Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopter Is Cryonically Freezing His Body to See the Future
wired.com
wired.com
It's a pretty long, annoying process to become a member, but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die.
I have a $300K policy that covers the $200K suspension and a $100K fund when I wake up. I'd recommend insurance even if you can afford to pay the $200K out of pocket because there's less legal risk that the funds might be tied up in litigation. I got my policy through the only Alcor member insurance agent, Rudi Hoffman, and if you're interested in cryonics, he's probably the best introduction you can get. His number is (386) 788-3773.
Overpriced insurance policy based on pseudoscience implemented by a shady industry. What is not to like.
When I mention cryonics people tend to respond very negatively without engaging rationally. More so than with most anything else. It's sad that it's something you can't say even here on hn. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Says who ? Just like it may be physically possible to create immortal humans, but it's extremely unlikely we find a way to make it happen anytime soon, and in the meantime your frozen body will be left to rot over time faster than science progresses in that field.
The term "pseudoscience" can be applied to a true result as well as a false one. The term refers, not to the result, but to how it was acquired.
An astrologer may predict that you will have a nice day. If you then have a nice day, does that make astrology science?
I could also sell coal to people that would hope to use it in their 3D printers in the near future to construct their own diamonds, or flight goggles for our futures' flying cars.
It's not pseudo-science, but not because it's trust-worthy; it's not pseudo-science because Alcor is very careful with their image and wording so as to flank that issue entirely.
Even more to the point, why would they revive you? You already paid them.
Agree, there's not much incentive. Plus let's say you wake up as an old man 100 years from now, who is going to take care of your daily needs ? Your immediate family will be long gone, your descendants probably won't care about you, and your skills from 100 years ago will be irrelevant. What a life!
If you want to argue that they would stand to lose more PR and goodwill than it would be worth, that would actually be a point you could make, but now I’m just writing your argument for you.
Also, did anyone read Pet Cemetary? Yeah, it would be nice to be revived, but in what condition?
tl;dr: A rabbit kidney was vitrified, then revived and successfully implanted into another rabbit which remained healthy.
It's the same with a human's memory/personality. Just bits in a brain.
We barely know how memory works. It is fantastically simplistic to suggest that personality is "just bits in a brain".
1. The process to revive a person after freezing does not exist. Current speculations about how it would work are so mired and poisoned by wishful thinking that it is essentially impossible to know whether it will ever exist.
2. Even if the process will some day exist, it will be too late for you if you were not frozen correctly. It’s like writing a zip/compress program and speculating that someone in the future might one day invent unzip/uncompress – if unzip or uncompress eventually does appear, it is extremely likely to show bugs in the implementation and/or specification of the original zip or compress program, making all data previously thought to be “compressed” instead utterly corrupt and worthless.
3. The incentives are all wrong for the actual truth to surface. The incentive for a company in this business is to imply that the science is (or will soon be) much farther along than it currently is, and a customer has the incentive to believe this, since the alternative is death. To paraphrase: It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their life depends upon them not understanding it.
And this is exactly why more research should be done to figure it out. Human creativity when provided the right incentives and not over-regulated is a pretty powerful thing.
Future generations may look back on us as unbelievably primitive and may have trouble believing that we suffered physical death and thought it an inescapable and acceptable part of life.
So it’s like Pascal’s wager, except it is a real wager which costs money.
> […] more research should be done […]
Absolutely, but it is very hard to guard against wishful thinking, which absolutely everybody has an incentive to succumb to.
> Future generations may […] have trouble believing that we suffered physical death […]
…and there it is.
Even if you have the money, it's recommended you don't pay directly as it can get caught up in legal battles, all the while your brain is rotting. the vast majority pay via life insurance, although if you were for whatever reason uninsurable and had sufficient cash on hand, I guess they might accept it while you are still alive as a donation.
Unlike pascal's wager, it's also the only game in town when it comes to avoiding death, unlike religion where if you picked the wrong one out of any of the millions that have existed in human history, you made a mistake that ruins your chances under the vast majority of them (AKA "What happens if you spend your life praying to Jesus in the hopes of getting a reward, then you end up facing Hel, Anubis, Hades/Pluto, Erebus, Allah, Mormon Space Kolob God, any of the native american myths, Flying Spaghetti Monster, or even Cthulhu instead?").
