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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of cryopreservation, to borrow a question from Scott Aaronson [1]: have you signed up for cryopreservation? And regardless of your answer, how do you defend yourself against the charge of irrationality?

On one hand, it seems like a different version of Pascal's wager - if you can afford it, the upside is potentially far more beneficial than the downside. On the other hand, well, it is crazy...

I can think of one reason for not doing it (personally): I don't necessary want to live in a society that can perform my revival. Not to say that there's anything wrong with that society, they would just be so far away from me that I can't fathom how that would be like.

[1]: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=455

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>if you can afford it, the upside is potentially far more beneficial than the downside

I looked into this in some detail a while ago, and I recall Alcor indicated that many of its members opt for life insurance (with Alcor as a beneficiary) to cover the cost of cryopreservation. That's something like $75K to cryopreserve your head, and $150K for whole-body cryospreservation.

I suspect the mean age of HN readers skews toward late 20s or early 30s, meaning that they'd likely pay something like <$100 every year for $150K of life insurance. Also many of us have some form of life insurance paid for by our employers.

I updated my will last year with the help of a SF bay area attorney who told me she's done cryopreservation wills/trusts for a bunch of high-profile tech execs (she did not, of course, name names). Email me if you want her info.

How does the math work for paying let's say 60 years times <$100 and cashing out $150k at the end?

I know other folks active on HN actually work in the insurance industry, and hopefully they'll jump in. But there are different types of life insurance. For most HN readers term life insurance (pay $100 a year for 10 years for $150K in death benefits, and then the policy ends) makes the most sense. There's no "cash out" at the end...

There are other types tied to investment vehicles that go by names like universal and variable life insurance. Those can have certain tax advantages and can let you build that "cash value" you mentioned.

I assume that your rates go up as you age and get more likely to die. In your 20's it's only covering improbably illnesses and events like car accidents. But nobody's going to extend those same rates to you once you're 85 and already had two heart attacks.

What if some improbable event happened like a major Earthquake or war or something that unexpectedly kills a lot of young people. Would the insurance company be able to pay out?

Who insures the insurers? The reinsurers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance

Interestingly, insurance actuaries here in Denmark has one of the highest incomes. 25% of those with the degree end up in top-1% income (vs 11% of those with a law degree). More (in Danish): http://www.business.dk/karriere/her-er-vejen-til-den-hoejest...

Why crazy? There's good supporting evidence for sufficient preservation of fine neural structure via vitrification. The oldest existing cryopreservation organizations have lasted 40 years since their formation as professional groups. There is no known obstacle in the laws of physics to developing molecular nanotechnology capable of restoring a cryopreserved individual: it's just a technology challenge in organization at the nanoscale, related to well-funded and widespread current work in cell science and nanotechnology.

Basically it is the best possible play with the cards dealt to you if you are going to die before the advent of rejuvenation therapies and would still like to live longer into the golden future of amazing wealth and technology that lies just ahead of us. The odds are infinitely better than those offered by any other end of life choice (i.e. they are above zero).

Would you mind sharing some of that evidence? I certainly understand the desire to be cryopreserved, but given the lack of proof of concept (I'd love to be contradicted here!) and how little we know about the brain, it seems like a desperate Hail Mary marketed to wealthy tech folks as sound science.

Electron micrography of cryopreserved tissue shows pretty good preservation[0][1], and since every aspect of the mind is dependent on physical properties of the brain, the possibility of revival exists as long as structure and context are preserved in the brain.

>marketed to wealthy tech folks

Cryonics has historically been a middle class thing.

[0] http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/micrographs.html

[1] http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm...

Electron microscopy of a ram chip shows no difference at all between one that contains a bunch of data and one that is empty.

Fortunately, brains don't work like RAM chips and there is apparently evidence that important data is saved in molecular structure, not in electric charges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics#Neuropreservation

Unfortunately though, data is not all there is, and a good part of what our brains do is electrical in nature.

In other words, you could save all the data in the brain but without knowing what the CPU was doing when it shut down (which is electrical state) that may not do you any good.

http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2013/07/16/i...

Thankfully the fact that people have come back just fine from minutes of total EEG silence (Often involving hypothermia) shows that the immediate state of the brain does not matter nearly as much as its structure.

That's not quite the same as freezing your brain for an indeterminate amount of time (decades? centuries? millennia? forever?) and expecting a spontaneous reboot after transferring and read-out + a whole bunch of other unknowns.

