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Terminally Ill Teen Won Historic Ruling To Preserve Body (bbc.com)
A teenage girl has been cryogenically frozen in the hope of being revived at a time when her cancer might be cured. The terminally ill 14-year-old girl from London won a legal fight to be frozen after she died. After her death in October, the girl's remains were transported to a cryonic facility in the United States. From a report: The girl, who was terminally ill with a rare cancer, was supported by her mother in her wish to be cryogenically preserved -- but not by her father. She wrote to the judge explaining that she wanted "to live longer" and did not want "to be buried underground." A High Court judge ruled that the girl's mother should be allowed to decide what happened to the body. The details of her case have just been released. "I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I am only 14 years old and I don't want to die but I know I am going to die. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up -- even in hundreds of years' time. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish," the girl wrote. The judge, Mr Justice Peter Jackson, visited the girl in hospital and said he was moved by "the valiant way in which she was facing her predicament." His ruling, he said, was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.
1) The people in the future may not even have our level of technology and resources anymore
2) The people in the future may hate us for what we did and didn't do, they wouldn't owe you shit
3) Cryo is a 1970s techno-religious manifestation of the human want to live longer, except it doesn't really work. There's no way to repair the damage to every cell in the human body.
That being said, we need to support research into life extension so we can understand life processes to cure people now. Not create expensive mausoleums.
Is there a Mr I C Wiener here?
They paid for it so why is this news? No different then a custody battle.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
nobody in the far future when we can fix cancer AND death...
is going to spend the time or money to bring back random teen girl from 2016.
IF her corpse is even still around.
It's incredibly wasteful, too. Yay, let's all use tons of electricity for no reason after we're dead. In just 120 years, we could have 7 billion people in freezers. Better hope there's no power outage.
Regardless of the girl's wishes or the scientific viability of cryo, it must be absolutely awful to have your parents arguing about what to do with your body after you die. Even worse knowing that one of them is against it, she must have some feeling that her father doesn't want to see her again.
For the sake of argument, suppose this is possible.
You will wake up about 5 generations beyond where you are now. Assuming her death doesn't end the bloodline altogether, the relatives she has in 100 years will have no real familial connection to her. Everyone and everything that defines her sense of happiness now will likely be dead and gone or so evolved that it is unrecognizable (like tech and hobbies).
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally.
So odds are you just wake up a social pariah, with no skills, in an alien social order with no friends and family. Heck, you might not even speak the lingua franca of that age. For all we know, Mandarin could replace English by 2116.
People imagine it like a movie where you wake up in a shiny, accepting utopia and you just go like Ender to the stars where no one knows your past or cares. The reality is probably more akin to you becoming a ward of the state for years, being looked down on except as a curiosity.
His ruling, he said, was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.
Exactly. Even before I could reach the closing sentence of the summary, I was trying to figure out what this situation had to do with "science" or even cryonics. This was just a dispute between parents over a kid. Nothing to see here.
Imagine waking up in 400 years, surrounded by scientists and doctors all cheering at their breakthrough. "Is there still a WWW?", you ask. "Yes! Just think of what you want to visit and this holographic unit will bring it up in 3D for all of us to see." Smile then concentrate on goatse.
Trolling is a art,
moon pie what a time to be alive
The father probably didn't want to pay for the yearly costs of keeping a dead corpse on ice in the pointless idea that it will be possible to revive a corpse in the near future. If the mom and daughter want to spend needlessly on this than by all means pony up the cash.
I'm waiting for the breakthrough discovery of a special chemical that will prevent ice crystals from forming and allow for a better thaw that doesn't destroy cellular membranes. It'll be ironic when the cryonic scientific community goes and says, "Our bad, all of those previously frozen people cannot be safely revived."
Hope she gets treated better than Ted Williams.
http://www.espn.com/boston/mlb...
In Colorado, there's a town famous for having a frozen dead guy on hand. It's important to recognize what this is: a vain (and hopeless) bid for immortality.
Yeah. 14 years of life should be enough for anybody.
Sorry, what were the "rights or wrongs" about cryonics again?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
And thus the zombie apocalypse begun.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
In Colorado, there's a town famous for having a frozen dead guy on hand. It's important to recognize what this is: a vain (and hopeless) bid for immortality.
Thing I'm wondering is - why don't they freeze her while she's still alive? Even if they find a cure for cancer, that will likely not be something that resurrects the dead. So if they are gonna freeze her after she dies, it's a wasted effort, too.
Instead, freeze her now while she's still alive, and whenever the cure is discovered, the doctors will thaw and cure her. Of course, nobody she knows may be alive, her relatives - descendants of any siblings she may have - won't know her, she won't know any of the things that may have developed by then, so her only choice may be to marry someone 700 years younger to her - assuming they haven't abolished marriage and divorce by then.