I'm not convinced that being a non-profit vs for-profit really changes the incentives for an organisation. No doubt the founder and CEO is paying himself a comfortable salary out of Alcor's money.
Actually, they are still better than that as they don't blow millions worth of donations on long guilt-tripping TV adverts.
Honestly, if a few employees make a living, I'm fine with that; good for them for advancing the field of life extension.
Yes, the incentives in this case are the same.
This goes triple for the brain, which is analog and highly redundant. You can have large chunks of your brain physically ripped out (examples on request) and still live a pretty normal life afterwards, unlike modern computers where a single off bit can crash a program.
He created optimal patterns for each drive controller he had available. You would only ever use the full set if you didn't know what controller you had - otherwise using a single set would be fine.
Gutmann himself says that a few overwrites of random data is about as good as you can do.
Secondly, it has happened that people has suffered major brain damage and survived with ”only” personality changes and mobility impairments, but I posit that these cases are rare, and not nearly the normal case you make them out to be.
Thirdly, it is a rather large step to go from simply having your data all there and usable to having to hire, no, wait, invent, data recovery technology.
2. That would be true if brains worked on all-or-nothing integrity, but they don't. The last people to be preserved will be the first to be brought back; as techniques get more advanced they will allow saving older patients. There are a few people that are likely nonviable due to extreme circumstances (one suicide and one murder victim where the body was autopsied and so left warm for a long time, as well as having the brain removed from the skull (it is normally preserved within the skill), for example) but as the brain is still intact in both cases, they are certainly still potentially recoverable with adequate medical technology. Remember when any random disease could kill someone simply because it wasn't treatable? We're at that stage with brain injury.
As it is, even if something went wrong and I died and wasn't preserved, I wouldn't even know as I would be dead.
3. Go and read Alcor's site some time. It's full of useful information including very detailed reports of procedures. Alcor admit that it will likely be a long time until many patients can be recovered, but the entire company is structured in a way to ensure that money is kept in long term investment. People's life does potentially literally depend on cryonics and Alcor at least would not wish to have a patient without an understanding of the process.
2. (I have nothing to add to this beyond my other replies in this thread.)
3. I argued that any information from a company in this business is likely to be biased, and you suggest I read the company’s information because they would like to have informed customers? What? That does not follow.
This appears to assume that your physical body will be enough for you to come back to 'life'.
Also, I understand that there is a school of thought that "you" are not only the physical body, but the ongoing electrical impulses in your mind. Reviving a brain that without its functional state might be akin to turning on a PC with no operating system installed.
Not an Alcor member yet, but will be when I can afford it.
Exploration of dying & waking up was nicely penned down by dying writer Dennis Potter in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115230/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/ .
You don't have to move to the US, there are organisations around the world who will perform the perfusion and handle shipping in an insulated box of dry ice to Alcor, but you should definitely budget extra. Many also rely on their members to help each other out a bit; you don't need medical training but might be trained by them and help in other ways with other patients; they also often offer a higher priced membership without this provision.
An example: http://www.cryonics-uk.com/
As for the cost of the preservation itself, the vast majority of people pay via life insurance rather than directly.
Suppose that in, say, 1000 years humanity develops a technology that actually can heal and resurrect people who have been "suspended" that way. What is their incentive to actually do it?
I mean, it's hard to make hypotheses about the state of humanity so far into the future, but if we base ourselves on current humanity growth it's unlikely that we'll be in a population deficit any time soon. Especially if we develop technology that allows us to cure death...
So basically, imagine if we had a fridge somewhere with a bunch of people from 1000 AD that we could bring back to life if we wished to. It would probably be very interesting to do it for a bunch of them, the most potentially interesting and influential people of the time. But would we bother bringing, say, 100 000 people back? Those people wouldn't be able to function really well in our society and even the best educated of them would have vastly outdated knowledge about practically anything.
Then there's the fact that if humanity survives long enough, it's more likely to resemble the Federation from Star Trek than corporate America where healthcare is only available to the rich.
Citation, please.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natron
-- and basically creating a simulacrum of a biological being. This is not to suggest that our present fascination with freezing is any less crude and unworkable.
> After thousands of years we are still unable to resurrect them and arguably we wouldn't even if we could.
