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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.
They should have frozen roblimo so we don't have to be spammed with his insufferable videos anymore.
...through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying" - Woody Allen
Non-Linux Penguins ?
No, he's the ex-editor-in-chief, predating dice by a long time. But all he ever posts is shilling for things. It's really weird.
Well, maybe not forever, but at least for a couple thousand years, that would be nice. I also would like the option of killing myself in an event that I consider my current circumstances to be worse than death. Though complete immortality (like Captain Jack from Doctor Who) would still be preferable to death.
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!?
Well, maybe not forever, but at least for a couple thousand years, that would be nice. I also would like the option of killing myself in an event that I consider my current circumstances to be worse than death. Though complete immortality (like Captain Jack from Doctor Who) would still be preferable to death.
That's something I've never understood about people; while I understand lacking a desire to end your own life early, what's so terrifying about the inevitable conclusion that is death?
complete immortality (like Captain Jack from Doctor Who) would still be preferable to death.
That's easy enough to say for someone who hasn't had to deal with 10 billion years of other lifeforms and their bullshit.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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").
what's so terrifying about the inevitable conclusion that is death?
I guess one part of it is instinct of self preservation.
And the other part is that I just don't like changes, much less permanent ones, so yea...
That's easy enough to say for someone who hasn't had to deal with 10 billion years of other lifeforms and their bullshit.
May be, but I would rather like to make my own mind about it after I live 10G years :)
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cryonics
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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
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").