Too bad the judge's heart trumped his brain, and he couldn't say 'no' to the ridiculous request of this precious snowflake
You needn't worry about 7 billion. Not all cultures bury their dead: cremation is pretty common. So it would be about half that number, if not less
It's incredibly wasteful, too.
It is only wasteful if few people do it. But if thousands or millions freeze themselves, there is good economy of scale. If you have a million corpse cryogenic warehouse, the cost per-body would be very low. Even cheaper if you only freeze the head, since a new body can be generated from stem cells.
Better hope there's no power outage.
In the event of a power outage, it would take a long time for all the N2 to evaporate. A large well insulated cryogenic warehouse can easily go without power for days.
This has to be a new record for the time between when something showed up in my Facebook feed to the time when someone cross posted to Slashdot. Sad, sad day.
What's the furthest back you could go and still have the person relatively well-integrated into society?
Judging by recent events, 50% of people aren't well suited to fit into society -- without displacing them in time %N years.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Thing I'm wondering is - why don't they freeze her while she's still alive?
Because that would be murder as opposed to preservation of an already dead body.
Too bad the judge's heart trumped his brain, and he couldn't say 'no' to the ridiculous request of this precious snowflake
Oh go fuck yourself. The father who opposed it is an asshole who hadn't had contact with her in six years, yet felt he had the right to overrule what the girl and her family wanted done with her remains.
Doesn't it need to be done immediately? I would imagine that the body changes dramatically after death and I wouldn't think that those changes would be reversible.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Thing I'm wondering is - why don't they freeze her while she's still alive? Even if they find a cure for cancer, that will likely not be something that resurrects the dead.
The current state-of-the-art freezing processes would kill her anyway, so the end result is the same. We don't have the ability to freeze the body without fatally damaging the cells. Anyone with the technology to reverse the massive cellular damage from the cryo would most likely be able to deal with the rest without any trouble. From a legal point of view, freezing someone while still alive would be much more problematic—it would probably be classified as a form of assisted suicide, given our current inability to reverse the process. No one wants to take on that kind of liability for a infinitesimally better chance of successful revival in the distant future.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
While I don't think there's any actual chance of her ever being revived and cured, I'd be willing to bet that the thought that there was a chance (however slim) helped the girl accept her situation and made her last days a lot less hellish than they might have otherwise been.
Once we get a space elevator, we could just store these people in space! Let them become comets for a thousand years then retrieve them on their next pass by Earth... I would totally go for that!
I'm imagining a high tech looking front room and lab with a hidden door that leads to a crematorium. You could do it for the bargain rate of $20k per pop (less than the $37k listed in the article) and it would, for all intents and purposes, be the same.
Yeh... I came here wondering if that would be a clever way to achieve Physician assisted suicide.
The problem is a question of faith? What justifies faith. What type of evidence is enough to give one faith. Faith is 'the belief in things not yet observed' a conjecture based on available evidence.
I find it ironic, that some have faith in cryogenics given the evidence for any possible success is certainly no better and in many ways much less then the evidence for a omnipotent creator who will resurrect your body at a future date.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
The father had legitimate concerns about how she would live after 200 years if she was revived (cited in another post of mine below). You are welcome to clamor for an endless extension of life, but there are issues other than that that have to be considered, and her genius of a mom was incapable of seeing beyond the suffering of her little girl. And cryogenically freezing her would not kill her, so no, it wouldn't be murder: her cells would just be frozen until a time when they figure out how to remove her cancer
It's our era's version of mummification. We preserve the body on the hope that it can be restored. We have a bright future in our imaginations instead of an afterlife. But it's really all the same thing.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
They did this with John Wayne too. He's not dead. He's frozen. He's gonna be pissed when they thaw him out.
And in a 120 years even if there was technology to revive the person why would they? What makes anyone that special? Especially after everyone who knew you was dead? There's very few people as a society that we'd even consider reviving anyway. Just get over it, we all die, and always will.
The father had legitimate concerns about how she would live after 200 years if she was revived (cited in another post of mine below). You are welcome to clamor for an endless extension of life, but there are issues other than that that have to be considered, and her genius of a mom was incapable of seeing beyond the suffering of her little girl. And cryogenically freezing her would not kill her, so no, it wouldn't be murder: her cells would just be frozen until a time when they figure out how to remove her cancer
200 years from now when she is revived, she will be a citizen of the United Federation of Planets (or will become a ghoul, depending on what universe evolves). She will be provided for.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Right, she's 14, and would therefore be a minor then. Except her parents won't be around, so social services would have to take care of her. I'm assuming that she'd be in the US, not UK, so she'd have no family here. (Even if she went back to the UK, her family's descendants wouldn't know or recognize her: I don't know the name of my ancestors beyond my granddads). Had she been, say 20+, she could have found a boyfriend (or girlfriend, if she was a lesbian), married and started a family. But she'd be totally lost, the way things are
More pressing than free actually. The less of it we use the more we just waste as it bounces off into space...
