Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2014-August/082585.html

by mlinksva • 12 years ago

300 269 12 years ago

lists.extropy.org

techdragon• 12 years ago

So rare to hear about this kind of thing so "present tense"

And is it just me or is it just a little bit funny to hear about an ALS patient getting frozen cryogenically right as the ice bucket challenge sweeps the globe... I dare say he's truly taken the ultimate ice bucket challenge!

GFischer• 12 years ago

I didn't know who he was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(cypherpunk)

"Hal Finney (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014) was a developer for PGP Corporation, and was the second developer hired after Phil Zimmerman. In his early career, he is credited as lead developer on several console games"

"In January 2009, Finney was the Bitcoin network's first recipient transaction."

ericb2• 12 years ago

I'm curious--in these cryopreservation arrangements, what is done to incentivize future people to resurrect you? Anyone know?

cousin_it2• 12 years ago

Well, you make a contract and pay money to the company that cryopreserves you. They could screw you over after you die, but that would be bad for their reputation and they could be sued.

lincolnq• 12 years ago

Yeah - more specifically, it's a nonprofit whose mission statement includes the mission to eventually restore to health all its patients. So, if you believe that nonprofits are generally going to at least try to achieve the thing they were created for, it would be surprising if they didn't try.

http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/mission.htm

darkmighty• 12 years ago

Well their reputation will only come into play once the first sucessful resucitations are shown (or shown possible), which is far into the future. This risk-reward disconnect is dangerous.

Funny enough, he worked on Bitcoin, which may pave ways to Autonomous Corporations. In some time perhaps you could set a an autonomous corporation managing some funds in low-risk while delegating the surplus to payments conditioned on a "proof of conservation" of the body.

maaku6• 12 years ago

Not to mention that people working at Alcor are also members and believers in cryonics. They wouldn't screw you over because they wouldn't want anyone screwing them over when it's their time.

zheshishei2• 12 years ago

A legally binding contract might do it. Or, there might be some fund that accrues interest over time to pay for the procedure. If neither of those options exist, then I suppose the first people to be revived would be in the name of science ("Let's do it just to prove that we can.") Then, I suppose anyone who's revived after that would be useful from a anthropological/historical perspective. Imagine having firsthand sources from different time periods.

rblatz• 12 years ago

A contract is only as good as your ability to enforce it. Who will be enforcing it on your behalf?

lt• 12 years ago

http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#patients

eudox10• 12 years ago

By the time we have the technology to revive cryopatients, that question will likely be "why not?".

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

Maybe reviving will be easy, but IMO the real hangup is power costs. Keeping someone in cryo has regular upkeep costs. That complicates matters a lot.

meepmorp4• 12 years ago

By the time we have the technology to revive cryopatients, that question will likely be "why not?".

It's a big leap of faith to think we'll ever be able to revive frozen dead people. Early applications of cryonics didn't take the tissue destruction of freezing into account. What other problems are being completely missed in the process?

And that's to say nothing of the problems related to reviving a dead person and fixing the causes of their death in a timely manner. Even granting a relatively uninterrupted progress of technology, it's a big assumption that such things are possible.

blake8086• 12 years ago

There is a post on the front page right now http://www.gentweb.co.uk/wirerecorder.htm about re-constructing some old wire recordings just to listen to the past. Imagine the opportunity to bring the person themselves back, instead of just audio.

I think if technology advances sufficiently that it is "easy" and "cheap" enough, people will resurrect cryo-preserved patients just because it suits them to do so.

If I had a button I could push that would bring someone who died in 1800 back to life, I would push it.

I believe I'm not the only person who feels this way, either.

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

You would only do it while it remained novel, though. When two or three people are cryopreserved, novelty is enough, but what about when thousands or millions are?

