A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html?_r=0

by sethbannon • 11 years ago

101 163 11 years ago

dominotw• 11 years ago

Why are we so scared of death, to be nothing. Why do we have to cling on to someone's memories,is it because it gives some sense of security?

It is just bizarre to reduce the beauty of life to some some little affair of holding on to someone's memories.

Death is as beautiful as birth. We should break past the ridiculous taboos surrounding death and discuss it openly as to what it means to die.

Edit: Jiddu K on death, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_OzCrmqxRE

pekk• 11 years ago

Once you're dead you'll miss out on all the cool stuff that's happening.

It's bad enough we missed out on all the stuff that happened before we died.

grondilu2• 11 years ago

You don't miss anything because you don't exist anymore.

Missing things is considered a bad thing when you can experience the frustration of not being able to do things you would like to do. But if you don't exist, you can not experience this frustration, thus not being able to do stuff does not mean anything to you because nothing does.

The only frustration you can feel is the idea that in the future you won't be able to do stuff that you would like to do now while you're alive. So you're suffering from an idea. It's all in your head.

Fear of death is a self-inflicted pain. Best attitude towards death is not to think about it.

Like in this movie:

    - A hundred years from now there won't be one
      sad f.ck to look at any of this. What keeps you going?
    - You know what it is, Theo?  I just don't think about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDEFgX-uFZc

dghughes2• 11 years ago

What about medicine if you say death is good why postpone it by eating well, taking medicine and being safe?

I don't see why we humans should die I think if all science put their efforts together (as done in world wars) we could extend human life quite a bit.

The only concern I have is the difference in culture for example imagine a 20 year old versus a person 200 years old. Even today the generation gap between 20 and 40 is big and causes problems when interacting even just music alone as one example.

rue• 11 years ago

If music is the biggest generational gap when I’m 200, I’ll be pretty content with things.

reasonattlm2• 11 years ago

And yet you take your medicines, go to see the doctor, look both ways before crossing the street. Why flee from the thought of doing more than that, of removing all of the other causes of death?

farresito• 11 years ago

Not sure about you, but I would rather be able to choose when to stop living than have to suffer the terrible disease of aging and its implications (neurodegenerative diseases, for example).

Old_Thrashbarg• 11 years ago

Your response is what Aubrey de Grey calls the pro-aging trance. And he offers a lot of possible explanations about the psychology behind why many people pretend death is a good thing.

staunch2• 11 years ago

"Grey believes that defeating aging is feasible and that the pro-aging trance represents a huge barrier to combating aging."

Had not heard that term before. I'm glad someone gave it a name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#Pro-aging_tranc...

staunch2• 11 years ago

The only people not afraid of death are delusional or suicidal.

tene2• 11 years ago

I can't say for sure that I won't ever choose to opt out of the rest of forever, but for now there are things I want to do, places I want to see, people I want to spend time with, or get to know. I'm not universally against death; when anyone chooses to die, that's their choice, modulo some concerns about depression-induced suicide. I'm against involuntary death. I want sufficient medical technology to keep people alive for as long as they choose.

Death may be beautiful. I disagree, but I can see how some people might think that. I hear that the view from the top of mount everest is quite something, but does that mean there's no reason you might complain if someone broke into your house, dragged you off, flew you up there, and dumped you at the top against your will?

I absolutely agree with you that it would be great if we could learn as a society to discuss death more openly. I think that a big part of what might help that happen would be sufficient medical technology that death mostly only happens voluntarily.

reasonattlm2• 11 years ago

Some reading material for those interesting in the current state of cryonics development and research, starting with an overview and moving on. Modern cryopreservation aims for vitrification, not freezing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics

http://alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm

http://www.brainpreservation.org/competitors/

The evidence assembled to date provides a reasonable expectation that the fine structure of the brain responsible for storing the data of the mind is preserved by vitrification, based on scanning electron microscopy and current best understanding of where that data is encoded.

There are a few organizations that span the intersection between organ preservation and cryonics, such as 21st Century Medicine. The focus there is on reversible vitrification, such as the paper linked below in which a rabbit kidney is vitrified, restored, and implanted.

http://www.21cm.com/

http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/12FahyORG5-3%5b1%5d.pdf

There is a sizable fraction of the futurist community who approach cryonics with the pattern identity view of being satisfied with a copy of their mind running in emulation at some point in the future, the original vitrified substrate then discarded. Not very satisfying from the continuity identity perspective; a copy of you is not you. I'd be stipulating a restoration of the original tissues; probably a harder problem, but one that can be understood and foreseen. Advanced molecular nanotechnology and complete control over cellular biology would be requirements, for example, but that looks like being feasible later this century, just like the process of scanning and emulation.

