What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams' head was abused at the facility. Johnson claims a technician took baseball-like swings at Williams' frozen head with a monkey wrench.
What?
If your body is not damaged enough. It would mean a lot of people would become really risk averse. If generalized it would fossilize a society really fast.
It's also worth noting that there are no hieroglyphs inside the Great Pyramids (which are supposedly said to be tombs), when the Valley of the Kings (an actual tomb) was caked in them.
Also, the only written text depicting the construction of the Great Pyramids, that I could find, is (again, supposedly) the Famine Stele. I find it highly questionable that there is only one text that tells us of the most notable construction of ancient Egypt's entire existence, and one of the most notable buildings to date. And not a single hieroglyph amongst the Pyramids' vicinity says anything about it either.
It's not very surprising that we don't have a lot of texts about the construction of buildings that are 4,500 years old. The pyramids are incredibly ancient, and were ancient when later pharaohs tried to understand who built them.
For comparison, the Notre Dame of Paris is closer to our time than the Pyramids were to the pharaohs who built their tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
Many have also been demolished in ancient times so the stones could be reused. For example the pyramid of Djedefre, son of Khufu who built the famous Great Pyramid. Instead of competing on size, the son made a smaller pyramid of more beautiful stone, but unfortunately the stone was too valuable to let stand and was repurposed over millennia:
"Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and its last active ruler. A member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great."
So, inasmuch as she thought about the pyramids, it was as a colonizer.
Up in Nederland CO, there is the body of Bredo Morstoel. Most years the town holds the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival to celebrate his cryopreservation, complete with ice cream, coffin races, and frozen salmon tossing. Yes really.
I've been on the tour of his cryonics 'facility'. It is a Tuff Shed on the side of a mountain next to a chemical toilet and a home-made above ground nuclear bunker (with sliding glass doors). The Morstoel family was ... eccentric. During the 'champagne' tour, you are allowed to help restock Bredo Morstoel's tomb with dry ice and see his coffin. The coffin is in very rough shape and you can easily see his corpse.
He is very dead and is never coming back.
He looks just like Otzi the Ice Man. There is a lot of mildew in the corners of his styrofoam and plywood cryo-chamber-thing. He is not fully attached together anymore. His caretakers are, honestly, paranoid occult isolated libertarians.
Bredo Morstoel's dream isn't ever going to come true. He is dead and rotten now.
There’s also the fact that after living elsewhere for many years, the home you go back to is not the same as the home you left.
When you then go back to people who are similar (because that's always going to be the case to some extent, even if locally the community feels and/or thinks itself diverse) you will frequently feel that others have not 'progressed' or are 'stuck' in those culturally determined ways. It's hard to share that growth with people that haven't done the same, which is I think why expats stick together, even when they're back.
I moved between Western countries I should perhaps add.
I suspect in hundreds or thousands of years we'll look back at age-related death culturally the same way we look at infant mortality during the medieval ages: commonly accepted as part of life at the time, but unnecessary and completely solvable in retrospective.
I think fear is the wrong word per-say. If it's something I can't change, that's fine. But if there's an avenue to change it, even if unlikely, why not try?
As parent poster wrote, we like nostalgia, because we clutch to our experiences. We compare them instead of collecting it. On the other side the more we experience something the more we stall or get bored. Even with other people - with increase of lifespan we also increased number of divorces, lost connections etc. That doesn’t make us happier.
One could argue that we, as humans, suffer more today from out deteriorating bodies, than people in medieval time, when it was shorter, and that we suffer more psychologically due to increased influx of information, global conscience and artificial constructs we build every day.
Resources would also be an issue, so even if immortality would be obtainable it’d be either reserved for the richest or would divide people with almost impassable line splitting centuries of servitude and centuries of indulgence.
So to answer your question - why not? Because it’ll bring suffer to many on many levels except for a blessed few and we should focus first on making life great for everyone present before trying to make it infinitely longer.
Joking lightly (as subject is very deep) - it’s somewhat useful skill to know when to get off the stage.
Humans dont progress in terms of biological evolution anymore but instead technologically. The increased lifespan would allow scientist to master multiple fields which would be great for progress.
As of 2019 1/3 of world’s population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. Would they be glad that instead of clean water and sanitary conditions they were granted endless life?
It’s nice to focus on optimistic outcomes but except for genius scientists world is full of mobsters, greedy bankers and ruthless corporation heads. They’d had a chance for longevity way sooner than the best of scientists (who have “infinite memory” trait, which isn’t true even for the healthiest of humans).
Sure, we’re speculating (and it’s fun) but I’d invite to mix at least 30% of “what could go wrong” as part of the context.
Let’s have a thought experiment: who would be the first to get such treatment - Nobel prize winner or a dictator? What would be the route, who would pay for that, would they even want that (as that’s not guaranteed).
If the technology first emerges you could probably get it quite cheaply because its not proven yet. Afterwards there will be a scarity due to everyone wanting it which will drive prices up. In the long run it becomes a free commodity due to being a net saving for governments.
But even if the rich and ruthless get it first, that doesnt matter much in the long run. Medical improvements tend to get cheaper with time. The incentives are there to provide it to everyone. And especially so in a democracy.
Immortality also doesn’t equal invincibility. One can get sick, one can brake their bones and still suffer. With assumption that immortality would come with great regenerative capabilities - would that include teeth as well? What would happen if we’d lost some due to accident? Would it extend to limbs?
I think main question is why one would like to be immortal? Experiencing thing is nice thing, but with great biological change world would change too. Population would grow and scarcity would be even worse. Probably people would work most of the time just to be able to sleep (due housing shortage) and eat (due food shortage as a result of decreased production area).
It’s possible that bigger chunks of our lives (except “the winners”) would consist of work (another prior example - while we work less for last couple centuries, work devices are omnipresent falsifying data, and we still work much more than in pre-industrial times [1])
If you hadn’t had chance I’d recommend Upload show available on Amazon Prime. It’s somewhat tangential (as it’s endless virtual afterlife) but it touches some possible issues relatable to our discussion
[1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
Immortality is maybe the wrong word for what i have in mind. Its more eternal youth but you can still be killed. Best analogy would be the elves in lord of the rings.
My hope would be that the higher life experience combined with a healthy body would allow us to be better as a species.
Media seems pretty dystopian and dark in general right now. I think that may influence the outlook of many regarding the future. Certainly could turn out that way but i think there is also a big chance it will be way different and better then we think right now.
Sure we will, just not in the traditional natural-selection sense. In many ways humans have "beaten" evolution by finding medical means to allow "unfit" humans to live full lives, and often pass on their genes.
Evolution in the future could be via technical means, either through advancements in medicine, or with cybernetic implants. If humans could ever become intellectually & ethically pure enough to be trusted with genetic engineering ourselves, that's another form of self-made evolution.
> If we had many lives then each one would be less meaningful.
That's a very personal thing, and just an opinion. With changes in lifespan, attitudes change, purpose changes, and people change their outlook. Once upon a time, humans lived much shorter lives, with many/most not making it out of their 30s. Now life expectancy is in the 70s and 80s. And yet we don't look at this doubling of our lifespans and believe that all that extra time robs our lives of meaning. So why should that be the case if we could live to be 500?
> We’d at least need to put age limits on political participation.
Perhaps, but that should be a floating limit that gets adjusted upward with life expectancy. If people regularly lived to be 200, maybe 190-year-olds wouldn't be fit to serve, but a 100-year-old? Why not? And if we managed to push that to 400, those 190-year-olds would start to seem pretty relevant; it would be an injustice to deny them participation in the political system.
Regardless, our idea of society itself would need a huge overhaul even if our lifespans were doubled, let alone made effectively limitless. Political participation would likely be the least of our worries.
Citation needed; because that's commonly believed to be average life expectancy - brought down by infant mortality. If you made it past ~5 years old, you had a good chance of living to 60-80.
"The days of our years are threescore years and ten" - Psalm 90:10, the King James Bible.
"A man will spend ten years as a child before he understands death and life. He spends another ten years acquiring the instruction by which he will be able to live. He spends another ten years earning and gaining possessions by which to live. He spends another ten years up to old age, when his heart becomes is counsellor. There remain sixty years of the whole life, which Thoth has assigned to be the man of god." - A passage from The Insinger Papyrus, in the Ptolemaic period"
Not as a species though. We just have to keep reproducing more of us that are good at staying alive and also reproducing to evolve. You and I theoretically could live forever in the same state, and still, our species would evolve via our offspring and theirs and so on.
If you're actually worried about evolution you'll want to bring back eugenics. Current selective pressures are quite relaxed, leading to an increase in deleterious mutations and rising future healthcare costs.
Faced with their own mortality, a bunch of aging billionaires and multimillionaires tend to pour money into longevity research. I'd be very upset if governments increased spending on fighting senescence today, instead of lower-hanging fruit .
>It is important for us to die because most of the time people don't change their mind, they just die. If you live forever, we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed.
There are also solutions like term limits, or generational tenure limits or something that could help reduce any negative effects without needing to continue unnecessary loss of life.
It's not (only) about old people having short term vision/not enough time for reeducation.
25 or 30 year old people are already very often set in stone and unable to change their views and they have most of their life ahead of them.
This argument is philosophical i.e. worthless. We will actually have to win with death to answer the question if it's good or not. It's not something you can figure out without doing it.
On the whole I think it's worth it, but it will definitely exasperate the problems already inherent to our economic system.
What till he's 75 and see if he still holds that view.
Mechanism that could be applied way earlier than old ossified out of touch rulers die now. And applied more merit based.
It is so right now only because of how good modern common people have. But it's going away now. And if security of elites depend of well being of others it's sort of self-regulating system albeit way too slowly.
There's also pressure from the other side. The longer living elites means it will get crowded at the top, so elites might be open to some means of culling their numbers.
To add some good mood, I stole a comment from reddit [1] which describes one of millions of media dealing with this question:
> In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, immortality is fine if you're born that way. It's only if you accidentally obtain it after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator is it a bad thing that you are not equipped to deal with and so decide to insult everyone in the universe in alphabetical order.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/tpzb4e/immortality_i...
2. Even if it was, it doesn't make the "wisdom" any less relevant. There's no shortage of relevant wisdom in Douglas Adams' writing.