Udo• 12 years ago

The core assumption is that minds have an intrinsic value. Future civilizations who don't share that belief are unlikely to engage in resurrection. But as far as cost is concerned, there is no reason to think it'll be in any way costly, especially if it's in the form of whole-brain emulation.

nazgulnarsil• 12 years ago

Once we've defeated death, reviving people who were preserved is the next logical step after saving everyone currently alive. Saving everyone who was not cryopreserved might not be possible, but will also be worth a shot.

gress3• 12 years ago

Once we've defeated death, the incentive will be to reduce the population sharply and strictly control reproduction. Adding new people from amongst the dead will be the last thing on anyone's minds.

tzs2• 12 years ago

Once we've defeated death, reviving people who were preserved is the next logical step after saving everyone currently alive

...unless defeating death leads to a huge overpopulation problem and severe restrictions on producing new children. Then there will likely be a lot of popular opposition to reviving them.

A revived frozen person first will need to have the condition that killed them dealt with. Then they will need training to be able to function at a basic level in society [1]. If we haven't got to a guaranteed basic income system or some other system that gets rid of the need for people to have jobs or live off welfare, there will probably be very few jobs that the revived person can be trained for.

Other than exceptional circumstances, such as reviving someone who would have knowledge of historical interest, it is hard to see how reviving a frozen person would be better for the future people than letting someone have a child.

I think Larry Niven's stories have it right--a given frozen person is far more likely to be broken up for transplant material than be revived whole in most potential future societies.

[1] I'm assuming it will take us a fairly long time to get to the defeated death stage, and so it will be a very different world that the person is revived into.

michaelkeenan• 12 years ago

If there were no government or Friendly AGI doing it for everyone, I imagine it would chain backward through time: those still alive who are friends and family of the cryo-preserved would resurrect them. Then, those people would know older cryo-preserved people, and would resurrect them. (Unless, I suppose, the cost were exorbitant and the cryo-resurrected didn't have the means. But this is a future, post-death, probably post-singularity world; it'd probably be a society of abundance.)

jbarham• 12 years ago

Well there is the old joke about the COBOL programmer who was cryogenically frozen: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/alex/cobol.html

SeoxyS• 12 years ago

Self-interest. In order to preserve the continued success of the Alcor company.

In order for people to continue buying cryogenic services, the company would have to be able to demonstrate that it's actually doing what it claims to do (keep the bodies frozen and stable). As soon as that stops, nobody would ever trust them with any business, ever. And as soon as revival is possible, it becomes the cheapest option, versus incurring the ongoing costs of preservation.

cousin_it2• 12 years ago

In 2009, he described his experience with ALS in a poignant post titled "Dying Outside": http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/ . I'm very sad to see him go.

mef• 12 years ago

Interesting that someone would choose to be cryopreserved somewhere where there's no legal assisted suicide. Wouldn't your chances of being successfully revived improve if you got cryopreserved while still alive?

PaulHoule• 12 years ago

See this

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/DoraKentCase.html

eudox10• 12 years ago

Active shutdown is certainly preferable, but to the best of my knowledge is only legal in Switzerland.

jacquesm21• 12 years ago

That's not called 'active shutdown', that's called murder. Unless you're very ill then it is called euthanasia. Why invent new words when we have perfectly serviceable ones?

drcode3• 12 years ago

I wonder how long until a cryopreservation startup sets up an office on a cruise ship or some other place so they can offer active shutdown to their customers.

lilsunnybee• 12 years ago

More than just Switzerland. From the Wikipedia euthanasia page:

Jurisdictions where euthanasia or assisted suicide is legal include the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Estonia, Albania, the US states of Washington, Oregon and Montana, and, starting in 2015, the Canadian Province of Quebec.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia

listic• 12 years ago

It is amazing that no cryonics company seems to have investigated this possibility seriously. Well, the cryonics itself seems to be really under-developed, as well.

I am planning to sign up for cryonics ASAP (as soon as I can afford it), and I would really prefer that stand-by and active shutdown were readily available options, but I'm afraid I would have to do all the research and preparation by myself, if I want it to become a reality.

