Why Cryonics Makes Sense (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Why Cryonics Makes Sense (2016)

waitbutwhy.com

19 pointstosh19 comments

Thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15503451

Very well written and very thorough. I'm signed up with Alcor and have not regretted it for a moment since I signed up over 15 years ago.

Long article, and it doesn’t address what I consider the biggest problem: what incentive do people hundreds of years in the future have to bring me back to life? Maybe if I was Einstein, they would want me to help solve scientific problems. But I’m not. Maybe the first few people brought back will be done for the scientific breakthrough - but they will start with the easy ones, which means people that died ten years before being brought back. Again, not me. After that, why bring some random nobody back to life?

Alcor and Oregon Cryonics have patient care trusts that are designed to build capital to pay for revival: https://alcor.org/AboutAlcor/patientcaretrustfund.html

"It doesn’t do any good to use the most advanced techniques to get our members into cryopreservation unless we can keep them there, as well as build capital to eventually fund revival and reintegration."

Also, if the technology to do revival develops in the future, it is likely to be relatively cheap.

Analogy: in the 1910-1920s, people were interested in life extension via hormone replacement therapy (mostly misguided, but that's a separate topic). They were understandably worried that this would only be available to the rich, as it was relatively expensive to do at the time. One hundred years later, hormone replacement therapy is relatively cheap and widely available, at least in countries like the US.

There are many many problems with cryonics, but IMO this is not a major one.

Not sure how that helps. What is alcor’s incentive to bring me to life in the future? Remember, I’m dead, so I can’t post nasty comments on twitter when they leave me in the vat.

More generally, why would I trust a private company to bring me back to life? It is extremely rare for any company to last for hundreds of years. And pretty much inconceivable for one to last that long without going through periods of very short term thinking.

So if your point is a separate one, that Alcor et al might have to close, eg as a result of war or global financial collapse, then that is a very reasonable point and absolutely a potential cause of failure.

It is one of the things that Tim brings up as well: "The cryonics company goes bankrupt and doesn’t have the means, the will, or the organization to create a plan that will save the patients. I mentioned that this happened a few times with some of the earlier companies. The major companies today claim to have secure backup plans in place in case of the worst case scenario, and this security blanket is the main purpose of Alcor’s sizable trust."

No, I was just supporting my original point. I think that for the most part, people do things because they are incentivized to do them. What is Alcor's incentive to wake me up 500 years in the future?

Contractual obligation? I find it very unlikely that legal systems and national organizations will still be around 500 years from now to make it necessary for Alcor to honor it's agreement with me.

Market forces? I doubt it. Say Alcor is still in business - their business model will have to be very different, given the change in technology we can expect in 500 years. Since they will be selling something very different, will anyone care that they dumped those 500 year old bodies? Probably not. They will just announce on a Friday before labor day weekend that they had an anomaly and lost cooling, and by Monday everyone will have forgotten.

Familial connections? Why would my ancestors want to bring me back to life? Would you want to bring your 80 year old great great great great great aunt back to life right now, and give her antibiotics for the pneumonia she died of, and then care for her? Remember, she has never seen a telephone or a computer or a tanning salon, so it is going to take a lot of work on your part just to get her comfortable with living in the modern world. If you want to bring more people into the world, why not make or adopt a baby? Why pick an old person to bring into the world?

Moral obligation? Ha.

I just don't see any reason for me to be brought back to life. The only way I see it working is if I somehow created a financial reward for whoever brought me back to life. That seems almost impossible to pull off though.

So... you'll be dead.

How is that worse than your original state, other than the money that you could have given to someone else when you died?

It's no worse.

I can think of infinite things to spend money on which would likely leave me no-worse off. Why should I dump my money into this one?

You make some good points. I think you are even too sanguine about Einstein. In terms of bringing people back, even if they extraordinary, it still might not be worth it. For example, Archimedes was undoubtedly brilliant. However, if you were able to bring him back now, I think it would take years if not decades to try to catch up with the learning before he was able to contribute to solving modern problems. In addition, chances are that by the time humans are able to bring people back, they would have made great strides in using genetics to make people smarter. Perhaps in the world where bringing people back is possible, Einstein is at best average.