3. I intentionally quoted Elon specifically, because it is a relevant reply to the parent comment about billionaires pouring money to longevity research.
But for the time being, nice to see him stating something I don't disagree with.
PS: Oh sorry I understood that as a question of what would be useful, not what is actually spent.
I meant what lower hanging fruits governments ought to spend on. However, since you asked, here are some of the things governments are currently spending on, but could bear improvement: eradicating preventable diseases, ensuring kids get good nutrition, better tracking, and hopefully prevention of e. coli/salmonella outbreaks, funding basic research into improving outcomes for patients, reducing profiteering off the products of publicly-funded research, medical pricing transparency, better organ donor policies (universal opt-out)
We have a whole host of societal functions that are not geared to cope with longevity: including social security plus the associated tax-rates
We, like, know how to solve some of those other problems. Sure, there's politics and bureaucracy and complications and the opportunity for corruption, but you can assign a p close to 1 we could get it done in an arbitrary timeframe.
Meanwhile, what's the probability that dumping a particular amount of money into aging is going to pay off? Even taking a thousand years you need a p>0.002 to make it worth diverting money from the safe bet of getting a couple of years off the other things.
Yikes! That's a scary conspiracy theory!
(Note that I don't agree it would cause a breakdown in society.)
My comment comes across as semantic nitpicking, but I don't mean it that way; I just think I'm not understanding what you mean by reasoning "by induction" here.
I am a mathematician, so am most familiar with induction in its technical mathematical sense, which I assume isn't what you mean. More generally, my dictionary says that induction is "the inference of a general law from particular instances". For that to be what you mean here, you would need to infer that "someone makes sure they don't" (meaning, I assume, "they don't succeed in curing death by aging") in general from the fact that someone has done so in particular cases. Is that what you meant? If so, who and when? Or is my dictionary wrong, or are you using some other sense of 'induction'?
Death is good on so many levels - equalizer that removes most horrible tyrants like Stalin who would easily burn whole world just to be immortal and stay on top. If you are a normal decent person you can't even comprehend mindset of such sociopaths and their eternal greed. Don't think there are few people like that in a generation, rather few millions, just with fewer options.
Death also makes whole nations eventually forget wrongs on the past, otherwise we would still be hating mongols and huns and romans and swedes and british and slavers and germans as nazis etc. If for nothing else, just to remove threat of semi-eternal planetary dictator death is great.
My grandparents from my dads side both died few months ago aged 94 and 95. They saw all their friends, neighbors and colleagues die decades ago, and they were witnessing same starting to happen to kids of those close people. They were both depressed from this, gradual loss of everything that has any long term meaning plus decline of everything health-related. It sucks to be the last living guy from say group of friends, you think you would find tons of solace in the fact you are still alive but thats not how reality on the ground looks like. People just wait for death to come and many prefer it comes soon.
All because you don't want to bother inventing an orbital ring or an arcology tower or society where suicide by choice is the accepted way out.
> "removes most horrible tyrants like Stalin"
"we" could still kill him; immortal or ageless doesn't necessarily mean invincible.
All the while the are almost endless resources and options how to solve these issues waiting in the solar system!
Its like hauling old people to the mountains to die because your village can't support them. We got over that & we should should get over our current terrestrial problems as well by moving on and expanding out of our cradle.
Consider: it seems that we should be able to support a technological civilization of billions of people on renewable energy alone. That means literally on a fraction of the sunlight that Earth captures. Now, Sun isn't focusing on Earth, it's an omnidirectional emitter. Which means there's some 74 000 times more energy than Earth is receiving from the Sun available just in Earth's orbital band alone.
Fortunately, space-related energy problems seem like they'll be solving themselves, in lock step with increased space capabilities.
There's no way we're going to rocket launch billions to Mars, and there isn't another planet worth living on without unreasonable amounts of energy for Terraforming. But we are capable of rebuilding the atoms of Earth into much larger living environments - there are so many atoms it wouldn't mean destroying the Earth to do it. A Space Elevator doesn't need diamond nanowire, it could be built with enough steel chain. An orbital ring around the Equator would be enormous and would take approximately nothing of the Earth's matter to construct.
Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel is full of speculation and plans for all kinds of possible or nearly-possible futures, as well as more distant dreams. e.g. the playlists:
- "The future of Energy, Industry and Agriculture" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
- "Earth v2.0" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6mRjsxQQJE&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
- "Outward Bound" - near-Earth space exploration and living - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
- "Visions of Earth" - arcologies, megacities, ecumenopolises, geoengineering, weather control - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
And somewhere in there, megastructures such as Dyson Spheres, ringworlds, etc.
Also, since death is apparently good then Stalin was not bad? Right?
Most of it is on fruit flies and mice then takes a life time to test on humans!
What we do know is that being fit and exercising with some semblance of healthy eating helps people live a lot longer. But no one wants to do it.
No, abstaining from things like alcohol and smoking mostly does that.
Exercise and healthy eating markedly improves quality of life at old age, but it doesn’t extend it by huge amounts.
For what it's worth obesity accounts for about 5-10 year shortening. Not dissimilar to smoking.
Sport is good for you. Extreme sports markedly cuts short average life expectancy and late quality of life. With your logic, that makes sports bad.
Edit: actually, I guess it depends on where you live. In America, obesity probably is the median..
There is this weird defense of obesity and being sedentary in western culture it's just inexplicable.
Interestingly we've just had the first case of manslaughter by obesity trial going on in the UK [1]. The mum has admitted manslaughter the dad is going to trial. Over death of their 16yo girl.
If my kids, or their kids, or their kids, etc. ever wanted me to die in order to "bestow" them with something...well, too bad. I wish my grandparents, and their parents, etc. were alive today.
Eventually all the atoms we know and love will decay and "disappear."
If we get to a place where people can live healthy lives until they are 300 years old, why do you think someone who finished college 40 years ago will be more valuable for a company than a fresh graduate? Because nowadays we have exactly this setup minus the 300 year lifespan, and often times the company is happy to let go of the senior guy.
You don't know that. You think that is the case, but (I) you don't know what death is like, so you cannot realistically claim it is worse than anything (II) until you qualify 'fucked up' then this is a pointless claim, since your version of 'fucked up' may not be that bad compared to what is in the realm of possibility.
It's incredibly more likely that continued existence will be no worse than the world today, which is quite nice. Even if it becomes torturous existence beats non-existence.
The only reason population numbers aren't collapsing is immigration, but that comes with its own issues. Extending live expectency and productive lifetime isn't that crazy (if we can get a handle on our rising living standards and resource consumption).
People who are physically young are at a much lower risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, Type II diabetes/Alzheimer's, etc. Stopping/reversing the aging process kind of fixes the root cause of a lot of those diseases.
We're probably not far off from that reality, either. Then we move onto more controversial questions, e.g. Do physically healthy people have the right to end their own lives? Not everyone want to live to be 300 years old, especially those who have lost most of their family and friends over those years.
I've experienced extreme loss, but continue to expreience new connections, knowledge, etc. There's simply no small limit to what a human can experience, and hundreds of years is paltry compared to when it would take to even be on the verge of boredom/emptiness, if such a verge could actually ever be reached.
I suppose there are others but like you I don't understand why there isn't more focus and media attention on the root causes of aging, the ultimate killer.
Currently our culture/civilisation can be expected with my life. We won't adapt as you can see by us not adapting even now for mitigation on a societal level at all.
But yes, death of old age is the sorrow of our days!
> I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery
No, you couldn't. You would still be your aged brain, not capable of learning hundreds of professions, and your frail body, not capable of replacing its cells any longer. It requires more than a better way to heat up a corpse to extend life.
I'll leave you with this (paraphrase of a) quote: millions long for immortality, but don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
How would you fix your brain? Its capacity is obviously limited, and tinkering with plasticity almost certainly will have unexpected and undesirable consequences. You simply won't be the same person.
Is it obvious? How would you repair a piece of metal suffering metal fatigue? A perished elastic band? A screw with a chewed head? These are trivial things compared to a human body and we haven't a clue how to rejuvenate them, all we can do is replace them. But how do you replace "a muscle" without surgically damaging the tissue around it? How do you keep "muscle memory" after doing so? How do you reconnect your replacement eye to the optic nerve? How do you replace cells like for like when there's tens of trillions of them in each person, and each cell is a machine a hundred trillion atoms complex? How do you target the cellular machinary inside one cell and find out that it's in need of repair? Is it 'pretty obvious' you can do so?
What does it mean to reverse aging? Younger me was smaller. Younger me moved differently. Younger me liked different foods and knew different facts. Younger me didn't have scar tissue in certain places, are you going to swap that out for normal tissue (how)?
It's pretty obvious that 'repair' does not undo the effects of ageing, it prolongs them - restored old cars are not new cars, they still need to be driven gently. People with plastic surgery don't look like young people, they look like old people who fell into uncanny valley.
The huge difference between repairing a piece of metal, and repairing a living tissue, is, obviously, the living tissue can repair itself. The mechanisms of self-repair are built in, and they are extremely effective. The problem is these mechanisms break down with age, so the task becomes figuring out how to re-enable them. Yes, we don't know how to do that yet, but keep in mind - just 10 years ago we didn't know how to do things like CRISPR gene editing and now we can do something like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63859184. The point is, we are making progress towards the goal of controlling all the processes in our bodies. There's absolutely no reason to believe this progress will stop any time soon. Even if we can't do it today, things like organ or limb regeneration do not sound like science fiction any more, it's a question of when, not if.
Yes, it's quite likely every one of us Millennials will grow old and die, but I'm much less sure about our kids, and our grand kids will most likely be able to stay forever young if they so desire.
I'd certainly rather live 100 years with a 20 year old body than 200 years with a 90 year old one.
To offer one example democracy would be mostly impossible in a post mortality world.
Also immortal humans would be either fertile or infertile and both cases would create quite weird situations.
If I can conclude with some posturing, it is part of human nature to strive toward better conditions and solve the problems around us. This might be our demise, as both giving up on that nature and following it to its logical end might lead to our end.
Change in viewpoints, lifestyle or behavior become exceedingly rare the older people get. Also, the youth is always incapable, stupid and wrong. It's so much of a phenomenon that I wouldn't dare blaming anyone for this. It almost seems to be part of normal development.
