The truth about cryonics is that what you've got are a bunch of corpses that have been treated in a variety of ways that induce massive cellular and organ damage over and above the original causes of death, dead bodies stored without the means, plan or any practical reason for anyone to ever try to rebuild one of them. They'll all eventually be disposed of in some fashion. Some already have been.
The whole enterprise combines fraud, delusion and egocentric fear in a nearly perfect storm of waste.
I already addressed your ignorant libel earlier in this very thread.
You understand
absolutely nothing whatsoever about the philosophical, technical, nor financial aspects of biostasis.
To reiterate, like many stasists, I do not fear death and fully understand that my reanimation is not guaranteed and that
even if I am reanimated, I will
still inevitably die
even then. I don't believe death can be avoided, only indefinitely postponed—a view supported by physics, very much unlike truly eternal afterlife in some immaterial plane or through reincarnation, yet you defend rather than attack such claims.
There's nothing egocentric about people such as
Kim Suozzi wanting to take a longshot at having more than 23 years of life, an
anonymous British girl taking a shot at having more than fourteen years, the parents of
Luna Wilson trying to give their daughter more than fifteen years, or the parents of
Matheryn Naovaratpong hoping for more than two years with their daughter. There's also nothing egocentric about a community donating to help those who couldn't afford it enter cryostasis, as was done for
Bill O'Rights, Kim,
Aaron Winborn, and L. Stephen Coles, nor in sons and daughters preserving their mothers and fathers.
And no, there's nothing wrong with trying to live
beyond a century, either. Why should a genetic lottery allow only an extreme few to live in good health into their second century of life? Eventually, healthspans and lifespans far in excess of Jeanne Calment's 122 years will be available to all, and since aging is the leading risk factor for myriad diseases (including dementia, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, and sarcopenia, to name but a few), this will lead to an unprecedented reduction in human suffering along with an unprecedented increase in productivity. Aging is not physically inevitable, and as humanity becomes planetary, stellar, interstellar, galactic, and intergalactic, we will inevitably transcend the limitations of natural selection—and biostasis will enable subjectively instantaneous interstellar travel with vastly reduced resource consumption.
Again,
vitrification enables far better preservation than freezing, and a vitrified rabbit kidney and multiple vitrified rat kidneys have been restored to function (the rabbit kidney with some damage, and the rat kidneys with no damage) and successfully transplanted.
Intermediate temperature storage can already further reduce damage, and the combination of vitrification and intermediate temperature storage in the cryopreservation of the biogerontologist
L. Stephen Coles (a cryoskeptic who agreed to be cryopreserved, for free, in order to contribute to science and because he understood that he had nothing to lose) enabled the prevention of both ice crystal formation and fracturing in his brain, as
explained by Greg Fahy, one of the world's leading cryobiologists who led the development of the M22 cryoprotectant validated in the aforementioned mainstream kidney vitrification experiments and used in Alcor patients.
Considering what's possible today (including the reanimation of vitrified animal kidneys and of humans without brain damage after
two hours at near freezing with no blood in the body), reanimation of people currently in biostasis via
technology centuries more advanced cannot be ruled out entirely, and that is, of course, the entire point of biostasis: to attempt to preserve people sufficiently for technology to advance by centuries and possibly enable their reanimation, so attacking biostasis for relying on technology not yet developed is to miss the point altogether.
As several scientific minds (including
Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stephen Wolfram) who were not involved in biostasis have said, human biostasis will inevitably reach a point at which it is reversible. Nothing in the laws of physics prevents humans from being cryogenically suspended and reanimated, and this is a fact, not an opinion. Whether anyone
currently in cryostasis is sufficiently preserved for eventual reanimation is unknown, and since it is unknown, we preserve people as best as possible in the present because we'd prefer to discover that we began to preserve people too early than too late. Reversible human biostasis, though, is certainly a question of when, not if.
Regarding the financial aspects, biostasis is and always has been a nonprofit endeavour, which it must be, since there's no money to be made in it. Only those who truly believe in the possibility of reanimation would bother to keep people in liquid nitrogen indefinitely, with the first cryonaut having been kept in LN2 for over half a century now. Scammers would engineer "mishaps" and reform under a new name, or just blow all the money and collapse.
Here are the financial statements of the three major providers:
Alcor, the
Cryonics Institute, and
Tomorrow Biostasis. All spending is a matter of public record. No one is using biostasis to live lives of luxury. In fact, the founders of all three spent significant amounts of their own money on establishing and building these nonprofit organizations which have
charitable trusts to ensure indefinite maintenance of cryotransport even across centuries.
Also, Alcor founder Fred Chamberlain III is now in cryostasis with his father, and his wife and cofounder Linda plans to join them, as does their son, Fred IV. Cryonics Institute founder Robert Ettinger is now in cryostasis with his first and second wives. Tomorrow founder Emil Kendziorra, a physician and entrepreneur, sold two companies before founding Tomorrow despite knowing that it would cost him rather than make him money because he genuinely believes in the cause.
There's even a very small provider,
Oregon Brain Preservation, which offers basic cryopreservation (without standby, stabilization, and transport) for $5,000, and another very small provider,
Cryonics Germany, which offers basic cryopreservation (again, without SST) for
free. Clearly, they aren't in it for money.
RationalWiki mocks biostasis, but even they admit that "cryonicists are almost all sincere and exceedingly smart people. However, they are also absolute fanatics and believe that freezing your freshly-dead body is the best hope of evading permanent death and that the $30–200,000 this costs is an obviously sensible investment in the distant future.
There is little, if any, deliberate fraud going on."
Lastly, there's little "waste" since liquid nitrogen costs as little as a dime a liter and each cryonaut costs only a few thousand dollars a year.
Why don't you attack those who believe in attaining immortality through belief in ancient mythology? Why don't you call them fraudulent, delusional, and egocentric? Why does ancient mythology whose practitioners make empty promises (often while raking in millions or billions) deserve respect but experimental medicine whose practitioners acknowledge its considerable uncertainty and make no false guarantees deserves scorn in your mind?
Also, no, Serveaux, I did not misuse "tragedy" and I did not misuse "objective," either, nor did I "project" as you condescendingly claimed in the image thread when I joked about the objective (yes,
objective) reality that Yahweh is as fictional as Zeus.
You're an endless stream of patent falsehoods, petty insults, and apologism for ancient superstitions.
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