The madness of it all is that cryonics is very plausible and could be far more cost-effective at volume. Yet no-one cares. Just like the problems encountered in trying to persuade anyone that working on rejuvenation biotechnology for indefinite healthy life spans is a good plan, in the matter of cryonics the population world is content to slow-walk off the cliff of aging and death without doing anything about it. There is no status quo so terrible that it won't be embraced and defended. Billions are lost to oblivion in an age in which the technological capabilities exist to prevent the overwhelming majority of those deaths. And no-one cares. The future will look on us as suicidal, ignorant barbarians, and rightly so.

AndrewKemendo• 11 years ago

Not very satisfying from the continuity identity perspective; a copy of you is not you.

Neither are you, you you from yesterday or the day before - conscious continuity is illusory. How do you know that your body isn't replaced with a new copy each night (thought experiment)?

restoration of the original tissues...Advanced molecular nanotechnology and complete control over cellular biology

You run into a Ship of Theseus problem with this approach, which gets back to your original qualia problem.

The biological body is not made to last - you'll need to be converted to something more durable if you want an unbroken conscious experience longer than ~100 years.

analog312• 11 years ago

Neither are you, you you from yesterday or the day before - conscious continuity is illusory. How do you know that your body isn't replaced with a new copy each night (thought experiment)?

Because the workmanship keeps getting worse and worse. ;-)

fizixer3• 11 years ago

Neither are you, you you from yesterday or the day before - conscious continuity is illusory. How do you know that your body isn't replaced with a new copy each night (thought experiment)?

Conscious continuity "might be" illusory. (Unless you have a proof or evidence; unlikely).

And favoring mind uploading over bio-longevity based on a "might be" is a very unsafe bet.

NhanH• 11 years ago

May be Buddhism got it right a few thousand years ago: the notion of self (ie your conscious) is just an illusion ;-)

coldtea5• 11 years ago

There is a sizable fraction of the futurist community who approach cryonics with the pattern identity view of being satisfied with a copy of their mind running in emulation at some point in the future, the original vitrified substrate then discarded

Since we loose continuity when we sleep, is the people waking up "us"? The only reason we say "yes" to that, is because it's the same body -- not because continuity of conscious existence wasn't lost.

Not very satisfying from the continuity identity perspective; a copy of you is not you.

Consider the classic "Ship of Theseus" way: while the subject is awake, his brain is replaced neuron by neuron by artificial neurons. He is conscious for the whole process.

In the end of the procedure, his whole brain is now an electronic one. We follow the same steps and replace all his body parts.

Now consider that at the same time, the old body is re-assembled from the parts taken out.

Is his new electronic copy or the old one the real "he"?

I'd say, favoring continuity, and since the electronic brain/body remained always conscious as it was being built, whereas the meat-brain got conscious after the transfer was over (brain matter being placed there piece by piece), it's the electronic one that's the real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

primitivesuave• 11 years ago

Black Mirror (on Netflix) has a powerful interpretation on the implications of digital reanimation in Season 2 Episode 1, "Be Right Back", although the digital representation of the deceased human is created by an AI that reads all of the person's digital information (social media, emails, videos, etc) and emulates them.

grondilu2• 11 years ago

There's a real world company that offers this service:

https://www.eter9.com/

pavlov• 11 years ago

Is that a real company? The copy sounds like it could be a viral marketing campaign for a movie.

ThomasBombadil3• 11 years ago

Consider the idea that this is a vector into the idea of machines being possibly equally important, or considered even more important than living humans, based on their capacity to accurately represent the continued presence of deceased humans.

That a machine is permitted to occupy and consume resources, that might otherwise be used by actual living people who are also trying to live meaningful lives. Which one wins?

codecamper• 11 years ago

no worries. The human emulator uses just 1% of a 2050 EC2 mini compute instance.

sbilstein• 11 years ago

The occasional stuttering is actually due to GC pauses.