People just tend to become more mentally rigid with age and they have a perfect justification ready for you: experience. They have seen it all and can therefore judge everything and everyone (without considering changed circumstances of course which would require to adjust the mental frame that was rigidly formed across the ages).
There are a couple of things that make death bearable. Any longevity treatment should placate the first and we should aim to compensate the second with plenty of change in our lives.
First is physical ailments. Even a healthy person will accumulate aches, and those will slowly erode they will to live. Several of my grandparents (and some that were not mine) have expressed that they were waiting to be taken, and I'd wager that would be a part.
Second is the mental fatigue. Not only your mental state is akin to your physical one, so you might be mentally exhausted, but also you begin to get bored with most media. It's hard to find a story that hasn't been told before, music that you find original and good, few dishes that you still dare to discover, ... .
Apart from the personal point of view there's also the general one. There two more problem arise.
Sustainability, as the planet can support what it can. The society and the way resources are managed will have to change a lot if people live longer. But don't worry because...
Power. You'd go from families holding power to individuals. No longer the young master will spend all the money and none will be left, because their parents will have control over that. Situation could become even more oppressive with them withholding the longevity treatments, giving some to their employees and none to the general public.
So while I agree with your sentiment, which is also beautifully expressed in HPNOR, I'd say that there's a lot of transformations to be made before it's good.
This isn’t absolute. Of course with an infinite life some of these restrictions go away, but unless we get rid of the meat minds I think we’ll have some built-in limitations that are core to who we are as humans. I honestly think I learn more than most of my peers because I keep trying to, but I do find myself getting less interested in the latest fad. Some amazing people can learn entirely new life journeys, Carmack or SamA, say. But look at most people you know. Most are going to keep plugging away getting crankier and crankier. If those people hold power and grow their wealth indefinitely, I think that’s a net negative.
Max Plank said, paraphrased: Science progresses one funeral at a time.
We make way for the youth to have their go, with our influence reducing over time.
This all ends when AI arrives anyway. Change has to outpace us. Someone or something will get your wish of indefinite life, and we’ll find out how these patterns change.
But rarely do you get an excellent back and forth as these thought provoking, diametrically opposite but equally compelling comments!
Is that enough? Can I go now? Isn't that enough? I still have possibly 3-4 decades of life left to average life expectancy, and for what - to grind through more experiences? Even though I've already had vastly more than most humans who ever lived? I have no great purpose to achieve, there's nothing I can do which millions of others can't do. The main reason to go on living is because dying would hurt others unnecessarily. Brute forcing through everything-there-is-to-experience is not an enticing vision for the future at all, it's a grind.
> "but if it wasn't for some limit forced upon me, if it was really my choice, then there's a lot more I'd like to do."
It seems common that people who become rich enough to do anything end up depressed doing nothing. Taking the forcing function out seems to make people miserable rather than happy. Even people who said beforehand that they had lots they'd like to do often seem to lose motivation to actually do any of it.
[1] there's a phrase.
Speak for yourself, but please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective. (I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to.)
Whom do you think I am speaking for?
> "please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective."
"I want everything" is a youthful perspective that adults grow out of by gaining things and realising that drowning in endless things isn't happiness, it's a hoarding disorder. People with a PetaByte storage array of media aren't the happiest film watchers on the planet, people with a garage full of Lamborghinis aren't the best drivers or the happiest people, Billionaires aren't satisfied with 'enough' money. Indeed, the opposite as one anecdote in this thread commented - a child with nothing who gets an orange is happy; a child with 9 consoles who gets a 10th console and wants an 11th, isn't happy. Saying "I want 1000000 consoles" seems more cringeworthy than convincing. "I want a career" "I want ten careers!" "I want a pony" "I want a hundred lifetimes of pony ownership!". "I want to master an instrument" "I want to master infinity instruments!". Ok mr oneupper. But it makes no difference whether "you" lived all those lives you can't remember, or someone else did. No difference at all. In fact, you may as well assume that other people are you, and their lives are ones you lived and can no longer remember. Everything becomes much simpler and it makes just as much sense.
> "I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to."
I suspect they are against suicide; why would someone who promotes longevity so much also be pro-dying-early? I also suspect one of the reasons our societies are against suicide is because workers can't be allowed an easy escape from their suffering. The kind of people who are in favour of working infinity lifetimes of careers are probably in the upper/white collar classes if they see that as a good thing; to a huge amount of the world, retirement is the carrot dangled ahead of them and dozens of lifetimes of work would be a pretty bad thing.
I think you're speaking for "adults", given your next sentence.
> "I want everything" is a youthful perspective that adults grow out of...
Also:
> > "I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to."
> I suspect they are against suicide; why would someone who promotes longevity so much also be pro-dying-early?
I was ambiguous, sorry. I know for a fact that a great many of longevity advocates advocate legalized suicide. My "I think" was hedging against the fact that I haven't done a survey and don't have hard data. But I think you - understandably, given this is what you're doing - took it as idle, uninformed speculation.
My advice would be actually to read serious arguments in favor of longevity before forming opinions on them. Maybe start here: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/cryonics
That's the kind of out of touch that E Yudkowsky's writing has, from his position of employing someone to sit next to him to remind him he's supposed to be writing Harry Potter fan fiction instead of procrastinating. Quite possibly I would agree more if I was a genius academic able to write about anything that interested me for a living and had an audience hanging on my every blog post. Here for example[1] is a LessWrong post from Gwern which I resonate more with. Quotes: "Next to life itself, freedom is the most precious value; and most people’s lives are functionally devoid of it. Many cryonicists fail to see this, because they are self employed, are in jobs that offer them compensating satisfaction, or that they don’t perceive as “work”". and "Heaven isn’t waking up from cryopreservation and having to go into work two weeks later – FOREVER. That is the very definition of hell for most people."
And even then it doesn't capture several things about cryonics arguments which bother me; the fiddling of the finances with insurance. Sure it may cost more than a normal person earns in a lifetime to cryopreserve someone, but if we handwave it away with "insurance" then it will all be fine. Insurance companies are scummy, the academic calculations about risk/reward/probability never take that real world fact into account, "markets are great" they say while everyday people are swindled by marketeers day in, day out. Or the delight in drastic medical treatments where the results may look good on paper, but look at people's lived experience of medical procedure aftermaths, problems they are left with, and it looks uncomfortably different. e.g. [2], c.f. how many doctors would personally refuse the old age treatments their elderly patients+families ask for. And then wonder what the actual lived experience of the cryo-revived would be, separate from the paperwork which says 'revived successfully'.
And then how self-satisified the whole thing is, e.g. from the Gwern post: "many of the arguments that make cryonics credible, require a remarkable degree of both intelligence and scholarship. Inability to understand the enabling ideas and technologies usually means the inability to understand, let alone embrace, cryonics.". Now that alone wouldn't change how likely it is to work, but consider Eliezer Yudkowsky who values his own intelligence more than most things; he is overweight and under exercised[3]. Caloric restriction is the only proven way to extend life in any creatures, and it's much more likely that it is effective in humans than it is that you personally will be cryonically revived, but he doesn't do it. Why not? Exercise is about the only proven way to slow IQ decline with age, something you'd think he would value highly, and it appears he doesn't do that either. Why not?
Compare with Ray Kurzweil and his book "the Fantastic Voyage - live long enough to live forever"[4], he has been partnering with a doctor for decades studying body biochemistry and interventions to improve his health and increase his life expectancy - and doing them - incredibly fiddly diet and micronutrient tracking and regular medical interventions at the doctor's office, dozens of regular blood tests. Seen through the lens of this book what it takes to try and live longer, makes it a bit less attractive to bother, doesn't it? Ray Kurzweil's reason was to live long enough to see the singularity in about 2035 and become immortal and revive his father. EY argues much more strongly for live extension than Ray Kurzweil, but apparently takes far less interest in doing anything about it today. The pro-cryonics arguments are often about how clever the cryonics suporters are for seeing a loophole in the universe - and conveniently it's a loophole that only needs an online signup with a credit card, but if you look at their 'revealed preferences', they aren't convinced enough to act on things which are much more likely to work but involve effort, so maybe agreeing with cryonics isn't about how intelligent you are, it's about how tempted you are to an easy low-effort fix?
Compared to most creatures on Earth we already have longevity, btw. Imagine how much more you could master if you hadn't spent so long commuting, washing vegetables, making your bed, showering, gazing out the window, vacuuming dust-catcher carpets, polishing silverware ... if you surgically removed all your life, how much more life you could cram in. Oh you don't want to give up eating delicious calories for decades for the hope of a few more years at the end? Funny, me either. You don't want to spend hours exercising for the hope of a few more IQ points near the end? Weird, I don't either. You don't want to wash your vegetables in acid and drink only filtered water and spend hours a week analysing your blood test results making microadjustments to your dozens of regular nutritional supplements using the latest medical study results for guidance?[5] Hah, guess what, me either.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mkrvsNi8cYGSjGqkh/on-the-unp...
[2] https://collateral-damage.net/ read the Preview of Chapter One. The developing full story used to be there as blog posts before it was turned into a book, you might find them on https://web.archive.org/web/20081215144025/http://adventures...
