Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
"PHOENIX -- A new book by a former employee of Alcor, the company that froze Ted Williams' remains, alleges the Baseball Hall of Famer's body was mistreated by the company.
Larry Johnson says in the book "Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death" that he watched an Alcor official swing a monkey wrench at Williams' frozen severed head to try to remove a tuna can stuck to it. The first swing accidentally struck the head, Johnson contends, and the second knocked the tuna can loose."
~ Lena Forsén
> 1,655 words. Running total is 8,296 words. Title refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna .
https://qntm.org/lena#komment5fa3096561295
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JFC indeed.
[Edit]
Also, Niven's "A World out of Time" [1], where the reanimated ('corpsicles') are used for menial / dangerous tasks.
It's truly scary, but there is of course also the potential of eternal life in paradise.
Or hell, as in Ian M Banks ‘Surface Detail’. Chay's dilemma was really affecting (she is reincarnated as an angel of true death in hell, who is compelled to release a soul every day, by taking on some of their pain)
Can't help but think his desire to leave behind collective identities has been crushed recently.
All we seem to do these days is reinforce collective identities and vie to join and exclude particular groups and people.
he wrote that the leadership in the Arab–Israeli conflict had failed, and that the warring sides were "acting like adolescents, refuse to resolve their wasteful 25-year-old brawl"
Being actually really dead, with your body physically no longer existing, is truly final. You won't be conscious ever again. No exceptions. This, on the other hand, gives you a chance to live again. The chance might be tiny, but it's still non-zero, so it's still worth pursuing.
Tim Urban has a cool article about it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html, I agree with most of his points, except "No one ever will ever ever want to live forever". Because everyone actually does want to live forever, they're just afraid to openly acknowledge it.
That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.
According to what criteria?
The bodies are still relatively intact physically. The point of the freezing is to stop any possible chemical activity so that no decomposition or other harmful change happens and the information contained in the body stays intact.
> That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.
You're saying that like you know exactly what a consciousness is, what's its physical representation and what is enough to support it. Our best understanding is that the brain itself contains enough information to encode one's "self". It might be in the neuron connections or something else — that part we aren't sure about yet.
So fun fact: In mountain rescue they have a saying that you aren't dead until you're warm and dead. People do come back from frozen.
Here's some science about this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24882104/
> Hypothermic cardiac arrest has high mortality and few known prognostic factors. We studied retrospectively 34 victims of accidental hypothermia with cardiac arrest admitted to The University Hospital of North Norway during 1985-2013 who were resuscitated and rewarmed by extracorporeal circulation. No patient survived prior to 1999, while nine out of 24 (37.5%) survived hypothermic cardiac arrest from 1999 to 2013. The lowest measured core temperature among survivors was 13.7°C; the longest time from cardiac arrest to return of spontaneous circulation was 6 h and 52 min. The only predictor of survival identified was lower blood potassium concentration in the nine survivors compared with the non-survivors. Submersion was not associated with reduced survival. Non-survivors consumed modest hospital resources. Most survivors had a favourable neurological outcome.
Can't find the very cool journalistic story where I learned the phrase a few years ago. I think it was one of those New York Times online features they used to do. Similar to the famous Avalanche story, but about a woman who froze to death and came back ... or maybe it was part of the Avalanche story even. Memory fuzzy
Recovering text from charred fragments of paper is sometimes possible, but anything reduced to ash is lost forever. The information required to reconstruct it ends up dispersed across the whole state of the Earth, and from there leaks out into space at the speed of light: it can never be recovered, even in principle.
The same is true vis a vis corpsicles and corpses. Whether cryopreservation preserves enough structure to make resurrection possible is an open question, but once your synapses are gone they're gone for good.
Arizona is seismically stable, a low flood risk, and has abundant solar power. It's probably not a terrible choice. Mix in laxer regulations than you'd see in California, and an innate hucksterism? It's a great fit!
But Arizona is definitely the kind of place where this type of scam is profitable. Until the maintenance bills come.
The difference between Arizona and Iceland to get to cryo temperatures is a rounding error.
It’s not linear at all. Going from 300 K to 250 K is much easier than going from 100 K to 50 K. If it were linear, going all the way to 0 K would be trivial.
The reason why it does not matter much is that average temperatures are not that different (Arizona is 29°C; Iceland is 14°C); the difference is not going to matter when cooling something from 300 K to 80 K. Besides, atmospheric temperature does not matter too much for underground facilities, and there Iceland is more active (thus warmer) than Arizona.
That said, things like proximity of an ocean, something with a huge heat capacity and decent thermal conductivity that could be used to dump heat more efficiently than in the atmosphere would be a plus.
Whilst the dreamer in me would like to believe that all this is possible in the future, I’m not convinced that todays technology is enough to even “freeze” the body, thawing and reanimation be damned.
[1] https://www.alcor.org/library/postmortem-examination-of-thre...
But it'll still be neat to have a preserved 20th century body in the 22nd century or even beyond.
One more interesting variation, while illegal, would be to freeze people when they are nearing death. If we could bring them back later, the scheme would have a chance of working if better surgeries and medicines are available. But I don't think we have the technology even for this.
EDIT: wouldn't places where assisted suicide is legal be cool (pun intended) with my proposed scheme of freezing when nearing death?
https://www.alcor.org/library/postmortem-examination-of-thre...
Let's assume the doctor says that we have 1 year left but a reasonably good quality of life until death. Should we wait until we're a few days away from death, or go to freezing right after getting the "1 year left" news under the assumption that the disease isn't as advanced and thus wouldn't require as big of a technology leap for a cure?
If we wait, the chances of being cured after waking up are pretty low (we are almost dead already due to the disease), but we'd have lived an extra year.
If we don't wait, the chances of being cured are a lot higher (disease not as advanced) but we might not survive the whole freezing process at all, and thus waste a year of life.
They basically have you fill your bathtub full of ice, pop some downers then jump in the tub.
Reanimation is the easy part (relatively speaking), even though we have no clue as to how to do it.
We don't have the technology to do this to humans yet, so chances are high that none of them are viable.