ThomasBombadil3• 11 years ago

So, if the distributed hardware infrastructure cluster supporting 10,000 EC2 mini compute instances is packed with 1,000,000 emulations of humans, how important are the physical data centers that encompass all their backups, master copies and live instances?

eloff• 11 years ago

The implications of your identity being copied into a new, improved body and what that means when the original you is dead, or what happens when you get copied more than once, etc are explored in depth in Jasper Scott's excellent Dark Space series: http://www.jaspertscott.com/p/dark-space-v-avilon.html

lfam2• 11 years ago

Some of Greg Egan's books explore this as well. I recommend Diaspora and Permutation City.

wfn• 11 years ago

Also see Greg Egan's short story, "The Extra" (http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Extra) and others, e.g. "Closer" (http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer)

danbmil99• 11 years ago

Also see every f-in thing Greg Egan wrote. Then for fun try to google his image.

loup-vaillant11• 11 years ago

The social problems from multiple instances, I can understand. The original being dead however, doesn't make much sense. As far as current science goes, it doesn't even have a physical meaning. All that matters is the result: if there is an instance of you, no one died, period.

(Well, not quite "period", actually. If you let one instance run for a while (a second, a minute, a day?), then destroy it, that certainly looks like murder.)

JesperRavn4• 11 years ago

It's fascinating that this is so close to reality, at least in terms of preserving the information that encodes our memories and identities.

Of course there is the issue of reviving the person, either biologically or digitally. As computing power grows, I don't see any barrier to simulating an entire human brain. Sure it will take time: according to this[0] and applying Moore's law, it will take about 60 years before we can simulate a brain in real time with a single machine.

This whole field makes me very uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's wrong, but the potential for harm (particularly to those being simulated) is very great. There's a Greg Egan story where reanimated humans live as "AI" characters a game simulation, waiting for when society will wake up and grant them rights.

[0] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-secon...

lfam2• 11 years ago

Which Greg Egan story is that?

JesperRavn4• 11 years ago

I can't remember (possibly not Greg Egan). In case someone else knows, the main plot is that the characters have to act as inhabitants of a primitive village, in a computer game/simulation.

Udik• 11 years ago

Possibly he refers to Permutation City. Absolutely necessary read.

eli_gottlieb4• 11 years ago

Almost all of them.

coldtea5• 11 years ago

and applying Moore's law, it will take about 60 years before we can simulate a brain in real time with a single machine.

What Moore's law? This has already stopped.

JesperRavn4• 11 years ago

Re Moore's law, the best answer I could get was from Intel via Wikipedia[0] "our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two." So I wouldn't call that "stopped" but slowed. On the other hand, there are other kinds of advancement that don't really fit into any kind of "law" but might make up for this slowdown, resulting in long term exponential growth, e.g. the transition from CPU to GPU computing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

amalcon6• 11 years ago

Cryonics is one of those things that's hard to evaluate.

On the face of it, it seems insane. You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses. Given the near-total lack of progress on the former front (there's been considerable progress in the freezing part, but almost none in finding a useful thing to do with a frozen brain), the odds seem phenomenally bad.

On the other hand, it does offer something to those who are still alive: the hope that your exstence could continue indefinitely, and that you might get to be with lost loved ones again. This is a valuable hope, so much so that it's built into most religions in some form or other. It's possible that the benefit of this hope makes the costs worth bearing.

For now, I've left cryonics in my "not for me, but I won't try to discourage anyone else" bucket.

fizixer3• 11 years ago

Surprisingly, the financial aspect of it is pretty manageable as explained by Max More (head of Alcor) [0].

Apparently if you have signed up for some kind of life-insurance, you simply pay your regular insurance fee, and direct them to give it to Alcor for your preservation if you die.

Or if you wish to pay in total, I've heard it's ~$80K for head only. And ~$200K for whole body.

Once I can afford any of the above options, cryonics would be my top "burial preference".

(Think about it, in the US, it's a fraction of the amount you get to spend in the final year of your life. You could choose to waste a lot of money during age 79-80 on a losing battle, or you could call it quits at 79, for which right-to-die needs to be legal, and spend a fraction on cryonics. Suffice to say, I'm a big advocate of right-to-die as well).

[0] (Warning: loud intro) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0xiX9mPB_s

amalcon6• 11 years ago

Just because that's what Alcor is asking for does not mean that they can actually deliver the service they promise for that amount. Frankly, I don't think any fixed amount is sufficient for a reasonable chance of a positive outcome. A lot can happen in a few hundred years.

