Cryonics Myths

http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html

by apsec112 • 8 years ago

33 49 8 years ago

Being an avid cryonicist, I have attempted to express these myths to a wide variety of people. The very few and open-minded folks that will move past utter dismissal usually have a deep and visceral illogical fear of death - or a deep and visceral religious belief in the afterlife. These "Cryonics Myths Debunked" tend to only further convince those who are likely to choose Cryonics anyways.

There must be a better way to convince the masses, but so far no billionaire or government has stepped forward with a serious effort here, and I doubt such a thing will occur in our lifetimes.

My point is, other avid cryonicists should study serious and effective approaches, and abandon the "rational" one. But hey, making it up high on the hacker-news top-10 is a good start.

philwelch8• 8 years ago

Funny, I find that the cryonics advocates are the ones with the deep and visceral illogical fear of death. That’s why one signs up for cryonics, right? Being at peace with one’s mortality removes the selfish “rational” incentive for cryonics.

Individual people are replaceable, and don’t belong outside of their own time. If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century. Because that’s the kind of mess you propose to inflict on our future descendants.

romwell• 8 years ago

Maybe I don't want to live in a world inhabited by "reanimated massed".

But I do want to see spaceships bringing people beyond the boundaries of human life spans.

I don't one can reasonably hope for faster-than-light travel. But cryonics is a technology that looks, at the very least, feasible.

reasonattlm3• 8 years ago

You also were born in the past. Are you not comfortable with death by your own declaration? So why do you work to avoid it, rather than embracing it? Why are you still alive? Are you not, by your own ethics, outside your time, creating a mess, and less valuable than people born after you?

Yet you undertake continual efforts to remain alive, embracing the use of food and medicine - technologies developed purely and entirely to stave off naturally occurring death.

I feel that you haven't fully examined your own position on this matter.

Momquist• 8 years ago

If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century.

Sounds like Riverworld. I think it could be quite interesting. But anyway, whether it's a potential mess or not is something for our future descendants to decide on.

Advocating cryonics today doesn't imply that our descendants, even if they have the technology, will accept the resurrection of masses. We have immigration laws today, I'm sure the same concept could be thought up for "people outside their own time", if it ever is an issue.

OscarCunningham2• 8 years ago

One might as well say that being at peace with one's hunger removes the selfish "rational" incentive for food.

justinalanbass6• 8 years ago

I can't speak for everyone, but my interest in Cryonics stems from a love of life, not a fear of death. Preservation will not solve grief, death, or displacement in time. Nor does it necessitate immortality - I want to die, eventually, but if there is a chance at more life, I'll take it. People have spent more on experimental cancer treatments with similar uncertainty and discomfort, so I suppose it's similar to that.

I would gladly revive a non famous person from the 18th century - diversity in thought doesn't seem to be a mess to me. And any future that would revive me would necessarily agree - I'm just betting there are enough people like me when resurrection is possible. And if everyone is like you, I'd gladly opt to be dissected and studied instead.

nordsieck• 8 years ago

In principle I could be on board with cryonics, but I have one principled objection that I can't seem to get around:

I see no reason why anyone with the ability to re-animate/heal cryo-preserved strangers would do so.

joe_the_user2• 8 years ago

If we had the ability to reanimate 1,000 people from ancient Egypt, it seems highly plausible the resources could be found to do it. These people would be a font of information from a long forgotten past. The only question is whether they could adjust to the present.

So if preserved people from the past survived long enough, it seems like historical interest could motivate people to re-animate them. There may be other motivations but that's one.

Maybe only a small selection would be reanimated at any one time. But that might others to revived later.

OscarCunningham2• 8 years ago

Presumably they can be paid to do so from the same fund whose interest is being used to keep the bodies frozen.

justinalanbass6• 8 years ago

Diversity of thought, novelty. In the same way it never gets old to watch a child experience "I am your father!" for the first time, I'm sure humans of the future will enjoy entertaining humans of the past.

discreditable• 8 years ago

"Ask a Mortician" just did a video on Cyronics! https://youtu.be/FOZSU0SLNME

nwatson2• 8 years ago

Cryonics Myth #1: "Trustees 200 years in future at a time when your disease [X] is completely curable will care to bring you back."

There's no corporate or legal or NGO structure in the business that will last long enough that anyone will care, and even if they do the cooling system failover will not work in the particularly hot summer of 2074.

nwatson2• 8 years ago

And while we're at it, somebody needs to do the cryonics re-make of the not-so-classic 1960's movie "The Loved One":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-edybFkBiO4 -- Rod Steiger as Mr. Joyboy, the masterful mortician at work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoZ5dTQa_2E -- Liberace as a funeral home salesperson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaGtDJo5R5o -- Aimee Thanatogenos visits Mr. Joyboy and his mother

abecedarius3• 8 years ago

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

Also we don't know how long this needs to work. If it happens at all I expect it'll be in much less than 200 years. (Yes, of course that's a big if.)

apsec112• 8 years ago

While there is a real risk that cryonics organizations will fail, there's no reason to think it's a foregone conclusion. Tons of organizations have been around for over two hundred years. The oldest non-profits in continuous existence are well over a thousand years old. There's no legal barrier to a non-profit corporation or trust continuing to exist indefinitely, as many indeed have. (Heck, the Nobel Prizes are an after-death trust that has only gotten larger and more famous in the 122 years since Nobel's death.)

See also Alcor's reply to "Who will revive patients?": http://alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#whowillrevive

There is no active cooling system; cryonics patients are passively cooled with liquid nitrogen. The only regular maintenance needed is adding more liquid nitrogen, and the storage dewars can last for many months before replenishment is needed.

empath75• 8 years ago

There is no shortage of people in the world and no reason to add additional people who are old or diseased, and have no particular skills that are necessary in the future.