First, it's precedent. Second, you clearly have read absolutely nothing about this situation. I spent a total of about 10 seconds skimming the article and still picked up enough to know that this was not the case you want to make your "men have no rights" stand on. You're hurting the very cause you're (apparently) trying to help by doing so.
This father-of-the-year had no contact with his terminally ill daughter for SEVEN years prior. His daughter didn't even want him to see her body when she was gone.... So, yeah, I'm kinda thinking he gets no say whatsoever in this.
Or maybe he was opposed to being forced to spend a lot more money on what he (probably rightfully) views as a complete waste of time and money.
Joke's on her, then. Freezing a dead body bursts every cell wall as the water expands into ice. If a future tech can repair THAT kind of damage, then they will certainly by godly by our standards today. Of course, left unsaid will be WHY any godly future society would want to wake up some violent barbarian spawn from the early 21st century. So she can screw up their carefully manicured DNA profiles with her wild genes carrying all sorts of horrible diseases and mutations?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Easy. One of them has been classified as science and the other has not. Easy to see why one is more acceptable to a certain crowd anyway.
But I agree with your basic premise.
I don't understand why this post isn't modded up higher. It is the correct answer.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
We have a bright future in our imaginations instead of an afterlife.
And now you have me wondering about something.
How does one balance the belief in an afterlife with the belief that, one day, a frozen body will possibly be revivable? If someone believes in an afterlife, then they believe in the existence of the soul. So what happens to your soul while you are frozen, and is this true for with all frozen bodies, or just ones that were frozen in a lab?
I'm not here to debate the existence of souls and afterlives (I believe in neither). I am simply curious how the people who do believe in such things view cryogenics.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
When I think of suicide (and i'm not suicidal by any means), my first concern would be to create a situation with minimal clean-up for the people who are left behind. The guy who slit his wrists in the hot tub in the Godfather comes to mind here. Some bleach and a scrub brush should make everything good as new after they get the corpse moved. Maybe i'd lay out all the required documents - insurance policies, last will, whatever directives I have - on a nearby table so that nothing is missing. The reason why is that i'm not a sociopath. I don't want to make people's lives worse, even after i'm gone.
Translate this to cryogenic storage. It's incredibly expensive in terms of energy. The chances of success are near nil, because over time, there's about a zero chance that I won't get inadvertently thawed due to power or refrigeration problems. Besides which, it doesn't work for any standard definitions of 'working'. Every cell in your body will more or less burst when frozen and if thawed, you'll just rot the faster.
I'd weigh the fantasy against the real-world effects of wasting resources in a futile endeavor and just get myself cremated and flushed down the toilet. In fact, my directive inside my will says just that.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
It's incredibly wasteful, too. Yay, let's all use tons of electricity for no reason after we're dead. In just 120 years, we could have 7 billion people in freezers. Better hope there's no power outage.
Not only that, but reviving frozen dead people is just silly. It's easy (and fun) to just make new people instead.
What's valiant about being frozen? The right thing to do is accept your fate, and not fool yourself that you'll be "woken up" someday. You won't be.
Let's be pretty clear here. The likelihood of her ever being brought back to life are exceedingly low. This strikes me as a fierce debate about how many angels can sit on the head of a pin.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'd say that's the least of the Dualists problems. I have yet to have one adequately explain what happens to the soul when someone suffers a serious brain injury that alters personality or cognitive ability. Does the soul get damaged as well? If someone suffers a traumatic brain injury that leaves them in a persistent vegetative state, does that mean the soul is also PVS?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Show me one person who has been saved from this. Shit, name me One person who's been frozen for more than a day and than woken up from said frozen coma. Saving lives my ass. This is a money grab.
If you had terminal cancer at 14 would you be like, 'Oh sure, it's only fair for me to go ... and wanting to live longer would just make me a narcissist.'?
I don't think having faith necessarily means there is limited evidence. There might not be any and yet someone believes.
Faith is something that is inside you and not your apparent circumstances (noumenal not phenomenal).
And what about human lives is worth saving? There is no sanctity of life. Very few people actually make enough of a dent on the rest of humanity to legitimately be called important, and even then, many if not most of those people make negative impacts.
If you disappeared off the planet right now, only a few people would really, truly be devastated. Your parents, if they're still alive. Your spouse or significant-other. Your children. Possibly your siblings and possibly their children if you have a close relationship. Devastated as they would be, however, even they would probably move-on with life, and in time would remember you somewhat dispassionately instead of being consumed with mourning. Parents would remember you from time to time. Spouse or significant other would move-on. Children would have to move on as it's normal for their parents to die before them anyway.
We all die. We're all pretty good at handling the death around us, even in cultures where significant effort is made to thwart death. The death of a fourteen year old girl from disease past the ability of medical science to treat is unfotunate, but it's also pretty routine, and to be honest, our ability to suspend the body and preserve it is so poor that she's never going to be reanimated and cured from what ails her now. It's a shame that snake-oil salesmen have convinced some people that it's possible to do this, when all it will do is consume resources without any return.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In Colorado, there's a town famous for having a frozen dead guy on hand. It's important to recognize what this is: a vain (and hopeless) bid for immortality.