OTOH, the existence of a company Suspended Animation http://www.suspendedinc.com/ gives me hope. How could a company carve out a market for itself, selling additional services for cryonics, which by itself counts less than 300 patients preserved over its 47 year history - I don't know.

reasonattlm3• 12 years ago

The cost of this would have been much greater, and present organizations are not really set up to transport people already cryopreserved, so doing it ad hoc would be especially expensive. Transport when it does happen tends to be a packaged in dry ice type of deal, with final procedures happening on site on arrival, potentially a day or two later in the case of long distances. Alcor recommends that those who can predict their end of life date with any accuracy move to be close to their HQ. A good cryopreservation, all other factors being equal, is all about time to fully vitrified for important tissues. Regulation makes that enormously difficult on one hand, but transport is also a real logistics hurdle.

Also, in Finney's case the condition he suffered allowed for more self-willed timing in these matters than is usually the case. It isn't a pleasant thing to have to do to yourself by any means, but that is what it comes to when it is government employees who are the people who decide on every aspect of your life, not you. One recommendation from people in the cryonics industry in the past has been that when you are on the final downward spiral to stop eating and drinking so as to time the end yourself and thus ensure much better odds of a good preservation, organized and timely. Very rational, as the time from death to vitrification is so very critical, but again something forced upon people by uncaring bureaucrats and laws that prevent self-determination in end of life decisions.

NhanH• 12 years ago

On the topic of cryopreservation, to borrow a question from Scott Aaronson [1]: have you signed up for cryopreservation? And regardless of your answer, how do you defend yourself against the charge of irrationality?

On one hand, it seems like a different version of Pascal's wager - if you can afford it, the upside is potentially far more beneficial than the downside. On the other hand, well, it is crazy...

I can think of one reason for not doing it (personally): I don't necessary want to live in a society that can perform my revival. Not to say that there's anything wrong with that society, they would just be so far away from me that I can't fathom how that would be like.

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=455

toomuchtodo2• 12 years ago

I would argue that cryopreservation is the belief in the increasing rate of scientific progress (which can measured and proven), and that it is far more rational than the tens of millions of people who attend church every Saturday or Sunday in search of salvation for their soul.

As /u/dublinben mentioned, I'd give my entire wealth to have the opportunity to live in the future.

cjbprime2• 12 years ago

I would argue that cryopreservation is the belief in the increasing rate of scientific progress (which can measured and proven)

The problem is that you aren't just depending on future improvements in revival technology, you're depending on the current state of today's preservation technology (at the point you die).

And today's preservation technology doesn't have a lot of evidence suggesting that it can work to successfully preserve a kidney, much less a brain.

raverbashing3• 12 years ago

On the other hand, you'll be living in the future, and probably unemployable since things will have evolved so much.

Maybe everybody speaks something else other than English and even communicating is a pain (even with good translation resources)

You'll know nobody. All the things that you know by "home" are gone.

It'll probably be cool for the first weeks, then an absolute drag.

gertef• 12 years ago

It's not clear you understand why people go to church and what it's benefits are.

dublinben• 12 years ago

On the other hand, I think most inquisitive folks and Sci-Fi nerds would pay anything to travel into the future (beyond a single lifetime).

jngreenlee• 12 years ago

If conciseness is in fact just an internal feeling/feedback loop, the revived you will feel as though this was achieved, but is the benefit to your present mind-state somewhat lost?

tzs2• 12 years ago

Sci-Fi nerds who have read Niven's "known space" stories, particular those in the Gil the ARM timeframe, might not be so interested in the corpsicle method of travel into the future.

reasonattlm3• 12 years ago

Why crazy? There's good supporting evidence for sufficient preservation of fine neural structure via vitrification. The oldest existing cryopreservation organizations have lasted 40 years since their formation as professional groups. There is no known obstacle in the laws of physics to developing molecular nanotechnology capable of restoring a cryopreserved individual: it's just a technology challenge in organization at the nanoscale, related to well-funded and widespread current work in cell science and nanotechnology.