[3] https://live.staticflickr.com/6035/6262275090_186d29a15c_b.j... (belly)
[4] http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/ and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83538.Fantastic_Voyage
[5] Ray Kurzweil on supplements: "For boosting antioxidant levels and for general health, I take a comprehensive vitamin-and-mineral combination, alpha lipoic acid, coenzyme Q10, grapeseed extract, resveratrol, bilberry extract, lycopene, silymarin (milk thistle), conjugated linoleic acid, lecithin, evening primrose oil (omega-6 essential fatty acids), n-acetyl-cysteine, ginger, garlic, l-carnitine, pyridoxal-5-phosphate, and echinacea. I also take Chinese herbs prescribed by Dr. Glenn Rothfeld. For reducing insulin resistance and overcoming my type 2 diabetes, I take chromium, metformin (a powerful anti-aging medication that decreases insulin resistance and which we recommend everyone over 50 consider taking), and gymnema sylvestra. To improve LDL and HDL cholesterol levels, I take policosanol, gugulipid, plant sterols, niacin, oat bran, grapefruit powder, psyllium, lecithin, and Lipitor. To improve blood vessel health, I take arginine, trimethylglycine, and choline. To decrease blood viscosity, I take a daily baby aspirin and lumbrokinase, a natural anti-fibrinolytic agent. Although my CRP (the screening test for inflammation in the body) is very low, I reduce inflammation by taking EPA/DHA (omega-3 essential fatty acids) and curcumin. I have dramatically reduced my homocysteine level by taking folic acid, B6, and trimethylglycine (TMG), and intrinsic factor to improve methylation. I have a B12 shot once a week and take a daily B12 sublingual. Several of my intravenous therapies improve my body’s detoxification: weekly EDTA (for chelating heavy metals, a major source of aging) and monthly DMPS (to chelate mercury). I also take n-acetyl-l-carnitine orally. I take weekly intravenous vitamins and alpha lipoic acid to boost antioxidants. I do a weekly glutathione IV to boost liver health. Perhaps the most important intravenous therapy I do is a weekly phosphatidylcholine (PtC) IV, which rejuvenates all of the body’s tissues by restoring youthful cell membranes. I also take PtC orally each day, and I supplement my hormone levels with DHEA and testosterone. I take I-3-C (indole-3-carbinol), chrysin, nettle, ginger, and herbs to reduce conversion of testosterone into estrogen. I take a saw palmetto complex for prostate health. For stress management, I take l-theonine (the calming substance in green tea), beta sitosterol, phosphatidylserine, and green tea supplements, in addition to drinking 8 to 10 cups of green tea itself. At bedtime, to aid with sleep, I take GABA (a gentle, calming neuro-transmitter) and sublingual melatonin. For brain health, I take acetyl-l-carnitine, vinpocetine, phosphatidylserine, ginkgo biloba, glycerylphosphorylcholine, nextrutine, and quercetin. For eye health, I take lutein and bilberry extract. For skin health, I use an antioxidant skin cream on my face, neck, and hands each day. For digestive health, I take betaine HCL, pepsin, gentian root, peppermint, acidophilus bifodobacter, fructooligosaccharides, fish proteins, l-glutamine, and n-acetyl-d-glucosamine. To inhibit the creation of advanced glycosylated end products (AGEs), a key aging process, I take n-acetyl-carnitine, carnosine, alpha lipoic acid, and quercetin." - now that's longevity in practise, who's still interested? Who even bothered to read this, let alone do it?
Personally, I've always had the itch to recreate as much of the computing stack I rely on as possible. I love the idea of running my own text editor in my own shell, written in my own programming language, compiled with my own compiler, running on my own operating system. Not because I think I would be pushing the state of the art forward or that it would be commercially viable, but just for kicks. The joy of truly understanding.
I think this is not a completely uncommon feeling, which is why a lot of programmers could look at Terry Davis and say "okay, aside from the obvious mental illness, the racism and the antisemitism, there is something there." He spent years building something with little value to anybody beyond himself. Zach and Tarn Adams spending twenty years on Dwarf Fortress also comes to mind, to the extent they are doing it for themselves. These projects require huge sacrifices on the part of their creators. The opportunity costs incurred shape their lives (e.g. the Dwarf Fortress decisions currently being made based on health insurance coverage). I can't imagine inflicting the programmer monk lifestyle that would come along with such long term non-commercial work on my young kids when the end state is just "Yeah, it's useless but I got a kick out of doing it."
Being honest, it's also hard to imagine that once my kids move out and I can pick a more austere lifestyle just for myself, I'll look at the remaining ~20 years of my life and say, "I think I will devote the rest of my life to this one single 'that would be kinda neat' drive."
If I had, say, 100, 200, 500 more good years where I could just subsist and pursue passion projects? I'd love to spend 10-20 years going down the "recreate all your software from scratch" rabbit hole.
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A thought on the "society needs death" idea: if my continued existence pursuing obscure hobbies without economic value is a drain on society, maybe the fix isn't that I must die at some arbitrary age fixed by evolution, maybe the fix is just a better way to account for the costs and benefits of our actions. Don't say nobody can spend 10,000 years jetsetting from tourist spot to tourist spot, just require them to offset it through their other actions so that on balance they've made a positive contribution.
When something is very painful and inescapable you can: Fight it, run away from it (not talk about it, ignore it, pretend it's not there or won't happen, mentally distract away from it with constant stimulation), freeze (dissociate, numbness, ie shut down emotions, be stoic, feel nothing or little) or fawn (appease, please, embrace the pain in order to feel a sense of control over it, believe it's good, you want it or is positive in some way, thereby releasing yourself from the torment of powerlessness+pain).
My guess is that we’ll inevitably begin to forget the older, less important stuff even with a completely healthy brain simply due to size constrain.
Quick note because you seem like the type of person who’d like to know, it’s “per se”: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per_se
If we think of some collective 'Gaia Hypothesis' rather than yourself, then keeping you (specifically) around forever is kind of a big commitment, no?
Perhaps you are just not that big of a deal to be worthy of keeping around? And how would you square keeping you around and not Joe? Is it resources based? Than we would be stuck with a collective of eternal wealthy people, which judging by the sample of mortals available today sounds pretty uninteresting.
Yes it's amazing and you're having your turn at it right now! Enjoy it and then pass it forward.
I'll see you all at the heat death of the universe.
I'm not involved with that organization, but I find their work very interesting.
As a backup plan, there's Alcor. https://www.alcor.org/
If a drug or therapy truly does extend life span I can also see systems forming where the few want to keep it to themselves and away from the many. One way or another I can’t imagine this being the the top priority of anyone but the most vain (personal opinion) so I would not associate myself with such research is all.
For example, people who live much longer would probably think about the environment on longer time scales. That includes climate change, pollution, resource exhaustion, and so on. They might consider helping to improve their society, because even if it took several generations they might live to see the benefits.
People who live longer can afford to make better long term investments, instead of trying to cash in on short get rich quick schemes.
They might take better care of their health, knowing that they're not just risking the usually healthy 20s-60s range, but a 20s-200s range, when doing risky activities. Those risky activities sometimes affect others.
People may care to invest in research to cure other diseases because more people will live long enough to suffer from them.
And so on...
Honestly this seems like a better use of resources than a holiday or a new TV.
I personally think we need better tooling. We need atomically precise manufacturing, so as to create medical interventions on the smallest scale.
To this end I hope to be launching a molecular nanotechnology startup in the near future.
Asking people to "take the quick way out", though, IS asking someone to kill himself for having an opinion you don't seem to like.
looks like I didn't misunderstand at all.
It's also a big difference in outlook -- people that would scoff at life extension would also be the people ready to "end" something in life, and not constantly be at the teat of something. For example, young soldiers in WW1. That sort of outlook is alien to most now, modernity's pit of comfort makes a fool of anyone who partakes.
Therefore, no, we should not search for immortality, Terra will be unliveable for carbon-based organisms in 1 billion years [1], but we should look for mechanisms to preserve a somewhat trivial metabolism of ~50-90 kg of mass for 10,000 to 100,000 years.
[1] "1.2 billion years [from now], high estimate until all plant life dies out [...] rising temperatures will make any animal life unsustainable from this point on" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear...
Therefore, the only way I can see a lifespan push, not only x2, but x10, or even x100 (10,000 years—once you get x3/x4, it probably scales trivially) is through 100% organ regeneration and 100% programmatic control over the morphospace. Broke an arm? Amputate the limb and grow another one back, your cells already did it before. Liver cancer? Regrow another liver. Heart issues? Make another heart. Spend all the years above 35 as a perpetual 35 year old, eventually in the bodyshape of Chris Hemsworth/Margot Robbie (to keep the examples in Australia). This scientific fancy is somehow grounded in the mind-expanding perspectives coming from Dr. Michael Levin's lab [2]. Personally, I'm compelled enough by their thesis, programmatic control over cells, that I started learning about their work, BETSE, Bio Electric Tissue Simulation Engine [3], and try to build on top a BioElectric Simulation Orchestrator, BESO [4]. Most probably, however, we won't see 100% human organ regeneration in our regular lifetimes, but never say never.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
[2] Speaking with Cells: the Electrical Future of Regenerative Medicine with Dr. Michael Levin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzGaakopAKU
So... would my grandparents feel alienated now? Hell no! My surviving grandma is complaining about constant pain and ailing vision, not that things are too strange. She needs somebody else to call me or show her pictures I send on whatsapp because she can't physically use a phone anymore, not because she can't adapt to it.
There is some truth in what you're saying, but it's due to something we don't like to talk or think about: dementia. Not just Alzheimer, but dozens of ways the aging brain is deteriorating. Fix that, and suddenly you'll find out that old people aren't children anymore, and are perfectly capable of adapting to the new.
I'm not really afraid of dying, per se, but as a sci-fi buff, I am deeply sad that there are amazing technological advancements that I will never get to see. Even if the world 300 years from now (assuming humans still exist by then) looks nothing like what any sci-fi author could have envisioned, it still bums me out that I won't get to see what that ends up being like. (And yes, I've considered the possibility that things could be much much worse than now in 300 years, at least for humans.) My only worry about this is that if I were "asleep" for 300 years, that "stranger in a strange land" bit could be very real, and I don't know that humans are well-equipped psychologically to deal with that kind of... dislocation.
I'm not religious, and don't believe in an afterlife, reincarnation, or of anything after we die. So if I want to see the future, in any shape or form, life extension is the only way. I doubt medicine will solve aging and mortality in my lifetime, so even a moonshot like cryonics would likely be my only hope -- even such a remote hope -- of seeing the future. Not sure I'd actually go for it, though, but I get the appeal.
I think 100 years is far too short to experience everything our world has to offer. I get that motivation could be an issue for some, but a motivated individual would certainly appreciate extra time to broaden their experiences!
My reasoning is that I simply like living. I think that arguments against longevity often sound deep, but if you rephrase them in more straightforward terms, they'll seem completely devoid of substance.
For example, what does "we're children of our times mean?" That once world changes too much, death is preferable to adapting? I would absolutely love to see how the world will look in a hundred years, and I sincerely hope it will be strange and unique.
Same with "death will simply take us back to where we came from"... I'm sorry, but it doesn't really mean anything. If my loved one dies, that's bad. If my friend gets sick, I hope they recover. Again, I'm sorry but once we strip the poetics, there's really nothing left here.