How's that any different from Christian's asking for ecclesiastical rites and burial in consecrated grounds or Hindu's asking their remains be burned on the Holy Hindu river in a vain (and hopeless) bid for their version of immortality in the Afterlife
She can wish for anything, since she's just 14. But I do expect more sense from her mom, even though I understand the grief she as well as the dad have to be going through. People lose family members all the time - and it unfortunately ain't always the more elderly. Her mom should have had the sense to tell her that this was how long she was meant to live, and that she'd meet them in the afterlife (assuming that they believe that) Or that freezing her would still kill her, and that even if a cure for cancer was invented, she would still not be resurrect able. A lot of other kids in the world die every day, and their parents have the strength to prepare them for that eventuality. Her dad had the sense: there is no reason her mom couldn't have had the same attitude, instead of blowing $37k on something this inane
IMO, when the person dies, his soul is out of that broken meat body and is restored in personality/cognitive ability. Of course that's just an opinion, given that I've never died, or talked to anyone who has.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Ishi, 1911, the last un-contacted native American walks out of the wilds. He spends his final five years on a university campus being studied by anthropologist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi
That would mean that someone is keeping a running back up of mental states, to be restored when the soul departs. It strikes me that this is what makes the Dualist argument so absurd. As we learn more and more about how the brain works and about what constitutes the "mind", and the more we determine that who we are is the product of biological processes, it makes Dualist explanations ever more tortured and absurd.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Precisely the point I made. If she wants to be revived, shouldn't the freezing have happened while she was alive - first anesthetizing her and then freezing her?
No, mom's family footed this bill
Yes darling, of course we'll freeze you so you can be woken up when they cure death.
I know it's really shitty to lie to a dying kid but c'mon.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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The fact that the girl feels that she has some hope of some day waking up probably made her imminent death easier to accept. That is why the religious afterlife is there. To ease the fear of death. Cryo plays the same role.
You can quibble over the semantics of the "murder" part (maybe combine this with the euthanasia angle), but you can't really get around the "death" part. The body is mostly water, and when water is frozen it expands, so what you get when you freeze meat is a *lot* of ruptured cell membranes. Barring some pretty amazing nanotech work during the defrosting process it's extremely unlikely that there's any way back from that. Ultimately, the only thing this ruling and expense has done is to help ease the passage of a child with a terminal disease, and only her immediate family and the girl herself are/were in a position to say whether that was worthwhile or not, but from a practical point of view there's little point in keeping the cryo power on.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I find it ironic, that some have faith in cryogenics given the evidence for any possible success is certainly no better and in many ways much less then the evidence for a omnipotent creator who will resurrect your body at a future date.
I forget who said it, but there is an argument for believing in God which says "if you don't believe, and He does exist, you lose everything. If you do believe, but He does not exist, then you've lost nothing. So you might as well believe."
The problem with that, is which God should you choose to believe in? Zeus? Odin? Amun-Ra? Someone else?
The reason I bring this up, is that cryogenics is a bit like that. If you choose to be frozen, and in the future they are able to revive you, you get a second lease on life. If it turns out that they cannot revive you, it's no different than if you hadn't gotten frozen. So if you can afford it, you might as well freeze yourself. The difference here, is there is no "but which God should I believe in?" problem. At least not as far as I can tell.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
If you're completely fantasizing, like you seem to be, just freeze some stem cells and be done with it.
Then you lose all the memories. Identical twins are different people because of their different life experiences.
The father had legitimate concerns about how she would live after 200 years
There might be concern, but trying to predict 200 years into the future can by no stretch of the word be called "legitimate".
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yo Potsy, she's dead. They're preserving a corpse.
Assisted suicide is not illegal in all countries, and in those countries there are clinics which provide such services for terminally ill and suffering patients.
There are plenty of other problems to overcome (as you described yourself), but the assisted suicide bit is currently solved.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Which doesn't change the fact they're preserving a corpse....
Uh, I do think the kid needed to be gently given a lesson in reality, but I can't digest lying to her, especially when she wasn't gonna be around much longer
She's fucking dead ass-hole! She's not coming back to life. How stupid are you.
nanomachines could theoretically repair the cell walls of every cell. It might not be a big deal as long as the contents of the cells haven't all mixed together, so the repair would have to occur before thawing.
There are some scientists asking for women to carry a cloned Neaderthal baby. I don't know if they are serious or if it's purely a PR stunt or maybe done to provoke an ethics debate. I suspect in a very short time we'll have the ability to bring back ancient genomes, even if we choose not to use that ability with human beings.