Basically it is the best possible play with the cards dealt to you if you are going to die before the advent of rejuvenation therapies and would still like to live longer into the golden future of amazing wealth and technology that lies just ahead of us. The odds are infinitely better than those offered by any other end of life choice (i.e. they are above zero).

thenmar• 12 years ago

Would you mind sharing some of that evidence? I certainly understand the desire to be cryopreserved, but given the lack of proof of concept (I'd love to be contradicted here!) and how little we know about the brain, it seems like a desperate Hail Mary marketed to wealthy tech folks as sound science.

s_q_b4• 12 years ago

Who's to say that the choice to survive in the distant future is desirable?

Everyone you know and love will have been long dead, and any society with both the means and will to revive you may have undesirable objectives in mind, e.g. a life of slavery or military conscription. From a global perspective, what are the potential impacts on the species of an eternal elite, obsessed with life extension, creating an ever-growing class of ancient capital holders?

Assuming both constant human nature and the lack of an self-reinforcing intelligence cascade (i.e. no singularity event), survival is not an obviously rational choice.

rbanffy3• 12 years ago

Considering death is inevitable, cryopreservation just before you cease to function is, quite possibly, the best rational choice you can make. Of course, it's a bit selfish, as the resources you commit to it are substantial and your offspring could benefit from them.

Betting your final moments on specific advances of technology is also not an easy decision. Plus, you may wake up in a world you don't like.

OTOH, the other option is not to wake up at all.

goeric• 12 years ago

Exactly my thoughts.

kryptiskt• 12 years ago

You may wake up a stunted and brain-damaged version of yourself that is aware enough to know what it is missing.

declan3• 12 years ago

if you can afford it, the upside is potentially far more beneficial than the downside

I looked into this in some detail a while ago, and I recall Alcor indicated that many of its members opt for life insurance (with Alcor as a beneficiary) to cover the cost of cryopreservation. That's something like $75K to cryopreserve your head, and $150K for whole-body cryospreservation.

I suspect the mean age of HN readers skews toward late 20s or early 30s, meaning that they'd likely pay something like <$100 every year for $150K of life insurance. Also many of us have some form of life insurance paid for by our employers.

I updated my will last year with the help of a SF bay area attorney who told me she's done cryopreservation wills/trusts for a bunch of high-profile tech execs (she did not, of course, name names). Email me if you want her info.

jkaljundi• 12 years ago

How does the math work for paying let's say 60 years times <$100 and cashing out $150k at the end?

ggreer• 12 years ago

I signed up about five years ago. I outlined my reasons in a blog post[1].

Basically, I think it's more feasible than most people judge it to be. The technology has already been demonstrated in smaller structures such as rabbit kidneys. While it's not likely to work, the expected value is positive.

1. http://geoff.greer.fm/2010/07/09/insert-frozen-food-joke-her...

lsparrish3• 12 years ago

It's interesting that the comments by cell biologist Len Ornstein in that thread completely omit any mention of high osmolality vitrification, which is what is practiced in cryonics. I get the impression he is not aware of Fahy's approach at all. It probably is not used in his specialty.

HOV is using extremely high concentrations of solutes to reduce the freezing point (a colligative property). That is the only way to vitrify something big like the brain. At least, until some super material is invented that lets us pull out lots of heat really fast. The trouble is that it is toxic to cells to be exposed for very long. With rabbit kidneys and small slices of brain tissue, the exposure time at warm temperatures can be very brief. So with current cryonics we can only make a morphological argument for information theoretic preservation.