Basically every religion has some hope of afterlife/reincarnation. So for non religious people this also kinda provides this hope. And if it doesnt work out it is just a expensive funeral. If your dead body is burned, frozen or buried doesnt really matter in this case.
I would rather do a one time payment because they sure wont get money from me when i am dead. So a one time payment must basically be big enough to generate enough interest/stock market returns to make it worth their while too keep the lights on forever. I dont see this with a 50€ Subscription. Maybe they would do it like an ETF Investment Account which signs you up for Cyro Preservation after reaching a certain size. The money would have to be withdrawable while being alive though.
Besides that, as far as I understand, cryonics is heavily dependent on effects of scale. My hope is that by the time I'm about to get frozen, enough people will be interested in it to make it economically viable long term.
# I LIKE BIG BUTTS AND I CANNOT LIE / YOU OTHA BROTHAS CAN'T DENY...
You can't just sit here in the dark listening to classical music, Fry.
IMHO this is a generally benefitial viewpoint in life, except when specifically discussing mortality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_ac...
Me neither, it sounds like a punishment.
> We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia.
Now here, I disagree. If someone offered me to become displaced in time, being frozen most of the time, but waking up for a few months or a year (assuming I’d not be pennyless on the street) every decade or century, I’d love it until I tire and either retire in the "now" or end my life.
I love that my life will eventually end, I hate that I won’t be able to see everything to come.
This is not really convincing argument. If and when that happens and I find it so inconvenient that it is not worth continuing I shall end my life on my own terms.
> Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth.
Nah. We don’t “go” anywhere after we die. This is simply propaganda invented and formulated to get people over their fear of death. It has zero basis in reality other than the fact that people want it.
We are already there. We already face this challenge. We will overcome it before immortality. Immortality will be just the next step.
I prefer existing and being conscious to not existing, everything else is just details.
The finality of death is perhaps the only thing that human beings should be truly afraid of and treat as an engineering/biology problem to be solved as soon as possible, the other details and impact of this should be addressed later.
This complacence with the status quo is harmful in that regard.
Even if you don't want immortality, not having the last decades of your life being trapped in a decaying flesh prison while your brain and organs are riddled with various diseases does sound like how things should be. Even if aging cannot be eliminated entirely (for now), its effects definitely should be lessened, so people can live out their lives respectfully and comfortably, what modern medicine is very gradually advancing towards.
Cryogenics just acknowledge that focusing on this to the point of beating aging altogether is unlikely and that we're all born in the wrong time and come to the conclusion that maybe 1% chance at survival is better than 0%. Most if not all will sadly not survive.
Before we were dying in our 20s, then in our 30s, then in our 60s, now in our 80s. Perhaps in 200 years we could say we die in our 120s? That would be a good thing (and no, this doesn't mean to live the years between 90 and 120 in the worst conditions possible, barely able to walk, eat, talk...; it means to extend our good years and make the 110-120 just like our current 80-90).
I myself am in my 40s but I look younger than many people in their late 20s/early 30s (mainly because I don't smoke, and I don't eat crap. I excerise regularly and sleep a lot). Some celebrities right now in their 50s look younger than many regular people in their 30s. So, I think there is hope for future generations to extend their lives by a lot.
I feel like that now, in my, ahem, later years, and watching the 20-somethings tie themselves in knots over things, that are actually quite trivial. Friends and family are important, social media not so much. I don't really get it. When I was that age, and I was angry, it took a bit of effort. I'd have to cut the letters out of newspapers, glue them to a bit of paper, and post it to people.
Except it doesn't. Death is the end of everything for you. It's ultimate loss of any game you might have participated in. And there's nothing else. When you die then there's no longer any you. And there will never be you in any shape or form. When you die it's as if your family home burnt to ashes along with your family inside and family business and there not even any cinder left. What was there doesn't exist anymore.
Once you actually understand death without the layer of culture that we built to distract ourselves from the reality there's really no wonder why some people would take any chances to avoid it in any way conceivable.
> Death is the end of everything for you.
Both of you these are objective. You can think you are insignificant or you can think that you are part of the big bang which is still happening. It's just narration and if it makes no practical difference (as it would seem in these cases), everybody can choose whatever makes him feel better, there is no need to put down the other narration.
And you can only choose what makes you feel better in matters that don't matter. In all others you are almost always better off choosing what is actually correct.
You can choose a narrative that pi equals 3 because it makes you feel better but you won't be doing world or yourself any favors if you choose to make real world decisions based on that narrative.
If you want analogy - we are looking on the river and we see a vortex, then it disappears. Parent comment is like - oh, the water is again flowing in the straight flow. And your version is - there was a vortex, and now it's gone forever, nothing left of it.
So there is "you" as there is a "vortex". It's not just a language construct. It's a language construct that describes impactful but sadly transient phenomenon.
The amount of all forms of suffering and sadness this would lift seems hard to describe in a few paragraphs.
When we go return to where we came from before our birth it simply means the absence of consciousness. In this universe, you can either be conscious or not. There is something mysterious and magical about this phenomenon that seemingly differentiates our lives from simpler or even single celled organisms which seem more like biological robots.
It may very well be that the next time a consciousness manifests and forms a 'you' from 'the place before birth' you may as well be born as a cow, shackled in the darkness among feces. Kept from the warmth of your mother with cold metal spikes attached to her udder, ripping open the young flesh of your nose when you seek its nourishment.
How many times did we wake up yet from this 'place before birth'? How likely is it to be born as human among the conscious life forms on Earth? Nevermind being born as healthy human in the developed world in the 21st century.
Between the clear dry science and the mysterious wonder of a perception of 'self' and being consciously aware I just feel dizzy about it all.
A though experiment: Imagine I have no consciousness, but I can run circles around you, outperform you, outpredict you, game you, have a better intuition (gasp), or be more creative (gasp squared). What's left of the magic now?
When we strip away all of these aspects from 'the magic' it gets really interesting to think about what's left. And this is always where it becomes hard to articulate for me. Would you describe yourself as a robot performing a set of finite predetermined tasks? A system merely responding to pattern recognition? Are we just a more complex version of ants following some chemical impulses?
I cannot shake the feeling that it's more of a 1+1=3 kind of thing, where the sum is more than the addition of parts. In Complex Systems Theory it would be emergent behavior, I suppose.
I read you. What I find helpful is not to trust my own internal perspective on how I think I think. Things become much clearer when I consider more neutral ground, yes, ants, chatgpts, rocks, etc.
So, yes, I still wonder what would be the advantage of a conscious ant, besides hubris.
> Are we just a more complex version of ants
The same evolution caused humans and ants, that's all. Oak is not a version of orca.
> emergent behavior
This time it's a canonical thought stopper, on the level of "idiopathic disease".
It sickens me when people romanticize death. There's nothing romantic about the world being taken away from you at the time when you've understood so much of it and found your place in it — and could have contributed so much more to it, and enjoyed it so much more. It's an artificial limit imposed on us by the nature that needs to be fought with all available resources. It should definitely not be accepted.
It's about time humanity stops being humble about this stuff, ffs.
So one might say that there's a degree of hypocrisy in such views. They romanticize death unless it's their turn.
Problem I have with immortalists isn't that they have some desire to live forever, it's that they rarely are able to articulate what lives forever. Self is a construct, an narrative abstraction created by our minds that has utility as regards our functioning in the world, but is ultimately not real. I am not the same person I was 5 years ago, nor will the version of me that exists 5 years from now be the same as me. There are probably several people out there who are more like 5-years-ago me than I am currently, but for some reason they aren't considered to be the same person.
What is it that makes me me? It can't be memory, because memories are extremely fallible, and often confabulated. If we are our memories then we have forgotten most of who we are and will continue to forget ourselves as time passes. If you erased my memories somehow, you'd still likely consider me the same person anyway, so clearly memories aren't me.
Of course, even forgotten experiences leave some kind of mark on our being, but just by existing we leave our mark on the people and world around us but we don't consider those things us, do we?
And clearly anyone who imagines a digital-self in their future doesn't consider their physical form to be them either, so what's left? Illusions and abstractions, a heuristic notion of self that has utility but not reality.
Sure, go ahead and solve "immortality", I don't have a philosophical objection to the concept. What I have a problem with is the insistence that death is some kind of fundamental evil we must place a high priority on solving. Some would go so far as to preserve their own lives at the cost of many others, so terrified they are of something that has basically already happened to previous versions of themselves. Its perverse.
The only really pleasant, anxiety-free way to die is to not see it coming. We should wish for that rather than wish for immortality.
https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
It’s a nice, short metaphorical story for our acceptance of death.
Self-preservation, this is hardwired into us. You may rationalize, refer to a higher power, philosophize, etc... to make you accept the inevitable, sometimes successfully, but that's not what your body is telling you.
an awful lot of the article seems to be about how weird it is for people to study things carefully and try to do things that are not known to be possible, with the implicit subtext that being weird is bad
abandoning that ideology is how we got the industrial revolution and modern civilization, but unfortunately its adherents didn't die out completely, and will likely bring an end to that epoch
Your comment also does not do this. What are these techniques that have results that are not like the ones described in the article?
Now, "not knowing" doesn't prove anything, of course, and I think it was correct for the article to describe the evidence we do have, even if it's necessarily out of date. But it would have been nice for them to acknowledge that the unthawing data we have is not representative of what would happen if a "current-gen" cryonics "patient" were to be thawed today.
why haven't they tested this on animals or non-paying cadavers? It would seem unwise to pay to keep vitrified bodies frozen if one had no understanding of how the bodies would be when they were unfrozen.
Apparently the bottleneck is in thawing organs past a certain size, current thawing methods lead to uneven thawing in larger organs, however I read they were experimenting with using directed radio waves?
Of course once you thaw a person successfully you still need to cure them of what killed them and revive them and that part is highly variable and if they died of aging is still well beyond our reach.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318757723_Thermal_A...
With proper storage maintenance vitrifified organs can be stored indefinitely while frozen things eventually get freezer burn.
Imagine if I made an origami animal, then unfolded the paper and handed you the paper plus an origami book with the animal I made. With enough time and care, you'd probably be able to observe the creases and refold the paper to reconstruct the original animal.