That's a brain that was still almost the same brain as the one in which the electrical activity as we currently detect it was lost.

>(decades? centuries? millennia? forever?)

All equivalent.

>expecting a spontaneous reboot

Nobody actually expects this. You can't just thaw someone and reperfuse them. Extensive repair work has to be done at the nanoscale.

In any case, the evidence shows electrical activity doesn't really matter when you're only concerned about long-term identity. Electrochemical impulses don't encode memory or personality. If they did, it would be pretty clear in people who recover from extreme hypothermia, as they would have retrograde amnesia.

Who's to say that the choice to survive in the distant future is desirable?

Everyone you know and love will have been long dead, and any society with both the means and will to revive you may have undesirable objectives in mind, e.g. a life of slavery or military conscription. From a global perspective, what are the potential impacts on the species of an eternal elite, obsessed with life extension, creating an ever-growing class of ancient capital holders?

Assuming both constant human nature and the lack of an self-reinforcing intelligence cascade (i.e. no singularity event), survival is not an obviously rational choice.

Yeah, future may very well be worse than death, but I personally estimate the expected utility of a future life to be more than zero.

>survival is not an obviously rational choice.

It's a reversible choice though.

> Who's to say that the choice to survive in the distant future is desirable?

Each individual for themselves, obviously.

> Everyone you know and love will have been long dead

This obviously contradicts the original assumption that you might actually get revived. Because if you can, so can others.

> may have undesirable objectives in mind, e.g. a life of slavery or military conscription

I find it hard to believe that it will ever be cheaper to revive dead frozen humans than simply let living humans breed new humans for free. And plenty of people now living aren't even cost-competitive against the machines of 2014 or 2024, nevermind the machines of a society capable of reviving the dead. Both as a slave and as a soldier, you're likely to be horribly inadequate.

Honestly the bigger question is why the future people would bother to wake you up at all. Maybe history buffs would be happy to talk to you. Maybe the world gets so rich that a few weird enthusiasts can afford to do it on their own.

But the bottom line is that if the future turns out to be awful, you can always choose to die again. Plenty of people would be willing to have a look around first.

>> Who's to say that the choice to survive in the distant future is desirable?

>Each individual for themselves, obviously.

Agreed. Merely pointing out the choice does not have a clear answer.

>This obviously contradicts the original assumption that you might actually get revived. Because if you can, so can others.

Only those with spare wealth and foresight, which comprises a vanishingly small part of the current population. Most people's loved ones are unlikely to be part of that small population.

>But the bottom line is that if the future turns out to be awful, you can always choose to die again.

Any society that has mastered the technology necessary to revive you can certainly master the technology necessary to physically or chemically restrain you.

>Honestly the bigger question is why the future people would bother to wake you up at all.

That is the question. And I fear, upon waking, one may not like the answer...

I would personally expect "everyone you know and love" to be the reason any of us schmucks have a hope of being revived.

Even if there is no economic or scientific reason to revive a frozen, preserved person, there could still be sentimental reasons. If my grandfather were frozen and reviveable, and not dead and buried, I would want to revive him. If it were remotely within my financial means, I would save for decades, mortgage or sell everything I own, take on any debt I could trick people into lending me, if it technologically possible to bring a parent back to life.

It is not difficult to imagine a chain of un-freezing in some distant future. Children unfreeze parents; parents unfreeze grandparents; grandparents unfreeze great-grandparents. As long as there is some tenuous connection between the preserved and the living, at some price point a living old friend or third cousin will want to revive the preserved. Add in the odd charity for the few friendless frozen and it is not hard to imagine any frozen person eventually being revived, technology permitting.

> If my grandfather were frozen and reviveable, and not dead and buried, I would want to revive him. If it were remotely within my financial means, I would save for decades, mortgage or sell everything I own, take on any debt I could trick people into lending me, if it technologically possible to bring a parent back to life.

Of course you feel this way. Everyone does. And that's the problem. Imagine most of the world's productive output being redirected to the massive project of unfreezing generations of cryogenically preserved ancestors.

This is one of the cheerier possibilities. Most of the reasons that occur to me that an advanced society, lacking an intelligence cascade, would want to conjure a large number of functioning highly-educated consciousnesses are decidedly darker.

This possibility, and a thousand other unforeseen individual and societal implications of cryogenics, deserve debate.

