Cryonics. Hopeful stuff or people wasting their time?

Well it's interesting.

There's obviously a market for this or people would not be shelling out their money to have themselves turned into frozen popsicles.

I thought the process of being in liquid nitrogen would cause cells to explode from the freezing process even if you do remove the blood and other fluids? Wouldn't there be irreversible cell damage from the actual freezing process inside the tube the body is in? Not to mention the very delicate parts and organs like the brain.

What prompted me to think on this was a story I had just seen on TV about a young girl in the USA who had just been frozen after dying of an aggressive brain tumour. She did this in the hope that one day she might be thawed and revived.

Anyway thoughts on this anyone?

I'm not sold on the idea that this would work now let alone the reverse process in the future. And how do we know that company will still be around in 20 or 50 years time from now still holding all those bodies and with all the equipment still running let alone well preserved corpses waiting for revival...

 

I've always thought of it as a big gamble with very little to recommend it. From what little I've read, it assumes that the medical technology to cure the patient's ailment (I guess death is the ultimate "ailment") and freezer damage will exist "sometime" in the future. Freezing might be the dead-end we currently believe it to be. Maybe sometime in the future a long-term biological stasis will be discovered, and those researchers will look back at all the frozen people and quip, "Well, they just did everything wrong!"

Also, how does the patient pay for indeterminate storage and revival? Heinlein's The Door Into Summer addressed this. It's been a very long time since I read When The Sleeper Wakes, but waking up and learning that you own half the world does not sound very likely. Or perhaps the proverbial socialism-that-really-works will revive yet another mouth to feed out of the goodness of its heart?

Cryonics is backing into immortality from the "top-down." It's like NASA's alleged "warp drive" (Alcubierre drive) that will really work by bending space and taking us to Barnard's in time for lunch. All we need is the entirely fictional "exotic matter" that makes up the ring. From there, the rest is easy.

 

Unless you're the one getting paid to freeze people it's a waste.

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They don't freeze people. When you are put into cryonic stasis, you're not frozen, you're vitrified. With this process, your cells will not explode, and at the same time your brain is safely stored as a form of crystal, or glass. The process can then be reversed when whatever it was that killed you has been made curable via medicine. It's a long shot, but it's better than just rotting in the ground (in this person's opinion).

The most important aspect of the process is information survival. As long as they can save the brain, anything else can be repaired later. Preventing information death is absolutely key to the process. Here, this FAQ from the Cryonics Institute might help: http://www.cryonics.org/about-us/myths/

 

OK thanks for that but how long can a person be stored in that fashion?

How do we know that companies like Alcor will still be viable in 10 years let alone 20 or 50 or even a 100 for when a possible revival or cure might be possible? What happens if the company goes bankrupt?

 

Yeah, those questions aren't answered on the FAQ. I could afford to pay for the service but I don't know if the future would welcome my revival even if someone were willing to perform it and future society might be so alien or abhorrent to me that I wished I had never been revived. See, for example, Cold Lazarus by Dennis Potter.

 

That's interesting

 

Assuming any memory does survive much less the whole persona, what would be the point to these historical popsicles in a few centuries? Suppose that future society has no use for a bunch of retrograde savages beyond idle curiosity?

 

Cold Lazarus suggested that media moguls would be tempted to extract the memories for use as virtual reality entertainment. (Dennis Potter really hated Rupert Murdoch.) Of course, extracting memories seems like a stretch although primitive attempts are being made at the moment to do just that by using MRI scans. With advances in nanotech, perhaps it might be possible by direct stimulation of individual neurons.

 

Will they be able to tell a memory from a fiction or a perceived reality from a fantasy? The speculation on where the lines can be drawn between those simple dichotomies alone sound quite perplexing. That is, again, if those impressions which create the sum of an individual's unique mind can be saved much less recovered.

 

Exactly.

How could you tell my real mind or memories from my imagination mind where I'm a 007ish Timelord travelling the universe saving planets and finding babes. The technology to decipher which is which would have to be pretty damn advanced.

 

That sounds like Robert Sheckley's Immortality, Inc. (Naturally, the movie bearing that name is nothing like the book.) The protagonist is not a cryonic sleeper, but awakens in the future after dying in the 20th century. He revives with a bunch of media vultures around him trying to harvest his emotions of the event.

Imagine a cryonaut reviving in a future run by dinosaurs who have cloned him for a theme park to show what it looked like back when humans roamed the Earth. "Get your claws off me, you damned dirty lizard!"

 

To me, it seems like a unspeakably horrific prospect that some unscrupulous person in the future might want to mine your corpsicle brain for profit. But how do any of us know that we are not currently plugged into a simulation apparatus merely for the purpose of entertaining a wider audience? Sounds a bit more likely scenario than merely being used as organic batteries.

 

The Matrix can trace its roots all the way back to Plato's Cave, but the most direct inspiration for the movie (and several others) is James P. Hogan's novel Realtime Interrupt. The scenario in that story is far more compelling than "human batteries." I actually scoffed out loud the first time I heard that, along with Morpheus's line, "Combined with a form of fusion the machines have found all the energy they would ever need." If the machines had any kind of fusion power, they wouldn't need the grossly inefficient waste heat of human bodies. Also, harvesting microcephalic bodies would obviate the need for a complex virtual world and rebelling humans. (Anything would be a more efficient power source, no matter how you slice it.)

"When Irish eyes are smiling..."

 

Or we might be plugged into a virtual simulation that is designed to torture us in every way possible simply for the unknowable gratification of an Eldritch being as in "A Colder War" by Charles Stross.

 

Or maybe we are all stuck inside our own device like the Doctor's confession dial and with the right information the dial will release us eventually.

 

I think this thread has gone cold.

 

Perhaps someone will come along with the knowledge to revive it.

 

Maybe, we're just stuck in chairs and bored stiff looking at screens and monitors?

 

Well, companies like Alcor have a Board of Directors who deal specifically with that: http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq05.html#funds

The rest of the FAQ on that page explains how all of the financials work. It's worth reading.