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Comment by pontifier | Hacker News Reader

This article nicely explains something that most people just don't get when I talk to them about cryonics. Death is a legal construct that has changed meaning over time. Every new medical advance we make shifts that line a little so that someone who would have been dead, isn't.

I'm an Alcor cryonics member because my idea of death doesn't match the current, accepted, legal definition. I happen to think it will eventually move really, really far. When I talk to people that say dying is a natural process I just laugh because it seems unnatural to NOT want to give yourself every chance of survival.

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Biggest problem of cryonics is to know if that extensive damage made by extreme cold is reversible, even with the most advanced tech. Another problem is the lack of guarantees that 100 years later the same company would care about frozen people at all, likely will not even exist itself - on average companies don't live so long.

> Another problem is the lack of guarantees that 100 years later the same company would care about frozen people at all

It’s not like they’re likely to change their business model to online advertisement. And assuming the tech actually becomes available, what do you think the future post-singularity post-scarcity society will do? Keep them old-timer heads frozen out of spite?

Either way, it’s a matter of probability. 0.000000001% of survival is a lot more than 0%. By the looks of it there’s a lot of Everett branches out there, too. It seems worth a shot to some people.

Honestly id wager that being "green boots"" is a much more practical way to convince a "post scarcity" society to thaw you

In many countries, including America, there is already hysteria around the idea of having to share resources with people who are perceived as not belonging or deserving it, usually based around arbitrary criteria like color of skin or country of origin. For me, it's not a stretch to imagine Americans not wanting frozen pheezers to come and "steal" jobs or housing.

I can just imagine the anger around the resources spent to acclimate these people. Anybody from 100 years ago is going to require a lot of help to reintegrate, including vocational training, language classes and subsidized housing. We can't even agree on providing meals in school for starving children.

>Another problem is the lack of guarantees that 100 years later the same company would care ...

Only as a curiosity, I always wondered how the payments are arranged with such a company.

I mean, is it a lump sum paid at the time of the freezing or is it monthly (or yearly) subscription fees?

If the first, the risk might be that once the company has made enough money, it simply folds, with the second, who is going to pay the subscription, heirs, but then they could change their mind or die themselves, or spend the money on something else.

Probably there should be a trust, or an escrow service of some kind (which BTW might have the same 100 years duration issue), but even in this case, how do you calculate the amount of money needed on it, will the money be invested in such a manner to compensate for inflation, what would happen in case of a financial crisis, etc.

> I mean, is it a lump sum paid at the time of the freezing or is it monthly (or yearly) subscription fees?

Per Alcor's website, it's a monthly membership fee while you're alive (rate depending on your age when you sign up) plus listing Alcor as your beneficiary on your life insurance policy.

Thanks, I just checked their website, and also one of the competitors (Cryonics Institute), the "alive subscription" seems like being secundary, the main part seems to be a lump sum at time of death (directly or through life insurance).

No idea if those two offer exactly the same service, but surely the cited prices are very different:

- Alcor 200,000 full body or 80,000 head only

- Cryonics between 28,000 and 35,000 full body

This latter even puts the other prices in their FAQ, to show how convenient is their offer.

> When I talk to people that say dying is a natural process I just laugh because it seems unnatural to NOT want to give yourself every chance of survival.

Not when survival only entails increased and prolonged suffering.

Nobody is aiming for this. That’s the standard rejoinder to talk of extending life because we’re not very good at extending life yet.

That’s like saying in 1935 “why would we want nuclear power when it entails everybody on earth being irradiated and dying of cancers?”

Once you run out of U235 and expand reprocessing by a factor of 5000, this is true though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton-85#Anthropogenic_pro...

It's less about not being very good at extending life yet and more about not having good answers to information-theoretic injury/death - i.e. the sort that's permanent, no matter how far along technology progresses.

As it stands, most jurisdictions haven't legalized assisted suicide and the ones that have don't count cryonics as a means of such. That means that, when faced with a condition that entails a slow and agonizing death (particularly one which entails neurodegeneration - which includes probably most terminal illnesses, due to the injury to brain cells such illnesses often entail), there's no option to freeze oneself before that process happens; instead, one must endure that slow decline until one "dies naturally", then get frozen in that already-injured state. And then what? Repairing the damaged parts of the brain won't do much to recover the data permanently lost in the process; would one still be the same person?

Even if that legal obstacle gets "fixed", and you're legally allowed to cryogenically "kill" yourself, at what point do you do so? Too early, and you miss out on things in your own normal lifetime; too late, and you run into the same irreversible damage described above. All the while there is zero guarantee that you'll ever be thawed out however many centuries later, zero guarantee that you'll be able to live a meaningful life even if the procedure succeeds - and that's assuming cryonics is already perfected, i.e. ruling out permanent information loss from the freezing/thawing itself.

Good for you.

For me personally I'm quite hoping that death is real and I will see it in my normal lifetime.

My biggest fear is not being able to die.

And honestly your approach makes this more realistic than mine: what if your brain gets digitalised and you get copied and made to be in a popular kids toy who's sole purpose is to entertain a 4 year old for 1-3 years and than getting tossed out?

You just might not have thought about every possible angle there is...

And now queue the nightmare of being coerced in a future chatgpt, asked inane questions or to act like a search engine, to kinda falsely out lgbtq people, to transform bullet points into shitty gibberish for real estate agents for a 0.0003% commission on 0.0001 dollar-a-word in a serverless, stateless container. Ugh.

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