One thing that cryogenically preserved people might be good for however, is as a ready source of organs for transplants. Likely the cryogenic company has info on the blood group, etc of the people that are cryogenically preserved and if someone needs an organ, they will be able to find a suitable “donor” for them.

Or historical specimens to mine for data about health, diseases, environmental toxins, etc.

"Let's examine specimen <123> from 2019 who lived in a low-C02 atmosphere and is a carrier for heart disease (viral based)"

>Cryocrastination. That’s a real term used in the cryonics world to describe the phenomenon of people—especially young people—saying, “Yeah duh I’m obviously doing cryonics when I die” and then not actually going through the actions to sign up and start paying money.

This is a reasonable strategy because the best purveyors of liquid nitrogen vats today might or might not be the best purveyors of liquid nitrogen vats in the future. In the future, more information about who has the comfiest vats of liquid nitrogen will be available.

You need to pay for the life insurance, not the membership dues. The beneficiary can simply be switched to the next group should Alcor go under, but you need a working life insurance policy in the first place.

Neal Stephenson's recently published Fall touches on this topic as well. Makes for some nice speculative fiction.

> There’s been an explosion in the engine, and the plane is going to crash in 15 minutes. There’s no chance of survival. There is a potential way out—the plane happens to be transferring a shipment of parachutes, and anyone who would like to use one to escape the plane may do so. But I must warn you—the parachutes are experimental and completely untested, with no guarantee to work. We also have no idea what the terrain will be like down below. Please line up in the aisle if you’d like a parachute, and the flight attendants will give you one, show you how to use it and usher you to the emergency exit where you can jump. Those who choose not to take that option, please remain in your seat—this will be over soon, and you will feel no pain.

This analogy is used to obscure rather than to clarify. Preserving someone's body and hoping that they can be resurrected in the far future is something that anyone can understand. So why do we need an analogy?

The article makes many comparisons between medical intervention and cryonics. When considering a medical intervention, one has to consider the likelihood of the intervention's success. My opinion is that there's roughly zero chance that people being preserved will ever be resurrected. I think it's dumb to spend large amounts of money on medical interventions with roughly zero chance of success.

This is what it comes down to: people who pay for cryonics think that there is significantly greater than zero chance that they will be resurrected. I support their right to make that gamble but I think it's a bad gamble. I think that it's a waste of money, that it's selfish, and that people who make that gamble will tend to be people who have led unfulfilling lives because they've been unable to accept things that they can't control.

Maybe I'm wrong. Only with the passage of time we will know whether these people will be resurrected or not. As I said, I'm betting on "no chance in hell".

If you like Don DeLillo, Zero K is an excellent criticism of cryonics.

Bahaha. The post references an article in Russia Times as evidence you can defrost a brain.

I've heard reviving cryonically frozen brains as trying to reconstitute individual fruits from a smoothie.

This guy needs to read the Tibetan book of the dead. People in the past have thought long and hard about consciousness... and actually experienced alternate states similar to death. We just choose to treat them as loonies in the west. Who knows what happens to your consciousness in that frozen state. You might just be paralyzed the whole time.

The analogy to jumping out of an airplane is apples and oranges, because you are guaranteed life or death within the current epoch in the case of the airplane jump — both states that we understand. But you have no such guarantee in the cryogenic state. You might wake up to a horrible world.

I was signed up with Alcor until I was flown out for one of their Teens and Tweens functions and discovered everyone attending was a gold supremacist or conspiracy theorist.

Max More who (I think?) is still the CEO and someone I looked up to seemed more concerned if I was into a threesome with him and another attending woman than discussing transhumanism.

Realizing I wouldn’t want to wake up in a world with the rest of the members and encountering Buddhist philosophy was the push I needed to cancel my life insurance policy, which would have paid for the whole body procedure in the event of my death.

There's definitely a correlation between believing in one fringe thing and believing in a lot of fringe things. I think there might be some kind of "willingness to accept your own conclusions" hyperparameter that we're all set with, some people accept way too many of their own conclusions and some people don't accept enough.

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