That's because the mummies aren't remotely the people they once were, any more than a wax sculpture of Prince is Prince -- or the artist once known as Prince, if that's still going on.
But I would certainly like to reanimate some of those ancient figures, ask a few questions about ancient Egypt. Doesn't that sound interesting?
The thing that always disappoints me whenever I read about cryogenic freezing is that people seem to have to already be dead before anyone is allowed to freeze them.
From the article:
>Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility... As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals... Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit.
I always thought that the great selling point of cryo was that if you have some incurable-by-today's-science condition and you are shortly about to die, then you could be frozen instead, and then unfrozen and promptly cured many years later once someone has figured out a reliable treatment.
Isn't waiting until you are already clinically dead before having yourself frozen missing the point?
It's still a shame we have to wait though, because being vitrified while still legally alive would majorly reduce the chances of brain damage due to lack of oxygen (ischemia).
That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have any reliable cites for that?
http://www.livescience.com/5060-science-refrigerated-baby-mi...
Quote: "'There have been a number of well-documented case histories of adults and children who drowned in very cold water, even trapped under ice for hours, and were successfully revived many hours later,' Alistair Jan Gunn, a professor of physiology and pediatrics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told LiveScience. 'Of course, this is used routinely in modern cardiac bypass.'"
It might happen in the future in a decent state/country with good assisted suicide laws (if there was a Swiss cryonics organisation, they would probably be able to offer it). Perhaps in the US it will eventually become possible in Oregon/Washington (edit: also Montana, Vermont, and New Mexico), which allow assisted suicide. Alcor are based in Arizona, so they could have patients get themselves preserved in New Mexico, then be driven to Alcor.
Instead of going back-and-forth in comments, I think it would be much more productive to link to some FAQs or well-written articles from both sides. The current level of discussion is unworthy of us.
I'm not usually one to be a buzzkill, but I should point out that Hacker News is largely filled with startup coders and small business owners, not trained academics - you can't set your standards too high for rational debate, especially considering the level of religious wars coders start over trivialities like text editor choice, operating system or programming languages (check out any thread that mentions PHP for a great example of group-think flaming).
I think many folk who do this are showing a level of extreme bloody mindedness combined with a completely ridiculous gambling streak, that I do sort of respect.
I mean, even if it does work, or even worse, half works, you have no fucking clue what madness awaits. The chances of ending up in some Cold Lazarus lab experiment seem to be not completely discountable, seeing that is nearly what you are paying for.
Many Alcor patients are middle class rather than rich.
It suffers from the same problem too. Just as the god of Christianity is in competition with the god of Random-Other-Religion, both of these are in competition with cryogenics. Maybe freezing your head will stop you going to heaven, so now you've got a low-probability infinite cost to set against your low-probability infinite prize.
"In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows." -Superfreakonomics
If humanity survives long enough for revival to be possible, it will have already solved overpopulation problems, as otherwise it would have become extinct in the not-too-distant future.
Sounds like a fairly standard preservation; definitely not days in between. As it is, even if a field perfusion is not performed, cardiopulmonary support plus gradual cooling still massively reduce any chance of brain damage.
A standby is when they wait at your deathbed with a doctor, then get to work as soon as you are pronounced dead, including using a machine to perform cardiopulmonary support to circulate oxygen to the brain while cooling. They then start perfusion (replacement of blood with cryoprotectant), normally in the field.
Cryonics as assisted suicide would be preferable as an option, but a standby is significantly better than nothing. As it is, several US states have legalised assisted suicide, so it could potentially become an option in those states, but I guess nobody wants the mess of the legal battle to set a precedent. If there was a Swiss cryonics company, it would probably be available as assisted suicide today.
See also my other comment on assisted suicide: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8241828
Maybe instead of having your body frozen in the off chance that you can wake up 100 years old and with no friends, family, or prospects, you should give that money to a charity who will use it to save real lives that are being ended for ridiculous reasons like having no access to clean water or being attacked by malaria-carrying mosquitoes that can be deterred with a $5 net.
[edit] just so you know, I upvoted your comment to counter a downvote from someone else. You make a strong case, regardless of the fact that it didn't address my original point.
