Cryostasis Revival
alcor.org
alcor.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryopreservation#Vitrification
"Mixtures of cryoprotectants and the use of ice blockers have enabled the 21st Century Medicine company to vitrify a rabbit kidney to −135 °C with their proprietary vitrification mixture. Upon rewarming, the kidney was transplanted successfully into a rabbit, with complete functionality and viability, able to sustain the rabbit indefinitely as the sole functioning kidney."
EDIT: I will pull the PDF for the book later today.
When we are using cryopreserved organs, then preserving the brain becomes more obviously pragmatic.
I am guessing that cryopreserved human kidneys do not have uniform cooling, spoiling interior tissue. A rabbit kidney is much smaller, and wouldn't suffer as much from this problem.
The interior veins and arteries of a kidney look like it would be a reasonably good heat exchanger.
What's called "nanotechnology" today is mostly surface chemistry.
How do you keep a cryostasis business honest when you - the customer - are dead and there is no profitable reason to keep you from becoming like that loose frozen hamburger at the bottom of my freezer?
Freezer burn occurs when moisture escapes from frozen biospecimens due to slow freezing and temperature fluctuations. It's not an issue during storage in liquid nitrogen, which causes much faster freezing and has a much colder storage temperature level.
> And a few very wealthy people
Cryonics is not only accessible to the very wealthy. There are options available that are equal or less expensive than an average funeral.
> How do you keep a cryostasis business honest when you - the customer - are dead and there is no profitable reason to keep you from becoming like that loose frozen hamburger at the bottom of my freezer
1: The companies are non-profits so profit is irrelevant. 2: You look at their long-term reputation which is important for them to get new clients. This is why Alcor has been around for 50 years without thawing a single one of their patients.
They still need to be able to keep the fridges on.
> This is why Alcor has been around for 50 years without thawing a single one of their patients.
Which means "without proving they can actually deliver what clients expect".
I believe they are usually set up to invest the money people paid in, then keep the lights on with returns on that. They're not using the money directly.
> Which means "without proving they can actually deliver what clients expect".
They're very clear that they can't promise anything. People are willing to take the chance anyhow.
As one hypothetical example, imagine Meta buys Alcor. Maybe their lawyers work it out that importing customer consciousness into the metaverse is legal and fulfills the contract. But when this happens the metaverse has safeguards that don't allow you to kill anyone including yourself. And now your consciousness is in the metaverse for an effective eternity. Maybe that sounds nice to you but maybe the thought makes you a bit uncomfortable as it does for me.
Anyone who looks them up online can find this information easily. It is required to be public since they are a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Here are their current board of directors: https://www.alcor.org/library/alcor-board-of-directors/
> What if their interests become misaligned wrt customers?
Anything is possible but this seems extremely unlikely given their governing structure and requirements for being on the board of directors. Alcor has been criticized in the past because they fall very far in favor of protecting their existing patients in cryopreservation rather than making accommodations for prospective patients, leading to them turning away prospective patients for a variety of reasons.
From: https://www.alcor.org/library/alcors-self-perpetuating-board...
> A fundamental rationale for selecting the self perpetuating Board structure was its ability to provide continuity of purpose over a long period of time. Existing Board members select those new Board members who they believe are best able to preserve Alcor’s core values and carry out its mission. All Board members are required by Alcor Bylaws to be Alcor members. While not required by the Bylaws, we also find that Alcor Board members are cryonicists of long standing and are well known within the cryonics community. By tradition, new Board members are usually sought from the ranks of Alcor Advisors, although the Board can and has selected Board Members who have not been Advisors. Board members have a strong incentive to choose carefully because the success of Alcor and the survival of our members — including our Board members — is heavily dependent on the abilities and character of future Boards of Directors.
BTW, I'm not a shill for Alcor. I think some aspects of their operations are worthy of criticism. But this is not one of them. If you disagree, feel free to state why, but I would recommend at least learning the basics about them before doing so.
The specific concern is about who operates it _eventually_ (perhaps centuries from now.) I can look up who is on their current board and what their governance structure happens to be now but it isn't relevant to my hypothetical concern. Lots can happen in relatively short periods of time and the well-meaning intent behind their current governance structure can surely always be subverted by sufficiently incentivized and devious humans. I also don't mean this as a specific critique of Alcor. My concern is about the general concept of "freeze-now and wake-in-100s-of-years."
Every person buying in--or perhaps checking in--to the system needs to trust that there's another person coming after them who is equally-invested in the projects' success, and at least able to pay the power/maintenance bills.
Somewhat aside, the fiction book Cryoburn (a long way through the excellent Vorkosigan saga) does explore some of these issues in the background: The protagonist visits a planet where the frozen citizens have their voting-rights delegated to whichever corporations hold their storage/revival contracts. (In fact, some corporations are even trying to commoditize contracts so that they can be traded, in a likely allusion to CDOs during the 2008 property crash.)
One of the core problems of cryonics is the suite of technologies needed to revive a person from the frozen state and then fix whatever was wrong with them before freezing is indistinguishable from physical immortality. So once we can revive corpsicles, nobody will ever be frozen again! So there's no situation where you could actually get that tested body of law around corpsicle rights.
The cryonicsphile response is, of course, that the alternative is death. Even if there's a 1 in 100 chance of being thawed, even if you're legally enslaved to pay off the unfreezing debt or are returned as an uploaded brain in a computer, that's still better than rotting in the ground, right?
For example:
1. A patient with a rabies diagnosis, awaiting a future treatment.
2. Someone born with with muscular dystrophy, waiting for a retrogenic cure.
3. Someone who has simply run out of time to wait for a difficult to find donor organ.
4. The victim of gross physical trauma where there are too many. Holes to plug and things to sew and tubes to reconnect for it to be done safely in a warm state.
Any of those things could provide the necessary legal test cases without implying anything about whether we've cracked functional immortality or not.
If the person is not dead, then at what point have they effectively been kidnapped if the company chooses not to revive them? (Maybe someone says the technology is ready, maybe someone else disagrees.)
I wouldn't worry about that at all. The odds of someone waking you up from cryostasis are very low.
Of course, from the victim’s point of view, they always wake up. If they never do, at least they won’t feel disappointed.
Such technology always seemed much more reasonable than warp drive or other similar science fiction. I can believe that in a few centuries we have figured out how to revive a person from cryostasis.
Then there is the past record of, ah, interesting developments. https://bigthink.com/the-future/cryonics-horror-stories/
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/cryostasis-review
So I clicked :)
lets just hope that every scifi franchise got the eventuality of this tech wrong....
Do it now, not later. I waited too long and now there is no affordable life insurance available. :(