Hacker News Reader

Comment by pontifier | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, I sincerely hope he was signed up for cryonics. If there was someone who deserved to see what the future holds, it was him.

View on HN

From what I’ve read, cryonics seems like a massive scam pulled on rich people. The tissue damage in these frozen corpses is extensive and irreparable.

> irreparable

That’s the gamble. I think you’re right though, it’s far lower odds than the snake oil salesmen present.

The alternative of cremation is still lower odds.

So you’re saying there is some chance then. Can we let go of the pseudoscience and quackery quote from the early 90s then?

Even if some future technology could repair the damage, it’s a big gamble that someone in the future will want to repair the damage.

What evidence do you base those beliefs on?

Then you obviously haven't read much about cryonics, which involves vitrification rather than freezing to avoid such tissue damage.

In real medical cryogenics, e.g., embryo preservation, vitrification is spoken of as a kind of freezing, which, of course, it is. Only cryonics advocates claim that vitrification isn't a kind of freezing.

If the topic is tissue damage from sharp ice crystals, it's pretty handy to draw the distinction between cooling methods that cause that and ones that don't.

Yes, that's the relevant distinction in fact. Cryonics are the former, not the latter. Multicellular cryonic suspension is an unsolved problem after roughly the blastocyst stage.

As of last year we're up to doing rat kidneys. They're "heavily" damaged but they recover within a few weeks. To be sure, there's a long way from that to near-perfectly preserving a human brain, let alone a whole body.

https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/21/cryogenic-organ-preserva...

Yes, that is a living rat-sized kidney. Not a dead human-sized brain. And on a pass-fail grade, I'm giving that experiment a fail. Promising, yes.

Cryopreservation of corpses is a scam designed to fleece rich people with an extraordinary fear of death. Some justify it to themselves as supporting research which might lead to effective corpsicles, but to support such research they could simply donate to it. Not waste their money on an elaborate and expensive embalming with no hope of salvation.

Scam implies intent and someone benefiting. These cryonics organizations are nonprofits run by members.

By that logic, computers are a dead end because Babbage's Difference Engine No. 1 never really worked properly... Or that space travel is impossible because a lot of early rockets blew up on the pad.

I don't understand this kind of pessimism at all.

It might work someday, maybe. But it won't work now. The corpsicles which currently exist are just as dead as if they were cremated. I understand, sort of, the psychology of people who lie to themselves about this, but that's all that's happening.

You don't know what future technological capability will be. Current Alcor and CI patients are preserved well enough that their bodies and brains could in theory be repaired by technology at the physical limits of possibility. The information is there.

You are saying that existing technology is unable to fix the issues of vitrification. That is correct, but irrelevant.

You don't know that because you don't know the physical limits of reanimation technology. In 2014, a human brain was vitrified with no ice crystallization or fracturing for the first time. Certainly, the first viable preservation will occur (if it has not already occurred) long before the first reanimation, and eventually discovering that we began to preserve people too soon would be much better than discovering that we began not soon enough. Even the primitively frozen might be retrievable centuries from now.

Well, I've read an article about some people getting flushed down the drain because the company that was supposed to keep them frozen kinda went out of business.

Oregon Brain Preservation offers cryopreservation for $5,000 (or less if you can't afford that), Cryonics Germany offers free cryopreservation, and even the most expensive providers (Tomorrow Biostasis, Alcor, and Yinfeng) are affordable through life insurance. Most of us aren't wealthy and some of us are working class. Since 2000, vitrification has replaced freezing, dramatically reducing damage, and even frozen people might be recoverable centuries from now. It's offered on a nonprofit, experimental basis by organizations with public financial statements.

Well said! If anything, I'd say the money spent on traditional funerals is more of a scam but nobody seems to talk about that.

Expensive coffins, elaborate headstones, burial plot sales, etc.

As soon as somebody tries to spend their money in a way that might actually benefit them, people get defensive or try to justify death as noble or natural.

Checking Alcor¹ and the Cryonics Institute² suggests no :-/

¹: https://www.alcor.org/news/ ²: https://cryonics.org/case-reports/

I doubt either site would be updated with info about an ongoing cryopreservation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com