If you believe they are honest and competent (which I do), there are factors to consider entirely beyond their control. Even if we assume that there are still humans around to run Alcor, that energy prices haven't skyrocketed, that cryonics haven't been made illegal for some reason, and that some kind of war or natural or man-made disaster hasn't wiped out the facility, there's still a rather high chance that some future management of Alcor will be either dishonest or incompetent and ruin the whole thing. On a 200 year scale, I'd place the odds of that alone above 90%, even if I assume maximally effective present management.

Again, this doesn't have any effect on the present benefits (hope, etc).

blake8086• 11 years ago

It's not that insane when compared to the alternative.

a8da6b0c91d3• 11 years ago

Yes it is. Sane people are comfortable with death. It takes a weird sort of narcissism to pursue cryonics.

Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.

tene2• 11 years ago

Cryonics is pretty unlikely to succeed! I'm signed up for cryonics through Alcor, and I am not confident at all that there's much chance that I'll be revived post-vitrification. I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation. I see it as a low-percentage last-chance life support. It's early and underdeveloped and flawed in many ways, but it's still the best (only) game in town for when all other medical technology has failed.

amalcon6• 11 years ago

This is precisely what I mean when I talk about hope. That value is real, and I don't discount it the way most cryonics non-supporters seem to.

eli_gottlieb4• 11 years ago

I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation.

Except that there are other things you could do with the money, some of which could potentially even give you a much greater chance of not vitrifying in the first place.

tim333• 11 years ago

Cryonics is pretty unlikely to succeed!

There seems a surprising amount of techno pessimism here. Just to take the other side I think it's very likely to succeed at least to some extent. If you just assume computing and scanning keep improving a similar amount per year to what they have been then we'll have the tech to scan and simulate for example in two or three decades.

ryandvm• 11 years ago

Cryonics is another version of Pascal's Wager.

Logic and reason assures that it almost certainly is not going to work, but the value of the potential upside is effectively infinite to that individual, so it still may be a rational investment.

loup-vaillant11• 11 years ago

The original wager is more extreme than that. Paradise is eternal Fun, while hell is eternal Not Cool. Cryonics, assuming you don't believe in the afterlife, only gives a hope of life in our world, instead of certain oblivion.

Life does not have infinite value. People, including atheists, sometimes give their own life for some higher purpose (another life, freedom, a better standard of living for their village…).

Of course, this would be different if you seek to escape Hell. (You might be religious, and guilty of some mortal sin.)

a8da6b0c91d3• 11 years ago

upside is effectively infinite

Shambling about like some lonely museum piece come to life sounds pretty worthless to me, personally. The value of a human life is in its context of family and society.

dennisgorelik17• 11 years ago

What if your brain would unfrozen straight into "hell"?

The researchers from the future may put your brain into very painful condition in order to keep it functional.

Would cryonic worth it?

analog312• 11 years ago

... before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses.

A vastly more likely scenario is that the company is a scam in the first place, and has no particular interest in preserving your brain, given the complete lack of any possible accountability mechanism.

edanm5• 11 years ago

That's a little pessimistic, and doesn't sound right to me.

There aren't that many companies in cryonics, but they've been around for a long time (30 years I think?). And there are things you can do to verify - e.g. visit their preservation rooms, etc. And people have done this.

rdl• 11 years ago

I agree Alcor could improve. It clearly has over the past decades, and will continue to do so. Why not participate in that?

Their conference is in October. I'm going. (I signed up with Alcor after Hal Finney; the only thing worse is dying, and I'd like it to get better...)

$1k/yr between membership and a 20y 500k term life policy seems cheap enough to me.

336f54• 11 years ago

that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses

You've misunderstood the business structure of modern cryonics. A cryonics org like ALCOR is actually two organizations: one is a commercial organization which charges for storage and for the messy business of cryopreservation, and the second is a nonprofit trust which 'owns' the vitrified brains, pays the rent, conservatively invests the rest, and which will pay for the revival procedures if/when such are invented. When the commercial organization collapses, the nonprofit will simply have to have the dewars transferred somewhere else (it takes something like weeks for those things to boil down to a dangerous level; LN2 dewars are really cool!); and I believe there have already been transferrals of cryopatients in the past.