With better materials that enable faster cooling, prevent the toxicity mechanisms of the cryoprotectant, and/or block ice formation non-colligatively (certain polymers do this), it is theoretically possible that we could get to a point where the cells are still viable. In that event, it would be like placing the brain in an "off state". You wouldn't be able to resume it again without a body to implant it in, but that's more likely to be on the 200-year radar than nanorepair, so the chances would be improved quite a bit. Also, I suspect more people would sign up for a process that does not involve "killing" their brain cells.

lsparrish3• 12 years ago

I should also mention that the wood frog is really more a counterexample of vitrification. It forms ice (which they are adapted to tolerate, unlike us), but the interior or the cells remains a slightly more concentrated liquid. It is nowhere near the concentrations used in cryonics, which are high enough to prevent freezing entirely (50-80%). A wood frog cannot survive any temperature below around -5 C.

simonebrunozzi• 12 years ago

Thanks Hal Finney. You've done some good in the world. Hope to see you alive again.

amalag6• 12 years ago

He is legally dead, so good luck bringing him back to life.

maaku6• 12 years ago

Yes, because legal definitions impose their validity on the universe.

Coincoin• 12 years ago

I think he was referring to the legal clusterfuck that happens when someone who is legally dead isn't actually dead.

http://www.loweringthebar.net/2013/10/no-youre-still-decease...

http://www.loweringthebar.net/2014/08/feds-say-legally-dead-...

amalag6• 12 years ago

Universal laws impose their own validity. The legal system is our recognition of those universal laws.

declan3• 12 years ago

This is sad news, but less sad than a funeral and cremation would have been. I met Hal in the 1990s via the cypherpunks list, where a young Julian Assange was also hanging out. Hal went on to work for PGP Corp. in its glory days, and was involved in the early stages of Bitcoin as well. He is (not was!) the consummate cypherpunk and extropian.

A lot of those discussions have been lost to time, but here's a note from Hal that I posted to Politech in 1999 where he warned against building surveillance backdoors in Internet standards:

http://seclists.org/politech/1999/Oct/24 "If the IETF sets the precedent of acceding to the wishes of countries like the US and Europe, it may find itself forced to similarly honor the desires of less open societies."

And here's Hal responding to one of my Wired articles by pointing out the absurdity of the MPAA's claims against Napster:

http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.1Q01/3833.html "Looking at it over the history of Napster the amount would have to run well into the quadrillions. Surely this would be the largest legal claim in history! I wonder if the record companies can present this figure with a straight face."

I'll miss Hal. At least there's a very slim, but non-zero, chance he'll log back on again.

ogig• 12 years ago

In this post[1] Hal Finney writes about ALS and his involvement with bitcoin. Recommended read: [1]: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0

haakon• 12 years ago

:-(

If you haven't read his post "Bitcoin and me", now is a good time. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0

FiloSottile• 12 years ago

It's fascinating, and personally a bit disturbing, to read about his death as an announcement of cryopreservation ("being cryopreserved now") instead of the sad news it is anyway ("died today"). Also the discussion here revolves around he coming back, not he leaving.

Maybe it impresses me because he seemed so hopeful to be able to choose life in his post back then when he was diagnosed: "I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living." http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/

I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope. Anyway, I'd like to write down a regular epitaph:

Hal Finney (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014), second PGP developer after Zimmerman, first Bitcoin recipient, cypherpunk who wrote code.

pron23• 12 years ago

I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope.

Not more so than in some other religions with their own versions of an afterlife. It all depends on your faith.

Retric4• 12 years ago

I find it interesting that cryonics and the singularity are both 'modern' religions with that are vary similar in tone to many past religions. They both seems reasonable on the surface, but don't really work if you dig down into the details. Much like all that new age QM BS uses a few of the right words without much substance.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

Well Cryonics is one of the few where the afterlife is back here with the rest of us. There was an interesting story where these people were revived in the future but were basically welfare cases without any of the modern implants and conveniences and no money or credit to get them they were unemployable. Then there is Woody Allen's "Sleeper" :-)

JulianMorrison• 12 years ago

Cryonics is the opposite of religious faith in an afterlife, actually. It only makes sense with strict physicalism. If your self is neural state (structural and chemical but not electrical), and the state is preserved, then your life is on pause. That's almost a truism.

drcode3• 12 years ago

I find it really annoying when people compare cryopreservation to religious belief in an afterlife.

