Finding Hope In Cryonics, Despite Glacial Progress

biobricks writes: The NY Times covers cryonics and destructive mind uploading, with some news on progress in brain preservation research. Quoting: "Dr. Fahy, a cryobiologist whose research focuses on organ banking, had provided the most encouraging signs that cryonics did preserve brain structure. In a 2009 experiment, his team showed that neurons in slices of rabbit brains immersed in the solution, chilled to cryogenic temperatures and then rewarmed, had responded to electrical stimulation. His method, he contended, preserved the connectome in those slices. But a complication prevented him from entering the prize competition: Brain tissue perfused with the cryoprotectant invariably becomes dehydrated, making it nearly impossible to see the details of the shrunken neurons and their connections under an electron microscope. ... He could fix the brain’s structure in place with chemicals first, just as Dr. Mikula was doing, buying time to perfuse the cryoprotectant more slowly to avoid dehydration. But he lacked the funds, he said, for a project that would have no practical business application for organ banking."

Comments

Re:"no practical application for organ banking"?

[fustakrakich]

First Name: Abby

Re:Freeze me

[infolation]

Freezing research... what would you expect, except "glacial progress"?

Hibernation is the first step

[gurps_npc]

Hibernation works for large mammals. Yes, it's the poor cousin of full on cryonics. That's exactly my point. You don't try to go from building ladders to building a rocket to the moon. First you learn to build an airplane, and then use some of those skills when you go for the rocket.

Similarly, we should be working on hibernation, not cryonics. Once we can send a person to sleep for 40 years, while they only age 20 years, then we should be able to move to full cryonics. Until then, we are just kids firing off model rockets that go 1,000 ft straight up while we talk about hitting the moon.

Re:Hibernation is the first step

[quantaman]

Hibernation works for large mammals. Yes, it's the poor cousin of full on cryonics. That's exactly my point. You don't try to go from building ladders to building a rocket to the moon. First you learn to build an airplane, and then use some of those skills when you go for the rocket.

Similarly, we should be working on hibernation, not cryonics. Once we can send a person to sleep for 40 years, while they only age 20 years, then we should be able to move to full cryonics. Until then, we are just kids firing off model rockets that go 1,000 ft straight up while we talk about hitting the moon.

The difference is we don't need to solve cryonics, we just need to not screw things up badly enough so that a future who has solved cryonics can fix our mistakes.

I really think a lot of the skepticism about cryonics is overblown. Sure it sounds like science fiction but that's not an issue as long as it's science fiction that we eventually solve.

Yeah the stuff we freeze now will contain a lot of goo, but we can recover a damaged hard drive, why it is so implausible that in 100 or 500 years they could put our frozen brains through a scanner and recreate all the information?

As for the claim that they wouldn't revive the preserved people. How many people have dedicated their lives to studying the past, do you really think they'd leave centuries old people unrevived?

Re:Hibernation is the first step

[tsotha]

Depends. If there are only a few dozen, those people have a pretty good chance of being revived because of scientific curiosity. But let's say over the course of a century or two a billion people were frozen. Nobody's going to revive even a tiny fraction of that number. Those future people will have their own lives to live.

Re:Hibernation is the first step

[quantaman]

Depends. If there are only a few dozen, those people have a pretty good chance of being revived because of scientific curiosity. But let's say over the course of a century or two a billion people were frozen. Nobody's going to revive even a tiny fraction of that number. Those future people will have their own lives to live.

Perhaps, though people doing it now will be a very scarce and valuable resource just because no one is doing it now.

And even if two do freeze a billion people the past is still a limited resource and there are centuries worth of future humans who all want some.

There's also the potential of uploading minds, in which case 2 billion might be a drop in the bucket.

What are the odds that someone frozen today gets revived in a relatively intact mental state? 10%? 5%? 0.01%? At what point is it a worthwhile bet?

Re: Scam

[penguinoid]

At least with cryonics you don't have to sell your soul to a demonic entity*.

* Note: demonic entity may be posing as an angel of light

Destructive scanning

[Iamthecheese]

I'm STILL waiting for a rational explanation for how destructive scanning isn't death. Another person being created at the same time isn't it. Ship of Theseus isn't it. The brain isn't just software, its hardware is inherently part of the program.Destroy the hardware, destroy the program. Even if you made a backup that program is gone. I can buy another computer just like mine and install the same software, but it would be silly to say the other computer IS this one, whether or not I destroy this one. People who think destructive scanning is the same as life extension and people who think cryonics is a scam are both emotionally invested in accepting death or denying its existence.

Re:Scam

[gweihir]

"Succeed"? Why would future generations revive people that were so full of themselves or so afraid of death that they had themselves frozen? If anything, having yourself frozen in this way is a good indicator that reviving you is a bad idea.