When you die, your life insurance is paying much of that out into the trust fund. There's not much question of 'whether your estate will be able to afford the procedure', since that's what the trust is for. It's not your estate's business at all.

hugh42• 11 years ago

The nonprofit can also collapse, though.

Is it likely to happen? Honestly I have a very hard time imagining the probabilities. Financial collapse versus deliberate destruction versus horrible accident versus actually getting revived? They all seem unlikely, but once your brain is in deep freeze, its fate is one of those.

amalcon6• 11 years ago

The business structure is irrelevant. There are either enough resources to maintain the procedure or not. If there are not enough resources, what legal entity technically owns those resources is irrelevant.

cbr3• 11 years ago

"that your estate will be able to afford the procedure" reads to me as being about revival? Which ALCOR etc don't attempt to cover.

loup-vaillant11• 11 years ago

You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain

Something is deeply wrong with this way of thinking: it doesn't value human life at all.

Here's another version. Someone comes to you seeking for help. He's dying. He could be saved by some recently devised miraculous medical procedure, which would return him to full health. The catch is, that procedure is relatively expensive (let's say a few weeks worth of your own salary). Question: would you let him die?

Put it this way, of course not. But we tend to forget that cryopreservation, if it works, is exactly the same.

See, a preserved person, provided she can actually be reconstructed back to life, is not actually dead. She's mostly dead. There's a difference. Think of it as a very deep coma. So, if we ever devise a proper reconstruction procedure, we have two choices: (i) pay for the procedure and heal that patient at last; or (ii) don't pay and let the patient drift into utter annihilation.

Heal or don't heal. It's that simple.

---

Now maybe you assume a frozen brain is not a living person. Maybe you're right. Maybe the preservation wasn't good enough on this particular brain. Maybe the preservation procedure was flawed to begin with. Maybe the brain doesn't hold enough information about a person to begin with. Maybe we won't find the technological means to actually get the brain back to its old state —even if it's theoretically possible. Maybe we won't be able to fix whatever caused the brainwaves to go flat in the first place —if that's fixable even in theory, see Alzheimer. I'm sure I've forgotten lots of ways this could go horribly wrong. Anyway, if any of this is true, that frozen brain can't be recovered, does count as dead, and you'd be right to call it a "frozen brain" instead of a "patient".

The thing is, to the best of our current knowledge, the odds are not nil. They're not good, but they're not nil. There is a chance that the brain is actually alive —I mean, in some real deep coma. I'm not talking about some abstract hope here, but some actual probabilities of the kind you have for experimental drugs on cancer patients. Slim, but real.

And of course, if we somehow come up with an actual reconstruction procedure, if we somehow can examine the brain and be assured that yes, a return to full health is not only possible, but highly probable, then we'll know that brain was alive all along. That it was a living person in dire need of healing.

Surely the people of the future would be willing to pay for such healing? If not strangers, maybe (distant) relatives? Some philanthropist? The transhumanist community? Government or mutual funds? Today, people pay good money to give Kim a very slim hope of living again. In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?

amalcon6• 11 years ago

False dichotomy. I don't need to place a zero value on human life to disagree with this reasoning. I only need to place a finite value on it. Obviously our society only places a finite value on human life (e.g. because people sometimes starve to death, or die for lack of medical care).

Edit: > In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?

This one. People die of totally curable conditions all the time in the real, modern world.

cbr3• 11 years ago

"In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?"

This one.

People are dying now because of diseases we have basically eradicated in rich countries. The choice you're talking about making, saving a life for a few weeks worth of your own salary, is one that is already available to you and many others. What are you doing about it?

Now, I think you're right that it's horribly wrong to be letting people die when it's so easily avoidable, and I donate half my salary to help make things better, but most people don't think this way--most people just spend their money on themselves. Which means that if you're relying on the generosity of others to revive you you're probably going to be out of luck.

bitwize• 11 years ago

See, a preserved person, provided she can actually be reconstructed back to life, is not actually dead. She's mostly dead.

And mostly dead is partly alive. If she were all dead, well, there's only one thing you can do -- go through her pockets and look for loose change.

ck2• 11 years ago

Now factor in the sheer population of the earth by the time science reaches such an implausible point and realize how little one life matters to anyone living or remotely "in charge".

