types. This has been successfully used on laboratory animal organ transplants for mammalian livers, kidneys, and hearts; the first reference is a patent on the method of prepping the organ, which the second is a PubMed article case study dealing with a rabbit kidney vitrification and subsequent live transplant.
https://www.google.com/patents/US5723282
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
There has also been some interesting work in the last 5 years using in Japan using a 0.01 mT magnetic field. This prevents ice crystals from forming. The technique was originally developed by ABI, a Japanese company using a technique they call the "Calls Alive System", for storing sushi at cryogenic temperatures without permitting formation of ice crystals by triggerning through the glass phase change without normal expansion you would typically have with ice. The technique is currently being used for long term storage of live teeth, and has shown some merit for other larger organs:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20478291
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011224010000854
Dead.
Dammit Jim, I'm just a country doctor not the Lord almighty!
"Today's interviewee is Cryonics Institute (CI) Director Andy Zawacki, who takes Slashdot's Robert Rozeboom into the facility where they keep the tanks with frozen people in them"
How are they going to recover the brain to the same neurological state it was in when the patient was unfrozen. Regardless of any future scientific advances, information lost cannot be restored.
AccountKiller
...is nothing more than the complete insanity and utter humility the most well-positioned (interpreted broadly) people must eventually go through in order to come to the new way of thinking lots of others are already exploring.
It's only a singularity for you personally because your preferred way of thinking has no stable projection into the future past a certain timepoint. It's a lot about acceptance; or your lack thereof. A rediagonalization of our personal and collective sense of self.
It's scary, but real heroic change always is.
Pun intended and prefered. If I had the money, this would be my interment option. All the techno mumble jumble is too good to pass up. Plus liquid nitrogen is awesome!
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
Immortality?
Until the heat death of the universe?
Call me skeptical.
Supporting the SENS project by gerontologist Aubrey de Gray and also the Mprize projects, both scientific research charities (tax deductible in the US and the UK), because we have a vast world of biologists, geneticists, mathematicians, physicists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, chemists, computer scientists, inventors, thinkers, young people at universities, etc, that could ALL be employed to work towards developing all the sciences of reversing/fixing aging through biotech and nanotechnologies, both current and future. The source of all this funding should be by REDUCING the worlds militaries, their budgets, their R&D to make new bombs and weapons, (not DARPA's biotech/nano-tech fixing soldiers research), but just the ICBM, Bombs. current wars, reducing the amount of ships, missiles allowed, standing armies.....after all, these war machines will/may get you in the future, the robotic war machines may get you or someone you know (if you live long enough)...Regan's star wars program ate up close to 1 trillion (1000 billion) in R&D funding, most honest scientists viewed it as a make work welfare project for the defense contractors....Aubrey de Grey estimates that given 1 billion dollars. spent over a 10 year period could fix most of the scientific problems of aging.....I say we spend 100 times that amount to get things done in just a few years....Einstein estimated that the crash program to make the bomb during world war II took just a few years, but advanced that state of nuclear bomb physics and nuclear power by what would have taken 40 years in peacetime (he, like most of the physicists that developed the bomb, disapprove of the creation of such a new dangerous war tech, one reason is that, we are now surrounded by all the current "screaming monkey's (countries, people) that want to have, or have these destructive devices).
Seriously. Y'all livin' in a deterministic, mechanical materialist dreamworld.
Your mind is not in your brain, like an algorithm in a circuit.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is getting ridiculous. Stop the nonsense already.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I looked at the membership data available online at alcor.org, and from what I could surmise, alcor is losing about half of its long time members. About half of the people who signed up for alcor, say, 20 years or so, never make it to the dewar. They lose their alcor membership before they get frozen. The primary cause seems to be the alcor membership dues increase along with the the increase in funding minimums. Both the annual dues and the minimum amount your insurance benefit must pay out at death underwent a very substantial increase by alcor in the last few years. This seems to be the main reason half the people at alcor lose their membership before death.
The reason for the rate increases at alcor seem to be because of the Alcor board that is not elected by the members.
What may be happening is that one or more very rich members are using their money to 'persuade' the board members to raise the rates. Just my guess. And so when alcor members get older and their income drops and they get apathetic about life, they are more likely to stop paying. Also in the last years of life, the end game, most people become so incapacitated that they cannot pay their bills, meaning they cannot pay the insurance premiums and the alcor dues. So they lose their membership.
I am an alcor member, but unless I get lucky in the stock market, I intend to switch to Cryonics Institute when I retire. CI does not offer as good a cryopreservation, but better any cryopreservation than take a 50% chance of not getting frozen at all.
CI is controlled by a member elected board, which explains why they have not really increased dues and funding minimums.
Alcor may be controlled by rich folks who don't want regular people to hold down alcor. Just my guess.
As for the discussion here about whether cryonics is a scam or hopeless or whatever, I do not think you can really understand my reasoning on it, so I will not go into that. But for those who may be christian, the bible basically commands you to be a cryonicist. Google it. I explained it all online if you look around a bit.
For fuck's sake man, just accept that you're going to die and do it when the time comes. Cryo preservation is an extremely selfish and harmful fad. You will be wasting power, space and contributing to pollution from beyond the grave.
I guess your mentality is fuck everyone else as long as you *believe* you will be revived one day, despite people in the future having no reason or motivation to do so, even if it weren't a virtual impossibility due to the irreparable damage caused by your death and subsequent preservation.
Know how I want my body handled when I'm dead? Bury me naked in the middle of a forest so that my body can provide nutrients for new and existing life.
Apparently, they know nothing about the true make up of man. They revive a corpse with no soul, and the deceased person's spirit has long been returned. What will they have? Maybe they should save their money and invest it in cotton or fishmeal. At least that way they'll have a viable product. Nice dream though..
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245139/
He was a quiet neighbor.
Living for a month on sushi for $200? Yeah, sure, in your dreams, maybe.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
has the rebellion begun? Let's hope so.. Good work!
And I say this as a trueleftist
your understanding of real politics is all wrong. But what you are doing is right.
I'd go for living forever in a virtual space.
I don't think brain uploading is so insurmountable a challenge as it seems. Much of our brain is taken up with stuff unrelated to our core sense of self. Things such as sense interpretation, how memories are laid down, house keeping, etc are probably fairly generic from person to person. Even specific knowledge could be generic modules added and removed from the consciousness. It's your base personality which is probably largely genetic w/some development environmental factors plus modifications to it over your life and memories that would really need to be extracted, stored then simulated in a computer or overlaid back on a clone's brain.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
I imagined the place more like the Fry's "I.C.Wiener" pizza delivery case.