It's sort of like saying "Dieting is an eating disorder"- Yes, they share some superficial similarities (and some people may have both) but in any substantive way they are totally different things.

brey• 12 years ago

It sounds from the language used ("he did not want his vital functions supported any further but should be allowed to cease functioning and promptly be cryopreserved") that he didn't regard this moment as death at all - merely pausing his life until a) ALS is curable and b) we have the technology to reawaken cryopreserved people.

To him, all that was worth announcing here is the cryopreservation.

Who's to say he's wrong?

ewoodrich4• 12 years ago

Personally, I think cryonics is a pipe dream right now. But I completely respect and empathize with the wishes of Hal Finney to put hope into a future life, possibly without the burden of ALS that he was forced to deal with for a significant portion of his life.

If he had the means to do it, and it gave him something while he was still alive, than I would say it was worth it to him.

strlen• 12 years ago

Here's an interesting discussion results about near-term studies on inducing hypothermia was a way to save gun shot victims from brain death:

The article -- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623.000-gunshot-v...

HN discussion with some insightful commentary -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7477801

aerovistae• 12 years ago

The thing I don't understand is how circulating cryoprotectant chemicals through the brain doesn't destroy the tissue. How could anything other than blood safely circulate through the brain?

3am2• 12 years ago

As long as pressure, osmotic balance, pH, etc are in balance then it's not going to cause cellular trauma per se.

Regardless of the fluid medium, a bigger problem is absence of oxygen is going to start the process of autolysis after cell death. Neurons are particularly vulnerable, which how people can become brain dead within 5-10 minutes under normal circumstances.

The even bigger problem is cellular damage from the freezing process. Proponents of this sort of thing would say the "cryoprotectant" chemicals vitrify, so the massive small scale trauma from ice crystal formation is prevented. I'm not sure anything has ever been reanimated after this process, nor do I foresee a technology capable of allowing it.

Finally, and maybe the biggest problem, it is hard to see technological cure for advanced ALS. It is a structure problem with demyelination causing the symptoms. Even if you could correct the underlying source of myelin cell death/inflammation, it's very difficult to imagine a restoration process that results in viable life.

Anyway, probably more than you wanted to hear. This is just kind of sad, and reminds me this is a young forum on the whole that probably isn't too in tune with their own mortality (this is not directed at anyone, so I'd prefer nobody respond personally to it). He is dead, he lived well, there will be nobody else quite like him.

edit: fyi, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_substitute (though again, this differs because the cryopreserving fluid is selected because of its properties when freezing)

reasonattlm3• 12 years ago

Remyelination cell therapies for ALS are very much a viable work in progress today. They will exist within the next decade.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.stemcr.2014.04.005

Some people are working on organ preservation by vitrification and restoration. Not there yet, but promising work. There is no reason to think that this is impossible:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15094092

As to technologies capable of restoring the cryopreserved, there are any number of works that propose very detailed descriptions of how it can be done with molecular nanotechnology.

http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/2009/09/10/revival-of-c...

zanny5• 12 years ago

What you do need to consider is that, most likely, by the time anyone can conceivably revive those cryopreserved, the technology of the era is likely to be capable of genetic engineering and cloning to the degree where they might feasibly be able to just generate a new body for a patient to transplant the brain to. Or just do a detailed imaging of the brain, and transplant the memories. Or replace any parts of the brain damaged by the freezing procedure in the same way.