WalterBright10• 11 years ago

Isn't it still the Star Trek Transporter problem? The future may be able to revive a copy of you, that thinks it is you, but you'd still be dead.

loup-vaillant11• 11 years ago

Oh, that one's easy. At the state of current science, we're pretty much sure that the Star Trek transporter doesn't kill the traveller. The "copy" is the original, in fact. Basically, this is because we're kinda made of particles, and the origin of the quarks you're made up of doesn't matter. As in, current physics don't even have a notion of the identity of a particle.

The part where it gets weird is, if you don't destroy the "original", you end up with two originals.

More (much more) details here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_id...

zanny2• 11 years ago

If they are able to revive the original brain (and considering the whole point of cryonics is indefinite suspension until your wants are met) at some point in the next five billion years, assuming we don't kill ourselves (which like all those metrics about the odds of Alcor failing is also astronomically high) we should eventually be able to regenerate a brain rather than replace it.

You might lose some memories, but if its at least 51% of the original brains tissue, is that not still "you", even if it is now full of fresh gray matter to replace all that damaged by freezing?

amalcon6• 11 years ago

This depends on how you define the self. That's a philosophical question with many, many possible answers. Humanity isn't in any sort of broad agreement about which one is right.

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

How is it any different at all from sleeping and waking up? How do you determine, each morning, that you're still you, for whatever value of that line you choose?

Even more starkly: ever had surgery? Ever taken benzos? Or been black out drunk? I could give you an amnesic med, like midazolam (often used in surgery) then tell you that you were absolutely certain to die. And I'd be right (again for whatever flimsy values we're using here). The version of you that is hearing me tell you these things will disappear from earth. You'll wake up in the morning, none the wiser.

Edit: Only scary part is staying conscious after the cutover. Greg Egan gets into some of this with excellent short stories in Axiomatic (The Jewel) and Luminous (Transition Dreams). But that's still not really much worse than benzos.

Apofis3• 11 years ago

For me, the only reason cryonics appeals to me is that I really really want to see the kinds of things humanity will come up 100 years down the line, 1000 years down the line... it's unimaginable but I really want to see our future and experience it. Hopefully by the time I'm in my 50's, cryogenics will be far more advanced and it will be a feasible alternative to simply disappearing.

developer1• 11 years ago

Yes, because the fear of death totally makes the decision to have faith in sci-fi a rational thought. I sincerely hope our species never solves the puzzle of immortal life or even prolonging a life past a natural existence. The mere thought disgusts me. Please, hell no.

caycep• 11 years ago

to be honest, from a histology, pathology point of view, it's pretty doubtful anyone frozen today would be restored to anywhere near working consciousness, no matter how many rat brain glycerol SEM slice pictures the company trots out. The second law of thermodynamics is pretty rough on neural tissue.

saalweachter• 11 years ago

... and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure ...

The concerns about your frozen remains spoiling before anything happens is valid, but I personally suspect that unfreezing will play out like Social Security, but in reverse order. If we're unfrozen, it will be paid for (or prompted, in whatever post-scarcity Star Trek economy exists in the future) by our children and grandchildren, who will be unfrozen by their children and grandchildren, or childhood friend who misses them, or former coworker, and so on down the line.

There's probably no practical or economic reason for future people to unfreeze corpsicles, but there are sentimental ones. So I'm not so much worried about estates needing to pay for unfreezing or some future banks needing COBOL programmers.

runewell• 11 years ago

More power to her. I hope she awakens to a body and future that brings her happiness.

eevilspock2• 11 years ago

With all the suffering, injustice, unequal opportunity and privilege in the world, this to me is the epitome of narcissism and selfishness.

Would you donate to this rather than to social services for, for example, thousands of homeless children in New York City alone?

13thLetter• 11 years ago

Why are you spending your time posting on Hacker News when you could be rescuing babies?

eevilspock2• 11 years ago

I've devoted my life to working for a better world for all. I quit my 6-figure job years ago to work on solutions or ways to convince others to work on solutions. I spend time on Hacker News because I'm trying to use my tech skills for these aims, to be a voice in a tech culture that is too prone to callousness (such as yours) and simplisitic notions that the free-market solves all.

Why do you have to be mean? My comment wasn't mean, it was a criticism of the direction of our culture. Social progress doesn't happen without critique.

I find it ironic that I'm being downvoted for speaking a valid but un-PC thought in a community that normally complains about the ills of political correctness.

anti-shill• 11 years ago

In order to be a good Christian and receive the eternal life promised in the Bible, you must be a cryonicist.

