Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Er, the parent literally did that, in the bit you quoted. All the results of thawing mentioned in the article are from the older freezing procedures. Current methods (as mentioned in the article) use a form of vitrification. My understanding is that no one has been (intentionally, carefully) thawed after being vitrified using "modern" techniques, so we really don't know what condition a body would be in after unthawing using current technology.

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of course, and I think it was correct for the article to describe the evidence we do have, even if it's necessarily out of date.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.

View on HN

> My understanding is that no one has been (intentionally, carefully) thawed after being vitrified using "modern" techniques, so we really don't know what condition a body would be in after unthawing using current technology.

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.

The state of the art in this field is removing a rabbit's kidney, vitrifying it, waiting a month or so, thawing it and implanting it. I haven't read this article but the abstract seems to confirm what I read a while ago.[0]

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...

In the 1950s scientists were freezing small rodents and reanimating them using a primitive microwave. [0] If vitrifying and reviving a single rodent organ is the state-of-the-art 70 years later, I am not exactly impressed by their progress.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

Freezing is different from vitrification.

With proper storage maintenance vitrifified organs can be stored indefinitely while frozen things eventually get freezer burn.

Sure, you can freeze and unfreeze an organ. But that doesn’t work with the brain the electricity and the connections between the neurons are you. Cryogenic freezing will never work, until the structure of the brain can be preserved. All current methods kill the brain. It’s expensive snake oil.

Even if the preserved brain is very different from its original state, it might be possible to reconstruct the original state using future technology.

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.

> But that doesn’t work with the brain the electricity [...] are you.

Source? How do you know it's not just the neurons?

Because their clients are extremely rich people and if they’re not confident the experiments will work they won’t get money from those said rich people.

Cryonics is actually quite affordable -- within the means of most people reading this comment, I would guess: https://www.alcor.org/membership/

> 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.

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.

> The people storing popsicles don't necessarily need to have anything to do with the people who dream of someday unthawing them.

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.

Let’s skip the freezer and just launch the popsicles into deep space orbit behind mars or something.

Once we can successfully Futurama the bodies we will easily be able to retrieve the frozen capsules.

Won't they get pelted by microastroids, molecularly pulped with ionizing radiation, cooked by various sources of heat? Popsicles usually don't last very long outside a freezer

If you send them away from the sun or otherwise shield them (dark side of a planet, out past Pluto) they’ll be pretty cold and stable. You’d leave them in the rocket of course.

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.

You ever hear of the term "technical debt"?

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"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com