I do not want to be frozen. Anyone that wakes me up could have some pretty terrible ulterior motives. What if my payment for being cured of my terminal disease in the future is decades as an indentured servant? It might be possible depending on how badly human rights sinks in the future, or if my status as deceased means I do not have rights.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What if returning consciousness is a reversible process, like the Reversible Fluid Mixing experiments?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Uh, if we are discussing Cryogenics, should we bother discussing spiritual concepts like the soul or the afterlife? I'd rather keep them completely separate
I would think step one would be figuring out how to freeze people and bring them back a week or two later. Then we can talk about this again.
This is "Pascal's Wager". There are versions that pre-date Pascal.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Faith justifies itself. It's a circular belief bound by emotions and subconscious thought patterns. It is the antithesis of logic, belief in the unprovable. If you can prove it, there is no need for faith.
That's Pascal's Wager, by the French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal in the 17th century.
Too bad the judge's heart trumped his brain
I don't know about that. My brain would say the will of the child with the backing of half of their guardians should overrule the other half of their guardians who want to go against the will of the child.
The actual medical predicament here shouldn't have even featured in the decision making.
Nobody's life can be saved with existing cryotechnology. Freezing the water in the body and cells turns it to ice, long shards of crystal which shred the body to pieces at the sub-cellular level. Nobody could survive the process as it exists now, and the "cure" for this condition (rebuilding all cells) would be far, far more complicated than removing the cancerous cells.
you vehemently argue against ubiquitous solar power installation
He never mentioned solar power?
your horrifically twisted, greedy and morally bankrupt world view
Not much is more greedy and morally twisted/bankrupt than expecting others to keep expending resources preserving your body after you've died.
Easy. One of them has been classified as science and the other has not. Easy to see why one is more acceptable to a certain crowd anyway.
Even then though the belief in cryogenics is hardly consistent. If you are going to believe that science in the future can figure out how to rebuild a body in which every cell has been ruptured and the person was already dead when frozen then why not believe that science in the future can build time machines which can send tiny probes back in time and download your consciousness just before death? Both are based on wild guesses about future science but only one requires a huge expediture of money and effort.
The mother who supported and the judge you allowed it are assholes. The father was the only sensible person here.
Think of all the things a normal fourteen-year-old girl has to look forward to. Now, think of what this girl's future held: death. Knowing that her body would be frozen and that she might come back some day gave her hope, and maybe made her fate easier to accept. It doesn't really matter that we can't bring her back now, or that we may never be able to; don't you all think that she knew it? All that matters is that it allowed her to end her life in hope instead of dispair, and what we think about her chances doesn't matter in the least.
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There is a documentary on this. In Nederland Colorado, a Norwegian illegal immigrant started a cryogenic cave. Interesting story.
Yep. Boulder, Colorado. Between the mountains and reality.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
All it will take is one sustained power outage, and that's all she wrote.
The amount of power consumption required to keep things that cold must be enormous. What a waste.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Wow talk about someone who has zero empathy. "people's kids die all the time, suck it up" --- Seriously bro? Wtf is wrong with you?
As for cryopreservation being narcissistic, then being alive is also narcissistic. Why does anybody insist on continuing to live? Shit, maybe the world is better off without them. We have lost valuing our fellow human. Basically this today's society looks at another human being, by default, as some sort of predator and competition. Why do you think we elected a nearly open racist xenophobe as president? People are claiming this gal cryopreserving herself is a waste, and for her to suck it up and die. To cover up our hate, we are even going as far as to claim cryopreservation isn't gonna work, when frankly nobody has a clue. Granted it seems highly unlikely to be revived without serious brain tissue damage .. but then who knows if there will be workaround and cyber-augmentation etc. I mean really, who knows? But let's admit the real reason we don't want this kid cryo-preserving herself. It's because we have no empathy, and we think she isn't going to contribute anything useful anyway.
I don't know about that. My brain would say the will of the child with the backing of half of their guardians should overrule the other half of their guardians who want to go against the will of the child.
Was she emancipated and paying for it herself?
"Too bad the judge's heart trumped his brain, and he couldn't say 'no' to the ridiculous request of this precious snowflake"
That could't be what happened to the judge's heart, because this took place in Britain.
I'm sure you'll be a lot more rational when your 14 y/o daughter is about to die.
That's a good time to make another and hopefully more durable daughter.
Humans are a renewable resource.
The mother who supported and the judge you allowed it are assholes. The father was the only sensible person here.
It's highly unlikely that this girl will ever be revived, but one day somebody is going to solve the cellular bursting problem. When that happens, this tech will be a great way of assuring that luddites die and rot out of the population, removing that particular ring around our species' gene pool.
Your daughter is fucking DYING. Lie to her and fight with the wife after she's gone if you're that bothered by the idea, but Jesus Christ, let her be in peace for her final days. I think she has enough shit going on.
You really think "buried in the ground" or "burned" is better than "frozen"? Luckily you don't live too far north or you wouldn't even have the choice. I don't think this argument happens much in Siberia.
