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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.
The Cyronics Institute are a bunch of quacks and con men. Discuss.
And who the hell is this Roblimo guy, and why does get such special treatment?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
They should have frozen roblimo so we don't have to be spammed with his insufferable videos anymore.
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?
Didn't Richard Nixon explain this to Leela and Fry already?
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 ?
From an MBA's point of view, they already spent the money to make the videos and people coming to post snarky comments are additional page views for ads, so might as well post it with nothing to lose.
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
Huh, they ARE Slashdot-made. Things are worse than I thought. If the new owners' thought process was seriously "what geeky subject should we make some videos about, oh I know, cryogenics, everyone loves that"... well, things are a lot worse than I thought.
Personally I turned off ads in the last couple weeks because they started getting really intrusive. They'd been fine for years, but not anymore.
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").
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.
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
The whole premise of cryogenics is ludicrous anyway.
How so? The basic premise of preserving the brain for later medical advances is sound; it's the implementation details and social impacts that make it difficult.
The first video was loudly derided by the entire comments section and you post another one?
It's not generally a credible way to start a discussion by telling the reader to assume that everyone agrees with you; the briefest of glances at the comment section reveals many equally highly moderated posts by people who do not. Most of the quickly posted, top level responses were in this category, but in most articles that's where you just find the people who didn't think about it too much before getting in their word. (Not that I'm immune to that one, I'll admit.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
"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
Okay, let me rephrase. The whole concept of paying for modern-day cryogenics is ludicrous. I'm all for research into all fields; who knows, it might become usable someday, and that would be swell. But the lack of functionality of current cryogenics is so...total. You might as well pay someone to launch your corpse into space with a promise that magical aliens will recover it and cure you.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Care to explain immortality after death to me? Just how does that work? I die, yet I'm immortal?
You're right; immortal is a misnomer. Maybe multimortal? But this could already be claimed by reincarnationalists.... demortalized?
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
Not to mention the comments section had the standard trolls and offtopic comments, which weren't deriding anything. Of course, it could be argued that these are bots, not people....
Oh, and I actually added some non-derisive comments; but really -- anyone cryogenically stored isn't likely to be resuscitated in the way they expect. They may be a great archaeological study some day, assuming the freezers don't break down first (unlikely).
I just had another thought: what happens to your estate when you become a popsicle? I presume that since you died, it passes on via your executor. This means that when you come back, you are a legal non-entity, and basically belong to the Cryonics Institute... I sense a SciFi movie plot developing here.... and zombies.
"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.
Medical advancements in our own lifetimes, much less our grandparents' and great-grandparents' have been just short of miraculous already.
Just look at how gunshot fatalities have been decreasing over the past couple of decades despite the fact that the gunshot attack rate has gone up by half. 25 years ago, all we could do for a heart attack victim was to give them something for the pain and some lidocane, and now with advances in clot removers and stints, we've dropped heart attack fatalities by 40%. The stuff we can do with genomics, stems cells, and personalized medicine were once the things of science fiction. HIV is now an expensive nuisance rather than the killer of a whole subculture. We have surgical robots that allow us to go in through little holes rather than than slice a person open like a turkey. We've gone from EEG to fMRI, and we're pushing towards resolving the brain to the neuron level.
We have even more impressive tech coming down the pipeline. The human connectome project, studies into the human microbiome, cancer screening by saliva or smell, cloning and 3d printing of replacement organs, spinal nerve regrowth agents, etc. At least two of those are directly relevant to future restoration: mapping the brain and reconstructing tissues. It may be quite a while before we can construct a new brain to order (if it is ever possible), but I don't want to outright call it impossible based on the myopic lens of what is possible today.
As for the other two problems, the latter is the major sociological issue I mentioned, but I'm sure someone will want to reanimate people at least as a curiosity. And if something goes wrong with the storage center, then you're no worse off than you were without it (i.e, you're still dead, and you couldn't take the money with you anyway).
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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 *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
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).
Miraculous, maybe, but not the magic which cryonics requires.
Bah. Sufficiently advanced technology, and all. Nothing about cryonics is impossible like FTL travel, just difficult -- possibly impractically so -- but I don't think we're at nearly at the level to know for sure about that, yet. The best thing about cryonics is that you can just keep waiting until it is known.
And that is analogous to bringing a hundreds of years old dead person with extensive cell damage back to life, how exactly?
It's a sign of incremental progress. What seems miraculous today will seem mundane tomorrow.
Getting shot in the heart only has about a 70-80% mortality rating currently, and getting shot elsewhere is down to about 5% on average. Compare to what things were like only 150 years ago; we don't even have to saw anyone's limbs off to save people from gangrene anymore. What would surgeons of that time period think of what we can claim to do today? Would they be as incredulous of our powers to fight disease and repair broken bodies as we would be of a proposed future culture's ability to repair (or simply sidestep the issue of) cellular damage?
Building a brain from scratch to match an dead, probably aged, and possibly damage brain sounds nightmarishly difficult. But we've tackled seemingly impossible challenges before. We've put people in space, written messages with single atoms for pixels, created matter not found in nature, and edited living beings to produce drugs for our benefit. I'm not going to write off humanity's ability to pull it off, especially when it will benefit the people who do invent it just as much as the previous ages' dead. After all, the ability to revive the dead will require the ability to rejuvenate or preserve the living first. The corpsicles will just be fringe beneficiaries along for the ride.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
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.
The Universe does not cause me, I cause it. So does everyone else.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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!*
Rob's a cool dude.
He was here, slashdotting back when Perens and Searls still bothered to post.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."