It’s much cheaper (not to mention more fun) to make more babies.

tim333• 8 years ago

There's no corporate or legal or NGO structure in the business that will last long enough that anyone will care

No people will care because that's what they do and that's why we have schools, hospitals and the like in all countries, not because there is a legal structure requiring them.

reasonattlm3• 8 years ago

Reversible vitrification of organs is a field starting to show some promise. It will revolutionize the transplant industry, and will bring more attention to cryonics.

https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/216900...

There is also some interesting work spurred by the Brain Preservation Prize:

http://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal-announcement/

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cryobiol.2015.09.003

"We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution."

krisives2• 8 years ago

They mention they don't preserve "heads" in specific but rather brains, and go into detail about how they can't separate a brain from a skull so they preserve the entire head. Wouldn't separating the head from the body cause similar problems of destroying information in the brain? Do they keep the entire body?

abecedarius3• 8 years ago

Whole-body preservation has been a more expensive option (and I assume still is, but I haven't been keeping up to date).

Not that I've tried, but I guess detaching a head at the base has less potential to damage than would opening and removing the whole skull.

krisives2• 8 years ago

I know nothing of this field, is there any idea of how long "information" stays in the brain or any metric like that once blood/oxygen flow to the brain has been inhibited?

blake8086• 8 years ago

I did a podcast with a friend covering a lot of these points here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ffQEoSJW4w

I think a big myth people need dispelled is that cryonics is really expensive. It's not a very expensive gamble to take, and it's pretty easy to see that it's worthwhile for many people.

ericb• 8 years ago

Brain vitrification, from their FAQ:

This procedure is not yet reversible because of other damage (not caused by ice) including biochemical effects of the vitrification solution — but it eliminates ice damage and the preservation of fine structure is excellent.

mpetrovich• 8 years ago

For those of you who don't know much about cryonics (myself included), Wait But Why [1] has has fantastic primer.

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html

placebo2• 8 years ago

As the procedure has not been proved to be reversible, it suggests to me that finding a future cure for the original ailment is the easiest assumption to make in this field. I'm more interested to get better answers to the myth that "Cryonics is not a belief that the dead can be revived" than those presented in the article. I'd be hard pressed to say that there are things I think are impossible, but there are a great many things I think are very improbable. In the movie A.I., there's a part where advanced aliens temporarily restore the life of the hero's "mother" using a lock of her hair and some pseudoscientific stuff about information they managed to retrieve from the space-time continuum. All this without even having access to her brain! Impossible? I don't know - perhaps having the theoretical ability to retrieve a specific configuration which maybe exists at some dimension, somehow holographically stored in the fabric of universe combined with an unimaginably advanced intelligence and technological ability might make it doable. Do I believe there's a non zero probability if it being possible? Yes. Do I believe it will ever happen? No. Although cryonics is far less presumptuous than reviving back a personality from a lock of hair and information extracted from the "spacetime continuum", the complete lack of evidence for any sort of reversibility of the process makes me extremely skeptical in the wisdom in paying for such a procedure, regardless of how well intentioned it might be.

reasonattlm3• 8 years ago

http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/rej.2014.1636

"Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested for memory retention after cryopreservation. Our study's goal was to test C. elegans' memory recall after vitrification and reviving. Using a method of sensory imprinting in the young C. elegans, we establish that learning acquired through olfactory cues shapes the animal's behavior and the learning is retained at the adult stage after vitrification. Our research method included olfactory imprinting with the chemical benzaldehyde (C6H5CHO) for phase-sense olfactory imprinting at the L1 stage, the fast-cooling SafeSpeed method for vitrification at the L2 stage, reviving, and a chemotaxis assay for testing memory retention of learning at the adult stage. Our results in testing memory retention after cryopreservation show that the mechanisms that regulate the odorant imprinting (a form of long-term memory) in C. elegans have not been modified by the process of vitrification or by slow freezing."

placebo2• 8 years ago

Thank you, that's news to me. While I still remain skeptical due to the orders of magnitude of complexity in the gap between C. elegans and humans, it definitely calls for a reassessment of the probability I have previously attached to it.

This is why I like HN...

utopkara• 8 years ago

If Steve Jobs hasn't done it, then who am I to waste money on this.

Wh1zz4• 8 years ago

I don't know, who are you? Perhaps you may be someone that enjoys walks, beautiful views, or maybe the perfume of a loved one? Maybe you're the type of person that would want to never stop experiencing these things. Or maybe you're the type of person that only does things approved and recommended by [rich person from pop culture]. Yeah, why even take any chances if they're not thoroughly sold to you by some CEO. It's just your existence we're talking about after all. Who are you to exist if [rich person from pop culture] stopped a while ago anyway?

philwelch8• 8 years ago

Do you have stock in Alcor?

smoll• 8 years ago

I started casually researching cryonics after reading the WaitButWhy article on it https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html and I'm recently leaning towards more towards a "why not?" mindset but I'm not yet fully convinced.

The purely logical, rational side of me wants to say "why should I make an assumption that 21st century norms about the inevitability of death will hold true or are even valid at all?" so I should just do the least presumptuous thing and get frozen.

But on the other hand, what does the quality of life look like for a 21st century human reanimated in 2300 or 2500 or whatever? If history (or Black Mirror) tells us anything, at best, I'll live out my immortal life as some sick museum exhibit/circus curiosity, with no possibility of the kind embrace of death unless some rebellious young person happens to take pity on me.

But that's also assuming humans keep on being Sapiens and don't transcend their present biology/mindset.

But then, of course, how lonely is it to live in a world where I'm one of the last humans tethered to my un-enhanced, primitive biology?

And so on...

Cryonics Myths

Related Stories