At least that is the case according to this blog:

http://churchofthebetterresurrection.blogspot.com/

salgernon• 11 years ago

So, 10,000 years in the future they can revive you.

Apparently, we've decided that it has a hard problem to guarantee that we can communicate with the future, even about really bad stuff:

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...

This is about warning the future about nuclear waste, but could be adopted to "vault of frozen heads" (Assuming they haven't failed by then and there was sufficient coolant.)

Sort of flip the opening sentences around: "This is a place of honor!"

ridgeguy• 11 years ago

I view current cryonics as a bit like playing the lottery. If you don't play, you will not win. If you do play, you have a minuscule but nonzero chance of winning.

Over 30 years ago, I joined others to sit with a friend while he died way too young. He had arranged for cryonic preservation. AFAIK, he's still chilling. And he has a minuscule but nonzero chance of someday resuming his prematurely interrupted life.

While that seems to me extremely unlikely to happen, I wonder if it felt just as unlikely to somebody in the 3rd century that people would someday fly through the air...or talk to a friend who was beyond shouting distance...or live to 90 years of age...etc. We've sequenced DNA from dinosaurs, and 30 years ago I would have bet strongly against that.

I've learned to avoid underrating the power of exponential increments in knowledge and capability.

dennisgorelik17• 11 years ago

I think lottery is a good analogy here.

1) Extremely low chances to win (if at all).

2) The change that the winner is going to regret being revived is quite high (dysfunctional body, totally new environment, being a subject of historians' research).

gboudrias• 11 years ago

being a subject of historians' research

I might be narcissistic but that seems like a good thing to me. Imagine being able to tell future people what the present was really like.

cLeEOGPw• 11 years ago

If you do play, you have a minuscule but nonzero chance of winning.

This is what I don't get it. Why people think this? You have exactly ZERO chance to win.

Even if cryonics will be a thing in the future, nobody is going to unfreeze you or put you in some body. I'm not even counting technological aspects, where your brain would be incorrectly frozen/lack of some key chemicals that has to be used that don't exist yet/tissue not preserved well enough. Even if they COULD make you live, future people wouldn't do it. Reason is that your brain has no value of any kind besides cryonics experimentation - means same value as a cow or a pig. Maybe even less, because your brain might bring trouble to ethicists who would be upset.

Cryonics for smart people is money spending equivalent of fortune teller for less smart people. Even if you explain to them it is not worth it, it doesn't work like they think it works, etc., they will still be convinced they are right. If this helps you psychologically then good for you, fortune tellers sometimes helps people in certain areas too.

dennisgorelik17• 11 years ago

If you want to preserve your genes, then much more reliable way to do that is to have kids.

If you want to preserve your ideas, then writing books, articles and public comments on Internet is the way to go.

The chance of successful recovery of frozen dead brain after 100 years is very close to zero (assuming that the recovery process was never tested). Kim Suozzi's “1 or 2 percent chance” is extremely optimistic forecast.

BinaryIdiot3• 11 years ago

The chance of successful recovery of frozen dead brain after 100 years is very close to zero (assuming that the recovery process was never tested). Kim Suozzi's “1 or 2 percent chance” is extremely optimistic forecast.

While it's impossible to predict whether you'll be able to be revived it doesn't sit right with me that you, and many others, are making predictions about how future medical technology will work. Honestly, if we can keep progressing as quickly as we have been, it wouldn't surprise me that we couldn't do it after X years but could do it after X + Y years. Meaning if at some point we have the technology to start reviving people but can't do it reliably then wait another Y amounts of years and there is a significantly better chance.

Honestly, unless the brain is just completely ruined or something bad happens to the handling of the brains, it wouldn't surprise me if they're all eventually revivable. At this point we may be talking 200+ years away but they're frozen, who cares?

dennisgorelik17• 11 years ago

Making predictions is the main way to test out theories.

but they're frozen, who cares?

That is another problem with cryonics: why would future civilization care about dead brains frozen 200 years ago?

Imagine that we already have technology that can unfreeze and revive people. And we just found 100,000 frozen medieval people to unfreeze.

So for the same price we can either unfreeze and revive 100,000 people or we can extend lives of 100,000 modern people who are facing terminal illness today.

How many medieval people do you think we would unfreeze&revive given such choice?

A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future

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