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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

At the bottom update, he proposes that standard procedure should be to cryogenically freeze unknown corpses. I as a taxpayer do not want to shoulder this burden. As time goes on, the expense of keeping unknown corpses frozen continually increases as they pile up.

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The per capita expense of keeping a thousand frozen heads in a pool of liquid nitrogen is essentially negligible. You wouldn't notice it as a budget item. If it really bugs you, fund it yourself through private philanthropy. But out of all the things that government was ever proposed to do, this would be the most cost-effective in the history of time - even I, a libertarian, draw the line at not doing this. Cryonics is cheap, people are crazy.

It depends how far away our ability to reanimate them is. I don't know how many thousands or tens of thousands of unidentified people (or ones otherwise taken care of by the state) die every year. In a stable population the per capita cost of keeping them all would keep increasing.

Moreover, what would we do with them? Copy their consciousness into a computer some day? Who pays for that? And does it really soften the blow of losing a loved one? I don't think having a copy of my dead mother would make me feel any better about the real one having passed on.

Would we grow them new bodies? What does that cost and who pays for that? Would they even want that? Do we have the right to make that decision for them? If we reanimate everyone who dies, how quickly can our country no longer sustain such a rapidly increasing population?

All of this just seems like an illogical reaction to the death of a loved one. I don't mean that to be rude (I've had my own illogical reactions) but it's just not feasible, especially for a technology that we're not sure will ever amount to anything.

We're operating on different technological assumptions here. Cryonics reanimation takes nanotech and quite possibly machine superintelligence, both of which are self-replicating technologies. The software might be expensive, as 'twere, but that's a one-time cost.

Regarding the thing with "copies", that's a complex issue and I can only refer you to the entire sequence on personal identity on Overcoming Bias:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/qm-and-identity.html

If you had to make an educated guess, how long would it be until we can reanimate cryogenically frozen people? And what would the cost of freezing everyone who passes away until then be?

Umm, and remember there's no convincing reason to believe cryogenics work. Sure, we've cooled down some animals and brought them back. But keeping a head near absolute zero for years, and expecting to revive a consciousness? No evidence for it. None.

There are no revivals yet. That's expected - it isn't evidence.

If you can't examine the facts, can you examine the theory?

What is the theory? There's two I know of: biological revival, and informational "upload". The first sounds dubious to me - there's an awful lot of damage to repair, and the nanotech to do it is not even on the drawing board, let alone the knowledge to guide repair. The second sounds much more achievable based on some sort of slice, dice, scan and digitize process, followed by computer emulation. (See recent work by Anders Sandberg.)

What would be required for upload? Continuity of information. (Continuity of the potential for biological life is NOT required.) Do we have evidence for continuity of information? We know that vitrification tech has gotten pretty good recently. (Wikipedia: a rabbit kidney was vitrified, thawed, and worked.) That suggests enough information could be preserved for upload.

Conclusion: there is convincing reason to believe cryonics should work.

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