For fuck's sake -- freeze ME, and wake me up when people are rational.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Was she emancipated
How is this relevant in a situation where two people had opposite views over a 3rd person with no legal rights but an opinion. Why would you favour the one going specifically against the will of the subject if both parents had the same rights to make the decision?
and paying for it herself?
Irrelevant, 3rd parties are making the decision. If the decision was made purely on cost it is unlikely you could legally force a party to do it.
Another few questions to ask:
Who is going to keep on paying for her being frozen? Her parents may do that for the rest of their lives, but then who will pay after they are gone?
What if the cryonics business that is keeping her frozen goes out of business?
Who is going to expend resources to revive the person, cure the disease and get her trained for living in the world of then. (It won't be cheap!)
If there are relatives (distant at that) living at that time, then will they take care of this stranger?
I'm just sorry she has to die so young. It's life I know but if it brings her comfort to have herself frozen then why not? I hope she is freer and happier after death than any experience here would provide her..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
For the sake of this discussion, I'm assuming that souls do not exist
Ummm...what exactly do you think the difference between her being frozen while she's alive and one minute after is? Are you hoping to freeze her soul in with her or something?
Except it's not done one minute after death. They cool the body and such, but it takes several hours to get the body to the facility to actually freeze it. Which I would guess makes a big difference. It's one thing to have to figure out how to repair all of the damage caused to cells by freezing them. But after death CO2 builds up in the cells and autolysis occurs, dissolving the cell membranes. It will start occurring around 10 minutes after the heart stops moving blood. However it's still unknown at what point enough cells are damaged to cause permanent brain damage. But under normal temperatures, I would doubt any period of more than half an hour would cause irreparable damage. Which is pretty optomistic
Autolysis is also temperature dependent. So the colder the body is the slower it occurs. That's why people who drown in close to freezing water have been revived after an hour. I think the current longest time was close to 2 hours. But I don't think they can get the brain down to a low enough temperature fast enough. Even at low temperatures, autolysis will occur, it's just slower. So until the brain is in cryo, it's dissolving itself.
That said, being able to repair the freezing damage is going to require nano repair technology of some kind I would suppose. And if we get to that point, I don't see what's stopping people from becoming virtually immortal. If you can put nano repair robots into someone, why not have them in your body to repair any kind of cell damage almost instantaneously on a continuous basis. Then we'll just need some form of telepathic communication and we and go about the universe in cube ships assimilating everything we can find. ;-)
Metaphysical what ifs don't seem terribly useful to me. Everything we've learned about the brain over the last two centuries suggest that the mind; the person, their emotions, their personality, are built of physical pieces, much of it built out of the chordate central nervous system that's been around for over 500 million years. The human mind is the product of a lot of parts, obviously important aspects of which lie in the prefontal cortex, but with all kinds of functions scattered not only through the higher centers but also with some aspects in much more ancient areas of the brain like the hypothalamus. That "sense of self" that we have is something we do appear to share with a number of other animals, like the other great apes, at least Asian elephants, and cetaceans, which means they must share some of the higher executive functions of our brain. The whole point of this long diatribe is for me to suggest that the mind is simply a product of complex interactions in the central nervous system, and while ours may be the most complex example of a brain producing a self-knowing sentient mind, we're not the only example.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What I suggest might be testable though in the near future, because I am thinking of it as physics, not "metaphysics".
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's highly unlikely that this girl will ever be revived, but one day somebody is going to solve the cellular bursting problem.
Perhaps, but I'll bet money that it's a treatment that's applied *before* the damage is done.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
It's a pretty big assumption that memories would survive the freezing process.
Just ship them all to antartica. They will be fine until global warming melts all of that.
Alternatively just stick them on some mountain, like everest.
The dewars need topping off as they lose nitrogen every couple weeks, and the vacuum has to have pump attached about as often to maintain. This will not be done over 50 years, let alone centuries. All the corpses will rot when the company goes under or there is natural disaster that prohibits resupply of nitrogen or running vacuum pumps
> The father had legitimate concerns about how she would live after 200 years if she was revived (cited in another post of mine below)
You know, there is this newfangled thing called school, and at 14 years of age, the subjects she will have covered already will still apply. She will be able to take history, algebra, geometry and trig, and intro science classes in high school.
Do I think they will be able to revive a human after being frozen for 200 years? Not really... but it's worth trying.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
it's different in that this is actually a scientific endeavour. The question is how can she be frozen without damaging cellular membranes?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
How is this considered the slightest bit complicated?
Cryo's already paid for. Mom doesn't share any expenses with Dad. If she's frozen, there's a tiny chance she'll wake up. If she's buried, there's no chance she'll wake up.
If she wakes up and life is too hard, she can still off herself. But no, let's not even give her the option?
It's a fucking no-brainer and the father should be shot. Well OK not shot, but sternly admonished for sure.