Supposing technology continues to advance at the rate it has been -- then by year 3000, the problem of cryonic revival is likely one of statistical inference on possible original brains, with the cryopreserved brain as evidence. Hard to predict the difficulty of that problem in advance.
Source? How do you know it's not just the neurons?
The people storing popsicles don't necessarily need to have anything to do with the people who dream of someday unthawing them. If some rich person wants to pay to keep an expensive freezer running for a specified amount of time after they die, that creates a sound business opportunity for someone who is willing and capable of running a freezer.
Generally speaking the thing they have in common is the funding required to do the cryonic enterprise.
> If some rich person wants to pay to keep an expensive freezer running for a specified amount of time after they die, that creates a sound business opportunity for someone who is willing and capable of running a freezer.
The question is "why would some rich person want to pay to keep a freezer running after they die?" in the case of cryonics the answer is usually because they have some expectation that they could be unfrozen and revived in the future.
Once we can successfully Futurama the bodies we will easily be able to retrieve the frozen capsules.
The baseline temperature of outer space, as set by the background radiation from the Big Bang, is 2.7 kelvins (−270 °C; −455 °F). Probably too cold.
How many times have you said "sod it, that sounds like a problem that Tomorrow chordalkeyboard can deal with, I'm going home"?
In this case, it's "sod it, future human-popsicleologists can solve that one, at least I got them frozen"
Or at least they did the last time I looked.
It has been said that death has the most euphemisms of any subject. Cephalon? As in cephalic, Greek for head. Passive voice, too. I suppose one would want to create some distance. "We removed the tubes from the arteries and put the head in a thermos."
I'm skeptical of this cryonics stuff, but I can see the appeal: even if the chance of being eventually revived is a tiny fraction of 1%, if money isn't an issue, why not? If humanity doesn't destroy itself over the next century or two, it might be fun to see what the future is like.
I don't like getting super deep into these threads, because my normal tendency will be to nerd out on all the reasons I think Alcor is kind of shady, but I'm acutely aware that there are real people involved here and these situations are always incredibly sad. I really just want to chime in to push back on the idea that "modern" cryonics have the problems worked out; I think it's kind of likely that the insurmountable problems here are fractal.
A better comparison might be people pursuing fusion for power generation -- something known to be possible, albeit potentially beyond human capabilities either now or in the future.
maybe even these horribly failing cases would actually make these people happy and not sad that they at least tried, instead of turning straight into nothing?
If Alcor actually is doing shady things, then I would certainly agree with you. I read up on them quite a bit around 10 years ago, but I haven't really kept up since then. But my impression was that they weren't giving false hope, and were telling people that the chances were slim that they'd ever wake up again. I also didn't read anything to suggest that their post-death care is something other than what they promise, and I thought it was sensible how they require patient care to be funded. But admittedly I didn't dive as deeply into third-party criticism as I probably should have (instead I just lost interest).
> I really just want to chime in to push back on the idea that "modern" cryonics have the problems worked out
I don't think anyone is saying that, though? If I've said something that made you or anyone believe that, my apologies, because that's certainly not what I believe. Certainly modern cryonics is more advanced than simply "lower body temp slowly until it seems like it might vaguely be safe to bring in the LN", but "advanced" in this case doesn't mean "it works". No one knows, still, of course, and I would strongly expect that it doesn't work.
> I think it's kind of likely that the insurmountable problems here are fractal.
The promise of only-in-sci-fi "suspended animation" or "stasis" is, well, just that: sci-fi. I certainly would hope that these problems aren't insurmountable, and that we can actually find a way to more or less press the "pause" button on organic degradation. Certainly the current cryonics tech is nowhere near that; the hope is that any damage done by the cryonics process could eventually be reversed with sufficiently-advanced technology, and then eventually the cryonics process gets good enough that little to no damage (beyond the cause of death) ends up being done.
Who knows if that's possible, eventually, but I'd like to think it is.
But I learned all that a decade or two ago, so if you have a moment to update/correct me I’d be grateful.
hmm. So was this like a minor repositioning or was there a head rolling onto the floor?
And if you're still pessimistic, consider this. A person I otherwise rabidly disagree with once said "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". Well, military power is also now accruing to those with the best ideas (see all the drones and cyber-war lately).
The world is slowly turning into nerd paradise!
a world dominated by military power is not a nerd paradise
consider the plight of the iranian nuclear scientists
Since 1950, the global population has more than tripled, while militaries have shrunk. Since 1960, military spending as a share of global GDP has gone down from over 6% to less than 3%.
The world isn't perfect, but it has become a lot less warlike and more hospitable for nerds in recent decades.
I don't see this as a grand thing tbh. Sure there's more nerds but I feel like they trive most when not having to deal with scarcities.
the cold war ended in 01991, and since then the us has been pretty much free to invade and conquer and colonize wherever it wanted without any real opposition
it's been 77 years since the end of world war ii, so this is probably an atypically peaceful moment in history
probably a few years into world war iii military spending will be a much larger fraction of gdp
2000 years ago, you needed a couple of engineers in charge of sword production and an army of Jocko Willinck types to wield the swords.
Now, you have an army of engineers producing drones, some other nerds remotely piloting the drones, and a couple of J.W.'s to do specialized strikes.
I don't see this trend reaching a stopping point anytime soon.
The only hard jobs left are things involving physical labor, like plumbing (ironically extremely hard to automate).
Nerds are capital F "ucked"
I personally think the way forward is to derive the neural connectivity and transcriptional state map of the brain on a single cell level. This can be done today, albeit at great expense, on tissue that is chemically fixed. Maybe this will be enough to reanimate someone in a new substrate. Maybe more data will be required, but eventually we’ll get there, accepting that human consciousness is subject to the laws of physics.
I disagree, I think salvaging them will be of tremendous historical interest. Imagine if we could bring back a peasant from the 1400s. Medieval scholars would be all over that.
I mean, suppose you could do that while the person is still alive. Assuming the reanimated person even has consciousness, then surely(?) the two won't share the same experience, like some hive-mind with two bodies. I don't think the original person being dead makes any difference.
So it's less about preserving "yourself" (whatever that means), and more about assuring that a backup clone exists after you die. I can see why that might be useful (it's kind of like leaving a will), but your experience probably ends when you die.
what difference does it make?
The results depend on the models you use.
Whether someone else who happens to have the same brain as you lives is almost irrelevant in that context.
Most people interested in cryo do this to prevent their experience from ending.
I could be a different experiencer to the one who was here yesterday, yet I retain their memories as mine so I have no clue that I'm 'new'. I might die today by falling asleep.
I may not even be the same a second from now.
Are you conscious right now?
And what about right now?
I think the way I see it now is, your mind is a black box to your current consciousness (with some interfaces to recall things), if you replaced this black box with a perfect simulation, your consciousness might not even notice it. Of course your consciouness has also been programmed since the day you were born, but wouldn't a perfect copy of your mind also copy the current consciouness? Either of you would wake up and think "Ah, I'm brap, and I'm currently in my bed, and yesterday I did x and felt y, and the day before... [iterate until there's nothing else to remember]."
If Original You remains alive, it does get weird, both of you will think "There's someone else with my own exact brain and memory, but I can't feel what s/he's currently feeling!".
There's an Apple movie that explores about what I've written, although I haven't watched it: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/mahersha...
I don’t do life science anymore, but deal with computers now. And it’s a whole lot more predictable and malleable. (Heck, it’s easy if I were to compare it to running gels or prepping cell lines.)
But I would be ecstatic if I could witness some science fiction level advancement in this field in my lifetime. I doubt it, but I would be amazed should it happen.
This is known: https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hayflick_limit
Like the reproducibility is contingent on so many factors. Very depressing and tedious.
There’s definitely a lot we don’t know and the knowledge gap is huge. And even if it can be done in the lab, translating some finding to a workable therapeutic is another story.
The trick is to have some cells starting the process over. Sexual reproduction always started from pre-existing cells, rebuilding a full individual.
Using this process to repair all the living cells does not seem impossible.
Our understanding of DNA programming is far from sufficient to enable this kind of project, but I don't see why it could not be possible at some point.
Then there are transposons, elements of ancient retroviruses embedded in our DNA, that can awaken and spray themselves thousands of times over the cell's genome. Usually, these new inserts don't hit anything important. Usually. Germline cells have mechanisms to suppress this, but most cells undergo this once a month.
You are talking about a lot of damage to repair in an older cell.
Nothing profound in being scared shitless of it either
There's probably extreme cases with bad metastasis where it's very unlikely that they can be saved, and they can probably tell some of those. But I think not all the time.
Must be a very depressing job to observe this over the years.
I mean, it'll flip our whole value system.
I've seen what appears to be a literal "city of the dead".
No doubt a metaphor. But metaphor appears to be a big part of "reality".
I've also seen what appears to be a "creator of reality".
So ya, it's a weird world.
And here, because freedom, people are advocating for the freedom to pretend death isn’t approaching, at the cost of millions to society.
It seems like if most people could choose, they'd prefer to have the mental and physical abilities of a 20-something while living as long as they wanted. Eventually, medical technology will get to the point where that is possible. Why not hasten such a day rather than let more people get old and frail? Yes, people will still eventually die, but living for 300 years in peak condition seems better than the status quo.
as the website article typed, there is a long way to tickle trustable keys to preservation, let alone reviving a frozen body, let alone understanding what we have to do to live in peak capacity for 50 years, let alone to live 300…
i sincerely prefer public and private money being wasted on improving our ‘short’ lives than MAYBE discovering some esotericism that probably very few people will have access
As for a solid foundation to discover and create things, you need to be healthy and have time first of all. The logistics of life just suck as it is now unless you are really lucky. It used to be much worse but it can get much better.
If you asked someone centuries back if we would go to the moon, they will laugh you out of the room. Similarly, if you said that people will consistently live to their 90+ years of age.
[1] https://majorspoilers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Sandman...
I mean maybe we can stick some pipes in a corpse and get it to move around or make a digital echo of a dead personality and have that rattle around inside a robot. However, I feel like we're drifting into wishful thinking if we figure genuine immortality is a going to be a some sort of scientific given.
Nature doesn't have goals. Humans, as far as I can tell, very much do. Put another way. Evolution didn't find a way to get life onto the Moon. Humans did.