People (even not-so-rich people) spend upwards of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars just to prolong their own life a couple months. How is the cost of that expense more justifiable than even a small probability of being revived in the future and becoming healthy and possibly immortal?
In the end, it's a judgment call as to what you do with your money. Unfortunately, fear of mortality and death is a very strong motivator for a lot of people, so we don't necessarily spend money related to death in a particularly optimal way. It's the height of arrogance to suggest that your way is better, or, even if it is objectively better, to impose your views on someone else's use of their money.
Also, to suggest I'm imposing my view on other people is asinine; this is a forum for voicing opinions, and I'm voicing mine. I understand that when I'm on my death bed I might well make the same decision to preserve my body - human beings are hypocrites by nature and I'm certainly no exception. However, if you're suggesting that raising an opinion/suggestion on the subject that is different to yours is arrogance then I'd take a moment to consider the idea that it might be _you_ that is being arrogant; reread my post and maybe you'll realise that my tone was more along the lines of highlighting an alternative use for this money, and with much more viable results in objective terms. If cryonics was known (or even generally considered) to be viable then I would likely hold a different opinion.
[1] As it is, the vast majority of people pay via life insurance rather than directly, both because it's far cheaper, and because there are risks in paying directly as the money could get caught up in a legal battle, while the patent's brain is rotting all the while.
Neuropreservation also allows a better preservation in many cases as newer preservation methods and technologies are often only applied to neuropatients first, before becoming available for whole body patients later.
I'm personally interested in neuropreservation. The only thing I have to lose in my body is my tattoos (which I would be sad to lose, but it would be worth it to live again and be young again), and which I would reproduce on my new body anyway.
If you say "people shouldn't spend their money on things they want to because it could be spent on other people", I seriously hope you don't have a house, nice car, food over basic subsistence level, etc. at the risk of you coming off as a massive hypocrite.
The key points in my argument are that:
a. cryopreservation is a very expensive way to maybe save the life of one person who has already lived a full life (I don't direct my criticism at those who want to be cryopreserved due to a fatal illness at a younger age)
b. charity is an effective way to use the same amount of money to save many lives, often the lives of people would have died at a very young age and with a great deal of suffering
Even if I could force you to change your mind, I wouldn't, but I believe that the charitable option should be seriously considered by anyone looking at cryonics.
What's to say that Alcor members don't donate to charity already?
People will always die. People will always give to charity. One person doesn't affect that.
Saying cryonics is bad because of that is the equivalent of saying that if someone was badly injured in (for example) a car crash in America, and received a big insurance payout to cover the hundreds of grand in hospital bills, they should donate it to charity and die instead.
Your second argument doesn't make sense - if no one individual could make a difference then by summation, no difference could be made by any number of individuals. You can't seriously argue that a donation of e.g. $100,000 to a life-saving charity makes no difference to anyone.
Thirdly, let me clarify that I never claimed cryonics is bad, and I do not hold that opinion. I would encourage research into cryonics in the same way that I would encourage research into cancer drugs or AIDS mitigation. However, I contend that under my personal ethical position, it would be more ethical to save many young lives than to invest in a small probability of saving one old life. Abstracting away from the specific case of cryonics, I suppose I would generally state that I believe (at this early state in life extension research) that death of/at old age is inevitable. By accepting this, instead of trying to deny it using technology that is incredibly immature and does not yet have any proof of effectiveness, one frees up one's financial resources to take care of family and friends, and if one is a wealthy individual, to attempt to save the lives of others.
It also doesn't make such a massive, terrible, catastrophic difference if it isn't made as money is fungible.
I'm not actually sure on any particular foibles of life insurance payments to charity, but if it was easy/doable, it seems like something that many more altruistic people would do.
You could make the same argument for any number of things, probably things you even do. Let's play with your sentence a bit:
"The thing I find most depressing about televisions is that the trillions of dollars collectively spend on hardware and programming would actually save millions of lives."
You can apply that to pretty much anything people do in first world countries that isn't available to people in the third world. Please get off your high horse and don't get bent out of shape when people do something that's in their own interest.
Oh, wait.
http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot
Of course, they perform research too, but the core of their existence is the preservation of their patients.
Interesting. As it is, I would seriously doubt they don't have contingency plans for moving, which would likely be enacted pre-emptively if the area became unstable.