I don't think anyone getting cryopreserved today expects to be woken up for at least a century. And a hundred years ago the idea of commercial airline flight was still a pipe dream, and anything resembling computers of any scale was complete science fiction.

jdnier• 12 years ago

Ancillary to the sad news, for a fictional treatment of cryopreservation (circa 1993) -- one that I couldn't help think about as I read that email/release -- Gregory Benford's novel, Chiller, works through many of the thought-provoking implications. http://www.gregorybenford.com/product/chiller/

ajb• 12 years ago

Bujold's Cryoburn may also be of interest: http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1439133948/1439133948.htm...

geoelectric• 12 years ago

Halperin's The First Immortal is damned near a written infomercial for Alcor, but is still a pretty interesting book in its own right in terms of exploring various cryonics scenarios.

Edit: looks like it's available freely online: http://coins.ha.com/information/tfi.s

onan_barbarian• 12 years ago

Attanasio's Solis also covers this topic without optimism; the protagonist's brain is used in a mining machine IIRC.

staunch• 12 years ago

I'm sad for him that we haven't progressed far enough to treat him. I'm glad he has a shot in the future.

dghughes• 12 years ago

Funny how the mind plays tricks I read that as cryptopreservation.

scintill76• 12 years ago

Maybe he has been uploaded into the Bitcoin blockchain to be preserved by virtue of the tens of thousands of independent copies maintained all over the world. On a more serious note, I expect to see tributes to Hal embedded in the blockchain.

donohoe2• 12 years ago

Hey Hal, when you Google all of this and stumble across this old page I hope you find this note and get in touch for a drink.

I'd love to hear your story!

harshreality• 12 years ago

Google? Is Alcor selling cryopreservation of companies now?

donohoe2• 12 years ago

I guess I meant it as a verb :)

rdl• 12 years ago

Hal Finney was one of the best people on the cypherpunks list -- wrote frequently, great developer, involved in some of the most interesting products of the past 30 years. He was also remarkably friendly and civil, even more amazing in a place like the cypherpunks list. A really great person, and will be missed. (but hopefully only for a few decades until the reverse-cryopreservation thing is worked out...)

pron23• 12 years ago

I didn't know Hal Finney, but condolences to his family.

Comparing different religions' various flavors of afterlife is very interesting, but perhaps this isn't the right forum for it (though maybe it is; I don't know). One thing is certain, though: cryonics's promise of an afterlife is definitely the most materially expensive of all religions -- on average, that is (some Christians spent what probably amounts to more than the cost of cryopreservation to expunge their sins). It is also the most strictly transactional since Catholicism prior to the reformation. The burial practice itself, however, bears a lot of resemblance to ancient Egyptian religion, and probably some other religions of antiquity.

jacquesm21• 12 years ago

It's just a commoditization. Religion will charge what they think they buyer will be able to afford, cryopreservation companies charge what they think it should cost to get the problem pushed beyond their own lifetimes.

It's a scam, but a very clever one, just like religion. The only mitigating factor to me is that the participants here go in eyes wide open rather than that they are sucked in as defenceless children.

pron23• 12 years ago

I think religion (and I include cryonics in that category for the purpose of this discussion) is far from being a scam as it most certainly provides immediate benefits that cannot be dismissed. I'm sure it makes people happy to pay a high price for effectively convincing themselves that their death is merely temporary, thus hopefully alleviating what may be a very burdensome dread. That money would otherwise be spent on alcohol, drugs or therapy, and may not be as effective.

ScottBurson• 12 years ago

I think it's nuts, but I don't know if you can call it a scam when apparently sophisticated people are demanding it.

My old friend Hara Ra (né Gregory Yob -- yes, the creator of Hunt the Wumpus) had it done when he died of cancer in 2005. He was well aware of my opinion about it. Anyway, I figure, it was his money, and if it gave him some comfort in dying (of cancer), maybe it wasn't that badly spent.

vidarh• 12 years ago

In terms of how it is marketed cryonics may be scammy by drastically overselling the chances of success, but I'd expect many people who sign up for it see it for what it is: an extremely long bet with money they don't have any further use for anyway.