We are already on the cusp of rapid automation of our current economy. Traditional models of how labor is distributed or utilized will, and have been, going out the window for quite some time.

But I think you can approximate well enough that by the time the technology arises to resurrect the cryopreserved, it won't require the entire effort of humanity to revive their frozen forbearers, because most of humanity won't be putting out any effort to begin with. We are already 20 years away from half the working population being rendered obsolete by automation. If it is something machines cannot do, it just lets us utilize untapped human labor in the future. If it is something machines can do, we will rapidly deploy the necessary infrastructure to enable the automation of revival, and it won't be a problem of anyone "affording" revival, the machines will just revive all the people they can.

The next step in your calculation is to ask, "What are the constraints on production in a society that has ultra-high automation but no artificial intelligence?"

There is only one: intelligence. I can see such a society going to great lengths to obtain that resource. The incentives to revive an individual for unfortunate purposes in such a society would be very large.

How are the purposes unfortunate? I see the connection between the cryopreserved often being smart folk, so that in the future at some point it might be adventageous to revive them for their intellect, but...

Consider that by the time they can perfect the nanotechnology to repair the brain damage dealt by the freezing process, they will easily be able to genetically engineer a near maximally capable brain. Why not just genetically engineer humans that have high cognitive potential than try to reintegrate those so long dead they cannot function in this futuristic society?

It won't cost them much to revive people, but I don't expect the preserved to be sought after for their intellect.

It'd be fantastic if an industrialized nation devoted 5 or 10% of its GDP to revival. We've been suffering dearly from a lack of aggregate demand for nigh on a decade now. A massive medical bubble would hardly be worse than a housing bubble for backfilling demand.

Well... Unless something prohibits the subject from self-terminating, it still beats death.

On that note, this (http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Lazarus) is worth watching if you can get hold of it. It appears to be on 4od for uk viewers.

I would argue that cryopreservation is the belief in the increasing rate of scientific progress (which can measured and proven), and that it is far more rational than the tens of millions of people who attend church every Saturday or Sunday in search of salvation for their soul.

As /u/dublinben mentioned, I'd give my entire wealth to have the opportunity to live in the future.

> I would argue that cryopreservation is the belief in the increasing rate of scientific progress (which can measured and proven)

The problem is that you aren't just depending on future improvements in revival technology, you're depending on the current state of today's preservation technology (at the point you die).

And today's preservation technology doesn't have a lot of evidence suggesting that it can work to successfully preserve a kidney, much less a brain.

Since you specifically mentioned kidneys:

>In the summer of 2005, where he was a keynote speaker at the annual Society for Cryobiology meeting, Fahy announced that Twenty-First Century Medicine had successfully cryopreserved a rabbit kidney at -130°C by vitrification and transplanted it into a rabbit after rewarming, with subsequent long-term life support by the vitrified-rewarmed kidney as the sole kidney. This research breakthrough was later published in the peer-reviewed journal Organogenesis.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Fahy

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15094092

That's exciting, thank you for the correction. (Happen to know whether they've done any larger organs?)

Entire animals can freeze:

http://www.livescience.com/32175-can-frogs-survive-being-fro...

The abstract makes no mention of -130°C, but digging into the actual paper (can be read here: www.21cm.com/pdfs/cryopreservation_advances.pdf), it does mention: "Fig. 13. Confinement of ice formation to the pelvis of a rabbit kidney that was perfused with M22 at 22°C for 25min, bisected, and allowed to passively cool in air in a CryoStar freezer at about 130°C... The vast majority of the kidney appears to have vitrified and is indistinguishable from the appearance of the kidney prior to cooling." (Emphasis mine)

> The problem is that you aren't just depending on future improvements in revival technology, you're depending on the current state of today's preservation technology (at the point you die).

When the other option is straight ol' Death, I'm not losing much by playing the long game on science coming through at sophisticated cellular repair mechanisms/protocols. I'm definitely ahead of people getting buried or cremated.

On the other hand, you'll be living in the future, and probably unemployable since things will have evolved so much.

Maybe everybody speaks something else other than English and even communicating is a pain (even with good translation resources)

You'll know nobody. All the things that you know by "home" are gone.

It'll probably be cool for the first weeks, then an absolute drag.

I think it'd be less of a drag than being nonexistent.

Maybe, but you won't mind not existing. You may mind it now, surely, but not at that time.

Of course, I want to mind :P

Yeah but if it is that bad the you could just kill yourself. The potential upside seems to outweigh the finality of death.