That's not true. We do have the ability to freeze the body without fatally damaging the cells. It would have been smarter to suspend her life (or kill her if you view it that way) via the cryogenic process rather than let her body get further ravaged by cancer to the point that it can't function on its own anymore.
Source: http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/...
From the source:
So to avoid that catastrophic liquid-to-solid state change, cryonics technicians do something cool—they perform surgery through the chest and hook the major arteries up to tubes which pump all the blood out of the body, replacing it with a “cryoprotectant solution,” otherwise known as medical grade anti-freeze. This does two important things: it replaces 60% of the water in the body’s cells, and it lowers the freezing point of what liquid is left. The result, when done perfectly, is that no freezing happens in the body. Instead, as they chill your body down and down over the next three hours, it hits -124C, a key point called the “glass transition temperature” when the body’s liquid stays amorphous but rises so high in viscosity that no molecule can budge. You’re officially an amorphous solid, like glass—i.e. you’re vitrified.
With no molecule movement, all chemical activity in your body comes to a halt. Biological time is stopped. You’re on pause.
I do not trust the cryonics industry to be actually doing the basic research to make it possible. Every time I've heard about it, they're taking the attitude that in the future, the ability will be developed to repair the damage caused by freezing human tissue, a capability that does not exist now. Then in the future they'll have cures for whatever ails the body. Then they'll have the ability to reanimate to then cure the body.
Simply put, no one should give the cryonics industry money to freeze human corpses or near-corpses until that cryonics industry has proven through laboratory experiments that it can freeze and thaw/animate large mammals with high reliability and get a good result for quality-of-life for those mammals, also with high reliability. This capability would demonstrate an ability to freeze without causing undue damage and to reanimate. Then they need to demonstrate the technique on diseased and injured animals, showing that the subject, weakened from the disease or injury, can survive the freezing and thawing/reanimation. Lastly they need to demonstrate that they have the financial endowment to support long-term operations and the costs associated with the reanimation and acclimatization process, and submit themselves to medical regulation.
As it stands now, they are not really regulated as medical businesses. They handle corpses, and since they handle corpses, not patients, they do not have to meet the burden that a medical provider has to meet, and as we've seen with abuses that other entities that handle corpses have been discovered to have committed, they do not have much oversight or regulation. Looking at the Ted Williams case, clearly this is not a mature, honest industry and should not be treated as if it is a realistic solution in any way.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It's a pretty big assumption that memories would survive the freezing process.
Many animals can tolerate being frozen, and they do not lose their memories.
If the process of freezing the body took place in zero g as opposed to earthbound gravity, would the process of freezing the cadaver still cause the shredded cell damage we see in the earthbound process? Likewise since you already have the body in space maintaining frozen tempature in the absolute zero vacuum environment would alleviate the issues of energy expenditure. Simply put the body in an 'ark' type construct, no life support, no engine, steering, etc and get it into a 50 or 100 year orbit. Sounds like science fiction but...
Show me one person who has been saved from this. Shit, name me One person who's been frozen for more than a day and than woken up from said frozen coma. Saving lives my ass. This is a money grab.
Exactly. Same bullshit as homeopathy, astrology, or any religion.
The part you quoted is the theory behind cryonics, and that's all well and good as far as it goes. However, we're not there yet. We don't have the means to distribute the cryoprotectant solution evenly enough throughout the body, or to lower the body's temperature quickly and evenly enough, to preserve all the internal organs in situ. The closest we've come to that is the preservation of individual organs outside the body, as stated later in the article:
And just in February of 2016, there was a cryonics breakthrough when for the first time, scientists vitrified a rabbit's brain and showed that once rewarmed, it was in near-perfect condition, "with the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures intact ... [It was] the first time a cryopreservation was provably able to protect everything associated with learning and memory."
According to the article, we've also managed to successfully freeze, thaw, and re-implant a functioning rabbit kidney. This process has not been successfully demonstrated with human organs, which are significantly larger than rabbit organs and consequently more difficult to freeze without damage, much less a whole intact human body.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
More costly than a cemetery plot. And there's more reason to arrange perpetual care, if you're going to do it at all.
So it's a matter of degree, not kind.
Who are we to criticize someone's spending of their own money on a matter of faith, just because it's not faith in a religion? (Well, not a conventional, well-established religion, anyway.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
What if the cryonics business that is keeping her frozen goes out of business?
This is a very good question! Which leads us to the question of if something happens, and the dearly frozen is thawed, is the company holding the peoplesicle guilty of manslaughter?
What if a hundred years from now, descendants of the frozen don't want to support the monthly bill. Are they permitted to defrost the corpse? Or is this depraved indifference manslaughter or even murder one?