It did though.[0]
There is likely very little evolutionary pressure for immortality, therefore this kind of thing isn't more widespread. If anything, at population level evolution might generally select for the population that produces a new generation and dies quicker.
Do you think GP's decision not to focus their work on life extension is forcing you to die?
Seems like a false dichotomy.
Aside from life support in one's final days, most practical medical interventions for prolonging life also result in significant improvements in quality of life.
For example, healthy diet and exercise contribute to extended lifespan, but they also improve quality of life significantly during all stages of life.
I can assure you that you'd never ever hold that opinion if you were a healthcare worker. A big part of our job is to maintain alive people with a horrible quality of life who should be long dead, oftentimes without even being able to know if they'd in fact prefer dying...
Healthy diet for example is not a singularly defined term and depending on specifics can be argued to lower quality of life even if they improve health.
A related concept is the quality-adjusted life year (QALY), which is used when weighing the cost/benefits of certain interventions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year
Health-wise yeah it’s great to be young :)
You have no idea if that is true or not though.
You're not recognizing anything you're deluding yourself to accept the incredible loss that is death.
This is Stockholm syndrome. We all die, so some of us choose to think it's a good thing. Death in general is needed for recycling, but not human death. Humans represent 0.00000001% (warning, made up number) of the available matter. We don't need to die for others to live.
Dead people have no use for money, doing this kind of research is not a waste, in my opinion, even if it is very unlikely to work at this stage.
Umm, people still alive have use for money. The money could go towards helping the lives of the living, so it absolutely is a waste.
Almost everything people in rich countries do is a ridiculous luxury compared to the fact that it costs about $1,000 to save someone from dying of malaria. Most of everything humans do is clearly a waste. We can’t even get it together to prepare for the next pandemic, never mind existential risk. This is besides the fact that nothing matters. There’s no God to ascribe meaning to things. Things only matter if they matter to you.
There is absolutely benefit in doing this type of research even if there is only a small chance that it ends up working.
I wonder: With economies of scale, could cryonics actually become cheaper than end-of-life medical care? Currently the ballpark cost of cryonics is similar to health insurance: https://www.alcor.org/membership/
It wouldn't shock me if cryopreserving terminally ill people would save money overall, given economies of scale. I would certainly prefer cryopreservation over terminal illness! https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...
The article covers the state of the physical complications quite well. I doubt we will be able to reverse the physical damage and safely reanimate before we learn how to digitize people, so I think the best bet is likely going to be in digitizing the brain after death.
Even if that comes with some damage, we know the brain is pretty plastic and functions well enough even with entire areas missing.
Still seems like a reach. But what's the other option? You can't take the money with you and there's no better alternatives if you would like more time.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation#Basic_prin...
I'm not aware of experiments with animals, and obviously not humans. But here's an experiment with human cardiac tissue [1], which went quite well.
Remember the first payload of his "Falcon Heavy" rocket - some tesla or other? Had a tailor's dummy in a space suit strapped in the front seat.
That was a real person in the suit who had paid for the most effective, reliable and longest lasting cryogenic freeze available. No maintenance power required. Will continue to be frozen even if the earth explodes. Not beholdent to anyone alive to make the right decisions...
Elon decided not to just hide it in plain sight but make a spectacle of it with live feeds etc.
Probably nonsense but makes a certian amount more logical sense than a dummy in a space suit, huh?
From the videos I’ve seen, it’s also spinning really slowly. I think you could see off-gassing in some of the videos. I looked into it a little further, and there was speculation it was from the plastics and paint getting extremely hot in direct sunlight.
“Space” is roughly the same temperature (a little warmer near stars with particles and free gas), but the direct solar radiation is what is so hot. Since space is an excellent insulator, getting rid of the thermal energy becomes a problem when you’re not shaded.
If you want to read some more on this, check out what the JWST has done for thermal management. It’s really cool (no pun intended).
The silver suit couldn't insulate and keep the heat out?
If you so wish to believe...
The problem is that there is no air to carry away the heat so that whole setup becomes like a miniature greenhouse. Without some active way to cool it eventually you'd cook.
Have you heard of Occam's Razor?
> but makes a certian amount more logical sense than a dummy in a space suit, huh?
It makes sense as a Heavy Metal reference.
This isn't necessarily a problem:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34060818
"And even if they could be bothered, the thawed would be a lab experiment, owned by whatever corporation pulled off the magic."
That feeling when you wake up from your secret space cryostasis, only to discover you're the living (?) embodiment of meat, now owned by Arby's.
The last post Ye (Kanye) mades was a symbol that had a star of David with a swastika in it. And Elon personally kicked him off twitter immediately.
But that's actually a symbol for this cultish religious group.
"Raëlism teaches that an extraterrestrial species known as the Elohim created humanity using their advanced technology. It claims that throughout history the Alohim have created 40 Elohim/human hybrids who have served as prophets" You can see the symbol on their wikipedia page.
Raëlism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism
Remember when they cloned Dolly the sheep ... That was over 20 years ago.
Through SCNT it is possible to clone monkeys for 5 years now, I hope Elon clones himself.
https://academic.oup.com/nsr/article/5/3/301/4862476?login=f...
I keep hoping to score a tour of one some day.
If you put aside the overt scorn, it's actually a fairly interesting article, and surprisingly upbeat at that.
I mean, CPR has gotten better for sure. But that's just for people who are mostly dead. Not going to work on people who are all-the-way-dead.
Anyone claiming high chances of resurrection in some sci-fi future are just blathing.
Based on the article it sounds like these bodies are being "preserved" in an absolutely destroyed state. They've kept the outside pretty, but they've pulverized their insides during the freezing process. Even if cryogenics works one day, the chance that these people can be revived seems extremely remote. The chance that the "store the body and not just the head" idea helps seems even more remote given that the organs, blood veseels, etc are destroyed.
They didn't discuss it (presumably verifiable information is hard to come by), but if the rest of the body is that destroyed, it seems unlikely that the brain is doing much better..
But I think we are having trouble really grasping the magnitude of that challenge compared to the progress made by science and rationalism so far. Today's medical interventions are breathtaking in effect compared to the state of the art of a hundred years ago, but the complexity of those interventions themselves does not even approach the complexity of the biological systems which are being restored. They are really very crude solutions. Even cutting-edge stuff like mRNA vaccines involves hijacking existing machinery rather than creating new machinery from whole cloth.
Anyhow, it's possible that humanity will go a long way, and that extinction is not in our future, but that nevertheless some problems will simply forever be beyond our intellectual capacity. It's not hard to imagine that all the requisite knowledge to accomplish this kind of techno-necromancy might not even be attainable in a single lifespan -- even a lifespan augmented by future technology.
Maybe AI solves that problem, but it would also be real weird to wake up in the future to discover that a race of incomprehensibly brilliant machines has resurrected you as a pet out of sheer boredom.
Ultimately, it appears that the odds of "successful cryonic preservation" due to any foreseeable reason are 0%. So a decision to do it would come down to betting against my own ability to predict the future. Fair enough: I've been wrong before, but I'm probably not wrong this time.
Turns out, death can be cheated but the taxman cannot.
And to be honest, <1% odds seem a lot better than 0% odds for normal death. (Sans religious aftermaths)
I'm glad there are signups for cryonics, just on the off chance it works and anthropologists hundreds of generations in the future get to talk to a real life human from our time period. If people started freezing themselves en masse I'd have concerns about whether preserving millions of dead bodies is a good use of time and effort.
Though I will add that morals and their reach often wax and wane. Chattel slavery is less acceptable today than it has ever been globally but there are more chattel slaves than ever just due to insane population growth
In 1847 the Choctaw nation sent money to Ireland to help with the famine.
If we could revive an iceman today, we absolutely would have, if not for science than for profit.
On that note, I'm disappointed by how often the future is assumed to have progressed no farther than today's form of capitalism.
That and TFA both speak to the same problem: the unimaginative belief that now is what was, is, and ever shall be.
I imagine that mad scientists, in general, suffer from a lack of test subjects. I'm pretty sure the future will find something to do with frozen humans who signed up to be resurrected.
Unless things have gotten really bad, in which case they'll defrost and eat them.
One thing they won't bother to do, is defrost and re-animate them, because why?
Maybe as like a really morbid party gag. Or to progress mad science?
As a solution I think there should be a special “bank” like organization which sole purpose it is to survive for hundred of years. It also would need to grow the money to keep up with inflation. In addition this organization needs to be country independent since you can’t guarantee countries to survive that long. This organization would also use some of the investment proceeds to pay for the storage and even transfer frozen people to a different location in case of war or natural disasters.
Also Benjamin Franklin pulled of something like this from 1790-1990 "2,000 be divided equally between Boston and Philadelphia for use as loans for young apprentices" https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/21/us/from-ben-franklin-a-gi...
Which is the plot of several sci-fi books. The most recent I'm aware of being the fun and light "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)"
Sort of how historians can read badly damaged ancient documents, but usually copy over their results to a new medium instead of trying to repair the original document.
A lot of the usual philosophical discussions following whether or not the AI is the same as the real person would probably follow...
Seems to me anyone who thinks this option is strictly better than death lacks imagination.
One question it explores: what exactly might people in the future want to do with the consciousness that have been frozen (hint it might not be good), and why?
Not award winning like Octavia Butler but it’s a fun read.
I really felt like I'd missed some big headline here.
There's a comment somewhere in this thread about perpetual motion. This tech seems to be its mirror-image, equal in impossibility, but opposite in aim. To stop all motion and decay, forever. Sometimes, it's wise to be circumspect, and to admit the possibility of a future technology that will change everything.
In the case of cryogenic storage of viable humans, however, I think it is straight-up, bona-fide, no-exceptions, impossible.
Just strap yourself into a spaceship capable of reaching within a few % of the speed of light, and fly around for a bit.
No need to wait till you're at death's door and turned into a corpsicle. Just head on out there for a few years at relativistic speed. By the time you slow down and return, you'll be having pina coladas with your new Felidae-Sapiens masters ;)
However, successfully producing a relativistic spaceship is probably more possible right now than successfully creating and reviving human corpsicles... just sayin' ;)
I suppose you could accelerate in an orbit around earth to maintain contact. But my understanding of relativity is poor
I'm sure producing one of these things is more possible right now than freezing/thawing/reviving a human.