A huge portion of the workforce will be unemployable in our lifetimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

By the time the technology comes around the revive the cryopreserved, the rest of technological advancement will change the dynamic of human interaction so much we cannot estimate what the world will be like, but we can assume that with technology advanced enough to repair the damage from the freezing process, you would probably be entering a world of almost any possibility.

Yes, this video is great, I saw it too

It's not clear you understand why people go to church and what it's benefits are.

I signed up about five years ago. I outlined my reasons in a blog post[1].

Basically, I think it's more feasible than most people judge it to be. The technology has already been demonstrated in smaller structures such as rabbit kidneys. While it's not likely to work, the expected value is positive.

1. http://geoff.greer.fm/2010/07/09/insert-frozen-food-joke-her...

On the other hand, I think most inquisitive folks and Sci-Fi nerds would pay anything to travel into the future (beyond a single lifetime).

If conciseness is in fact just an internal feeling/feedback loop, the revived you will feel as though this was achieved, but is the benefit to your present mind-state somewhat lost?

Assuming consciousness is an internal state (nothing mystical or metaphysical), isn't this the same thing as a long nap? Ie, is the fact that the you after a nap feels like a continuation of yourself of no benefit to the you before a nap?

Of course, the analogy isn't perfect since brain activity does not cease during a nap, but consciousness does.

People have come back from minutes of electrocerebral silence with intact memories and personalities.

You can say that for any attempt to make plans for the future.

Sure, but you can say the same about going to bed at night with the intent of waking up in the morning.

If you extrapolate this notion, which is something I have done and find an interesting theory, then consciousness is really a moment's event, like a processor's tick. Every tick you sense things, retrieve things from memory, and serialize a bunch more things into memory (including the working memory of say, a conscious movement you're doing right now.) The next moment another "you" comes along and lives that moment. To me it's the only point at which I can draw this line of "when is it no longer you?", as in being cloned with an exact brain snapshot, or sleeping at night, etc. You are only ever you for that single moment, so what difference is there between the revived you and the you a second from now? It's also a convenient belief in that I feel free to do teleportation when that becomes available (pulverize your body here, recreate your snapshot there.)

Sci-Fi nerds who have read Niven's "known space" stories, particular those in the Gil the ARM timeframe, might not be so interested in the corpsicle method of travel into the future.

It's interesting that the comments by cell biologist Len Ornstein in that thread completely omit any mention of high osmolality vitrification, which is what is practiced in cryonics. I get the impression he is not aware of Fahy's approach at all. It probably is not used in his specialty.

HOV is using extremely high concentrations of solutes to reduce the freezing point (a colligative property). That is the only way to vitrify something big like the brain. At least, until some super material is invented that lets us pull out lots of heat really fast. The trouble is that it is toxic to cells to be exposed for very long. With rabbit kidneys and small slices of brain tissue, the exposure time at warm temperatures can be very brief. So with current cryonics we can only make a morphological argument for information theoretic preservation.

With better materials that enable faster cooling, prevent the toxicity mechanisms of the cryoprotectant, and/or block ice formation non-colligatively (certain polymers do this), it is theoretically possible that we could get to a point where the cells are still viable. In that event, it would be like placing the brain in an "off state". You wouldn't be able to resume it again without a body to implant it in, but that's more likely to be on the 200-year radar than nanorepair, so the chances would be improved quite a bit. Also, I suspect more people would sign up for a process that does not involve "killing" their brain cells.

I should also mention that the wood frog is really more a counterexample of vitrification. It forms ice (which they are adapted to tolerate, unlike us), but the interior or the cells remains a slightly more concentrated liquid. It is nowhere near the concentrations used in cryonics, which are high enough to prevent freezing entirely (50-80%). A wood frog cannot survive any temperature below around -5 C.

Considering death is inevitable, cryopreservation just before you cease to function is, quite possibly, the best rational choice you can make. Of course, it's a bit selfish, as the resources you commit to it are substantial and your offspring could benefit from them.

Betting your final moments on specific advances of technology is also not an easy decision. Plus, you may wake up in a world you don't like.

OTOH, the other option is not to wake up at all.

Exactly my thoughts.

You may wake up a stunted and brain-damaged version of yourself that is aware enough to know what it is missing.

Then get fixed. If someone can restore a vitrified brain into a functioning state, they can probably restore it to full function.

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