Unless you have other things you care deeply about spending your money on, there's pretty much only upside.

apsec112• 12 years ago

Calling it a "scam" implies that, not only is cryonics hopeless, but that the cryonicists agree it is hopeless and are just lying to people for money. Do you have any evidence of that at all?

bryanstrawser• 12 years ago

I knew Hal back in the early days of remailing (94-96) where he ran several remailers and I had one nestled within the hidden confines of Indiana University (the gondolin remailer).

He will be missed.

WalterBright• 12 years ago

Hal was one year ahead of me, and the next dorm room over at Caltech. Hal was scary smart - but you had to get to know him for a while before you'd find that out. He was completely unpretentious, just a regular guy.

And a great person - I never knew anyone who had anything but good things to say about Hal. It was a privilege to know Hal.

owenversteeg• 12 years ago

Black bar anyone? I think he is very worthy of one.

Either way I just set my topcolor to 000000. Seems it doesn't take hex triplets.

shocks• 12 years ago

Maybe an ice blue.

cowmix• 12 years ago

Any time cryogenics comes up I'm reminded of this story from This American Life:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/354/m...

Schwolop• 12 years ago

Hal Finney (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014 [probably])

letstryagain• 12 years ago

Hal Finney's ALS Ice Bucket challenge

jaekwon• 12 years ago

Oh, now I understand mummies.

ryan-c2• 12 years ago

I'm surprised nobody has made the point that "death" is not a binary thing - it is a progression. If we consider a scale where "1" is alive (breathing, heart beating, higher brain functions working, etc) and "0" is when your brain has been unambiguously destroyed, we have a probability distribution of whether a person can be returned to "1".

At one time if someone left "1" (e.g. heart stopped), that was pretty much it. Now we can often recover someone whose heart has been stopped for several minutes with little to no long term damage through medical intervention. A cryonic procedure pushes a person to a place on the scale where the probability distribution provided by current technology is a big fat zero. There is some hope that as technology advances that probability distribution will look favorable to the those frozen. We're pretty much just guessing about that last part though.

TeMPOraL27• 12 years ago

It's good you're raising this point. There's the concept of information-theoretic death [0] that is the "0" extreme you mentioned.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death

ryan-c2• 12 years ago

Wikipedia's article on clinical death[0] seems to go into a lot of the boundaries involved and is worth a read. I have read about information-theoretic death before but forgotten the term. I first heard about Alcor quite along time ago (10-15 years), and have considered signing up, but haven't so far.

As much as I'd love to cheat death I can't get over the feeling that having myself frozen would be a selfish and arrogant act. I worry that the world will continue to struggle with limited resources and wonder how people will feel if the technology to revive cryopreserved people becomes available but it's a struggle to provide the unambiguously living with food, water and shelter. That said, I find it difficult to fault those who choose to try to escape mortality. I would be interested to hear how people justify it from a resource allocation perspective.

Perhaps we'll figure out how to do mind uploading and solve the problem that way? That's a whole other rabbit hole though, and there's plenty of potential for that to suck[1].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_death 1. http://www.tomscott.com/life/

morpheous• 12 years ago

Sad, and in a way beautiful (I hope that's not an inappropriate word to use), at the same time. This man lived his life to the full, and faced the end of his life (as he has known it), with the courage of an adventurer.

I must admit i had never heard of the man himself, although I do know of bitcoin. But I am humbled by how he is smiling in all of his pictures, despite his physical body slowly giving up on him; his wife constantly by his side, through thick and thin.

I get the impression that Hal would have been a genuinely nice man to know. His life and the way he has faced his challenges head on is (should be) an inspiration to all.

TeMPOraL27• 12 years ago

Seeing people going all "cryonics is another religion" saddens me in a way. It's a tragedy that we've learned to accept mortality to the point that as a species we're not only unwilling to try and fix it, we're calling those few who try nutcases.

Even if current cryonics won't work, how about focusing on trying to find another, better way to fix death, instead of throwing the towel and sneering?

Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

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