Alternatively, to compensate for how long it would take to speed up and slow down, just have our intrepid time-o-naut climb into their suspended animatio--- oh heck ;)
I think your misunderstanding comes from the relativistic twin paradox.
From the perspective of the twin on the spaceship accelerating away from earth, the twin on earth seems to age slowly as well until the space ship twin decelerates and then turns around, during which they perceive the twin on earth to age rapidly.
The acceleration / deceleration of the space ship twin’s frame of reference is what breaks the symmetry of the no-preferred frame of reference during flight.
Even then, accelerating and decelerating will take so long, I suspect you'll wish you had some way to freeze yourself for the trip.
The vacuum flask was designed and invented by Scottish scientist Sir James Dewar in 1892 as a result of his research in the field of cryogenics and is sometimes called a Dewar flask in his honour. While performing experiments in determining the specific heat of the element palladium, Dewar made a brass chamber that he enclosed in another chamber to keep the palladium at its desired temperature. He evacuated the air between the two chambers, creating a partial vacuum to keep the temperature of the contents stable. Dewar refused to patent his invention, and the flask, as developed by others using new materials such as glass and aluminium, became a significant tool for chemical experiments and also a common household item.
Dewar's design was quickly transformed into a commercial item in 1904 as two German glassblowers, Reinhold Burger and Albert Aschenbrenner, discovered that it could be used to keep cold drinks cold and warm drinks warm and invented a more robust flask design, which was suited for everyday use. . . . In his subsequent attempt to claim the rights to the invention, Dewar instead lost a court case to the company.
The classic dad joke: So if I put my cold beer and my hot soup in there, how does it know which is which?
With all the quirkiness of the 70s and giving Westworld a run for its money ;)
If you could save your DNA and a few cells and be cloned at a later date is that good enough for you? No memories but the same code. Is that still “you”? It’s like being an identical twin of yourself.
The reason freezing cells works is that they have no large 3d structure and the surface area to volume works with the slow freeze down process (1 deg. C per min.) and rapid thawing (as fast as possible) necessary for them to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_tree_frog#Cold_resist...
If possible, running it on the original hardware (i.e. the same brain) will satisfy people who believe in continuity of consciousness. (People hesitant to use a teletransporter[0])
Even a computer-simulated mind based on a scan of the original brain would I think be more 'me' than my clone.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox
Sure my clone will have different experiences but I think it would think just like I do. It has different memories and experiences but I will have different experiences from here on out too. It’s the reaction to them that makes me, me.
The escrow requirements for maintainance of state would be interesting too. Who exactly benefits from the spend? Is this contestable by a future generation? In effect, does the corpse become property?
Perpetual funding is a pretty bizarre concept, but that said the entire 'south sea bubble' debt exist inside British gilts for hundreds of years, they only wiped them out recently at the same time as the WW1 debt, so carrying forward into the future does happen, albiet mostly at scale by governments.
I guess if you turned the dewer flasks into a freak show and charged, you might even be able to fund the cooldown by revenue.
This is because coal mining has been bringing the complete cities below the natural level of the water table. Costs are taken care of by a foundation.
[0]: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewigkeitskosten
Sadly no English version but some pictures.
It's not really. It's an attempt to preserve the body and not much more of a science than me attempting to preserve some food by putting it in my freezer. Who knows if future technology will be able to bring people back? Claiming it definitely will not without evidence doesn't seem very scientific.
What?!
There is literally no way that pun was unintended. Were it so, it’d be easier to just choose a different word rather than note it’s unintentionality.
If Bide-a-Wee was not from this novel, a reference would be much appreciated, as my cursory search has not found it.
It deserves a Wikipedia page.
"Corsicles" had to pay The State back for storage and resurrection, as you mentioned, which was the reasoning behind the Bussard Ramjet training Corbell received.
Niven sidestepped the whole "how to correctly resurrect a frozen person" problem by claiming that Corbell's memory/personality were somehow extracted from his corpse (destroying the body completely), and then used to reanimate a convicted felon. If Corbell failed his training, the felon's mind would be wiped and another corpsicle's personality would be tried.
That book introduced so many big ideas to the young me. It was the first Niven book I'd read; Ringworld was the second.
Seems like it might be premature to claim that the remaining one succeeded in their quest for immortality
1) human mind can be simulated
2) human consciousness is totally dependent on physical connections of brain neurons
3) something like nanobots are able to determine the frozen brain connections despite the damage of being frozen
4) some organization is curious enough to do the work to bring you back
5) live your second life, hopefully in some type of humanoid android and not your great-great-great-grandkids PlayStation 25
The likelihood of all of that happening is probably pretty low. But you have 0% chance of coming back if you don’t get frozen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson
Keith is quite a character, who also successfully performed one of the most hilarious trolls ever against Scientology lawyers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891
>Just be glad you didn't have to explain an in joke about ftp sites, the local loopback address, and a troll, in a deposition, under oath, to Scientology lawyers, like Keith Henson did.
The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, page 93-94:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/transhumanism/1990-regis-greatmam...
>Finally some evidence about the success of cryonics emerged from among the ranks of the frozen themselves. Not that they were revived, they were only defrosted. Or at least parts of them were.
>In November of 1983, for the first time ever, a cryonics firm conducted autopsies on the defrosted mortal remains of two Trans Time patients who had been converted to neuro. The parties in question were a married couple who had wanted to be frozen after death. They hadn’t had the required lump sum in advance, but Trans Time didn’t want to turn them away, so it accepted them on a contingency, pay-as-you-go basis. Monthly maintenance costs would be covered by their loving son.
>When the son’s parents died, Trans Time suspended them as whole-body patients, which was their desire, and for a number of years everything went along exactly as planned. But then the son himself died, in an automobile accident, after which the monthly payments ceased. Trans Time kept the parents frozen for a while, but it was clear that sooner or later something had to be done. It was a private company, operating without government support — indeed, often in the teeth of government opposition — and could not afford an extended period of unpaid maintenance, especially when for fifteen out of its sixteen years of existence the company had run at loss.
>But then the Alcor Life Extension Foundation came to the rescue. It would take care of the frozen parents, essentially on a charity basis, but only on the condition that they could be “converted” first, which is to say, converted from whole-body to neuro, the latter being far less expensive than the former. “The same capsule that you put a whole body in,” Saul Kent once explained, “you can probably put twenty heads in.”
>This, of course, meant that the heads had to come off while the patients were still frozen. Not that this was much of a problem. As Alcor’s illustrated report on the case explains, “a rapid conversion to neuropreservation was done using a high-speed electric chain saw.”
>This was now a golden opportunity to see how frozen bodies actually fared over their years in storage—nine years for the husband, five for the wife. So the Alcor men thawed out and autopsied the newly decapitated bodies.
>There was both bad and good news. “The most unexpected finding as a result of these autopsies,” says the report, “is the discovery of serious fracturing in all of the suspension patients.” There were fractures in the outer skin, in the subcutaneous fat, in the blood vessels next to the heart, in the arteries and veins. The right lung of one patient was cracked almost in half, as was the liver, and there were open wounds on the hands and right wrist.
>This was not encouraging, but it was all too easy to lose one’s perspective. The fact of the matter was that the injuries suffered by these frozen corpses were no worse than what’s seen in hospital shock-trauma units every day of the week—broken (if not absent) arms and legs, and so on—but many of these people end up recovering. The fact that the frozen corpses were not in pristine shape was not by itself any cause for alarm.
>The good news was that much of the bodies survived perfectly intact. The palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, and other structures were all in fine shape. As for the brains, they remained in suspension and were not examined.
>To Alcor, the whole thing was a learning experience. The initial suspensions had not been perfect, but all things considered, the patients came through the whole process about as well as anyone could expect.
- A sense/awareness of being dead.
- A sense of peace, well-being, and painlessness. Positive emotions. A sense of removal from the world.
- An out-of-body experience.
- A perception of one's body from an outside position, sometimes observing medical professionals performing resuscitation efforts.
- A "tunnel experience" or entering a darkness. A sense of moving up, or through, a passageway or staircase.
- A rapid movement toward and/or sudden immersion in a powerful light (or "Being of Light") which communicates telepathically with the person.
- An intense feeling of unconditional love and acceptance.
I'm not sure, but this feels relevant juxtaposed the prospect of returning to life in a body of unsure quality, with all my friends, relatives and acquaintances long gone, into a world that I can not expect to understand much of. Even if it ever became possible, which I sincerely doubt.
anguish
distress
a void
devastation
vast emptiness
etc
A near-death experience (NDE) is a profound personal experience associated with death or impending death which researchers claim share similar characteristics. When positive, such experiences may encompass a variety of sensations including detachment from the body, feelings of levitation, total serenity, security, warmth, the experience of absolute dissolution, and the presence of a light. When negative, such experiences may include sensations of anguish, distress, a void, devastation, and vast emptiness. People often report seeing hellish places and things like their own rendition of "the devil."[1][2][3]
A post only listing the positive reports is wildly biased. Collect enough data and ignore whatever doesn’t support your views and you can eventually find “evidence” to support anything. You can use the same methods to show NDE are positive, absolutely horrific, or shockingly mundane.
But how many have had the unpleasant experience? The first reference to such is a paper by Nancy bush and Bruce Greyson, which opens the study thus: "The great majority of near-death experiences (NDEs) reported publicly over the past four decades have been described as pleasant, even glorious. Almost unnoticed in the euphoria about them has been the sobering fact that not all NDEs are so affirming. Some are deeply disturbing."[0]
So most are positive, a minority are deeply disturbing. The overarching purpose here was not however to paint any potential afterlife i glowing terms, it was to highlight the fact that there seems to be a widely (probably under-)reported process that we humans experience when we die. Which seems relevant in a discussion about cryogenics.
> reported publicly
For various cultural reasons people rarely want to talk about negative NDE. This is why studies into the phenomenon that look for possible cases are more objective than interviewing people who come forth.
So a study like :”A 1975 study conducted by psychiatrist Raymond Moody, MD, PhD, on around 150 patients who all claimed to have witnessed an NDE stated that such an experience has nine steps.” Shows different results than the recent UK Clinical Trials Gateway where out of 465 patients none reported any visual memories.