It's easy to say "But she's dead already." But a person kooky enough to put a dead family member in the cooler is crazy enough to press for charges, and probably doesn't believe the person is dead anyhow.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I do not trust the cryonics industry to be actually doing the basic research to make it possible. Every time I've heard about it, they're taking the attitude that in the future, the ability will be developed to repair the damage caused by freezing human tissue, a capability that does not exist now. Then in the future they'll have cures for whatever ails the body. Then they'll have the ability to reanimate to then cure the body.
Occam's demands the simplest answer. That the Cryonics industry is just another way of profiting from grief. After the survivors die, if the descendants pay the bill, and if not, it's into the dumpster for the dear departed. It's like that Corpso3000 ultra deluxe coffin with a camera and App that allows you to visit the dearly departed underground as long as you wish.
It's the Internet of Dead Things.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The father had legitimate concerns about how she would live after 200 years if she was revived (cited in another post of mine below).
Considering that her mother probably had a big part in the decision to freeze her corpse, I daresay the father's concerns darn well were legitimate!
It has to be horrible awful to lose a child that way, but that's a strange reaction, to freeze the corpse. I wonder when visiting days at the freezer are?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The father had legitimate concerns about how she would live after 200 years
There might be concern, but trying to predict 200 years into the future can by no stretch of the word be called "legitimate".
No, its the "now". The Hospital and mortuary expressed "misgivings" and apparently the mother was more concerned about th eprocess than any grieving. As in so many things, there might just be something more going on here. We'll have to stand by for further news, but there is a good chance that while the mother was given the right to decide, and the right to decide was taken away form the father, it's not certain, but the father stands a good chance of footing the bill for the rest of his life.
I wonder what happens then? Is this the sort of thing that will carry down in perpetuity? Will the father and anyone he might marry and/or father after this be required to pay for the dead girl's further cryogenic death suspension? Or will the state be required to foot the bill?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
No, mom's family footed this bill
Do you have the citation for that? I've been looking but haven't seen who was paying, only that the father was concerned about the costs. If the mother's family was paying, it seems odd that he would care.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
She can wish for anything, since she's just 14. But I do expect more sense from her mom, even though I understand the grief she as well as the dad have to be going through.
Side note - there were some misgivings by the hospital and they noted that the mother seemed to be more concerned about the procedures than any grieving.
I can't tell for certain, but this whole thing smacks of a refusal to face reality than anything else. If people need to feel like they are immortal, they should try one of th religions that bestows that upon you. Maybe reincarnation, maybe going to the clouds and worshipping the guy hwo made you or something. Faith will cost a lot less than some weird make a freezer pop our of you idea.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
XKCD Cryogenics
All very true, but it's still misleading to say we haven't figured out how to "freeze" the body without destroying it.
Father was not in touch with daughter for last 6 years. This was major part of evidence. Judge thus took actual carers in close contact (mother and grandparents) into account. Daughter did not at this stage wish to see or inany way contact father who was no longer part of her life.
Regards Eion MacDonald
The cost of preserving the body for an infinite amount of time in this case was £37,000, which was paid by the girl's mother's family.
It was the last statement in TFA:
The cost of preserving the body for an infinite amount of time in this case was £37,000, which was paid by the girl's mother's family.
Missed that, thanks much.
It's interesting that apparently that amount is going to cover the years of immersion in Liquid Nitrogen, the costs of revival, and allow the people running the company to pay themselves.
One is not out of line if they smell a Ponzi pyramid scheme here. Not the typical investment type, but these folk need a constant new stream of people. It does fit the typical confidence game requirements of narcissism or emotion or greed that predispose some people to invest in loser schemes with sketchy business plans.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Not just that, the mom and her family will be dead after N years. After that,their next of kin - what interest will they have in making sure that this organization doesn't fleece them? As others speculated above, after a number of years, when they run out of people to fleece, they'll just dump the bodies in a crematorium, have them cremated and the ashes tossed into the sea. Any cash, if left over, would just be pure gravy.
I don't think it's misleading at all. Practically speaking, we don't know how to freeze entire human bodies—or even individual human organs—without destroying them. We can't even freeze an entire rabbit body without destroying it. We're getting closer, but we're not there yet.
Now if you had a brain the size of a rabbit's, and you didn't mind preserving only the brain and trusting future medical technology to enable brain-transplant into a new body, then you might stand a chance. Otherwise, if your body is to be frozen using current technology, you're depending on future medical innovations to repair the massive cellular damage which will result from the uneven freezing process.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Not just that, the mom and her family will be dead after N years. After that,their next of kin - what interest will they have in making sure that this organization doesn't fleece them? As others speculated above, after a number of years, when they run out of people to fleece, they'll just dump the bodies in a crematorium, have them cremated and the ashes tossed into the sea. Any cash, if left over, would just be pure gravy.
A legal version of the crime "abuse of a corpse"
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There is nothing wrong with believing in an afterlife that you can prove scientifically.
Freezing your body happens to be the first time we've had to confront the possibility.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I believe they are equivalent, at least emotionally and culturally.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire