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Comment by kvee | Hacker News Reader

I'm an Alcor member, and I don't really get how it's not a bigger operation yet. This place has people like Hal Finney and Ray Kurzweil as members and is the preeminent option in the field, but it feels like a tiny mom and pop shop. Seems to me like it should be funded with billions, and eventually I'd like to help make it much bigger.

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.

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“Now, I can think of three really good reasons why you shouldn’t do something like that, George.”

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.

Alcor is a non-profit, and they're not implying anything other than the truth, which is that you're unlikely to get unfrozen, but it'd be cool if somehow you could be and maybe one day someone will figure it out.

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.

> […] maybe one day someone will figure it out.

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.

>So it’s like Pascal’s wager, except it is a real wager which costs money.

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?").

>Alcor is a non-profit

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.

So, like every other charity in the world?

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.

> So, like every other charity in the world?

Yes, the incentives in this case are the same.

Making data "utterly corrupt and worthless" is actually really hard, even if you're deliberately trying to erase it. That's why we invented secure disk erase programs (eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method), because people keep inventing better ways to get back 'deleted' data you might not have wanted them to see.

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.

http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html

Just a side note: the Gutmann algorithms have nothing to do with defeating better methods of recovering data.

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.

Firstly, the Gutmann method is seriously outdated. Nowadays, for modern SAS/SATA drives, a normal overwrite of the data is perfectly sufficient for all cases – if I recall correctly, nobody has been able to restore any data thusly overwritten. (This is for magnetic drives. For SSD drives, “overwriting” does not actually overwrite, so anything and everything might be still accessible.)

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.

1. Nobody has been frozen since the 80s. The process is vitrification, which is designed to mitigate most of the damage and cracking that occurs. Vitrified animal organs (a rabbit's, iirc) have been successfully restored and implanted into an animal which stayed healthy. The main danger is in ischemia if you are not given cardiopulmonary support during the cool down process, which might cause brain damage.

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.

1. You ignored my point to instead attack my word choice. I actually took that word (“frozen”) from the article title. But we could call it “mummification” for all I care – it does not alter any point I was making.

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.

> and I don't really get how it's not a bigger operation yet.

Overpriced insurance policy based on pseudoscience implemented by a shady industry. What is not to like.

Not sure what you mean. It's not pseudoscience or shady. Still, that's the problem! It's probably physically possible, but we're not making much scientific progress towards making it happen.

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

> It's probably physically possible

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.

I'm not sure how you can call it "pseudoscience," unless they're making false guarantees about current technology, or if it can be proven that current freezing doesn't prevent information-theoretical death.

> I'm not sure how you can call it "pseudoscience," unless they're making false guarantees about current technology ...

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?

True. My point is that it's not pseudoscience unless they're claiming that an unfreezing process already exists (that's just lying), or if they're claiming an unfreezing process existing in the future is possible and you can show that it's not possible.

it's an industry that's based on a bet that the damage caused by current day cryogenics will be repairable in the future, compounded with the bet that the problem which instantiated the use of cryogenics for the individual in the first place will have also been solved.

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.

Actually, it's using a proven process. A rabbit kidney has already been vitrified, then restored and implanted into another that remained healthy.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/

Every DBA knows that there is no point in doing backup if you can't do the restore. Have they revived anyone yet?

Even more to the point, why would they revive you? You already paid them.

> 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!

And what if your brain can still feel stuff and you're in a state of extreme discomfort for the next 100 years and since you're frozen you can't make it stop.

That would be very creepy indeed. But I guess at frozen temperatures, your brain activity would be nothing like at 20C, so I'm not sure how large is that risk - people who have been found frozen in avalanches usually (if I remember correctly) did not report they an horrible experience of being frozen when they came back to life.

I am not saying it is the case, but awareness does not imply memorization (which, if you think about it, is terrifying). See, for example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683150/

The brain has no electrical activity, so physically impossible (alternatively, if it's possible in a cryonics patient, it would happen in a normal corpse too, in which case people should stop burning/burying them).

If you go for neuropreservation, you get a new body (although it possibly means revival later than whole body patient preserved at the same time). As most Alcor patients will die while very old as dying young is generally due to accident or disease (Alcor do have some younger patients, who mostly had terminal illnesses, cancer, or conditions such as AIDS, but also one suicide and one murder victim), it makes sense. It's a common idea to go for whole body while still young, then switch to neuropreservation as you get old where your body would be useless/detrimental if preserved. This also negates the problem of inflation meaning you suddenly aren't insured for enough money for a whole-body preservation too.

Plus what companies from 50 years ago are still around?

No matter what happens, we can rest assured that IBM will be around.

It's not because companies disappear that assets do. Buildings, machineries, lands, are passed on to new owners. Now I'm not sure in which category of assets "frozen dead body" falls into, though.

A frozen body is a liability to owners – there is every incentive for them to lose it or otherwise facilitate its loss. There is also no drawback, as there is no one who would notice or complain if they do.

Not sure... if you have a famous frozen person and the technology to unfreeze people ever comes to be, you could make money on "reviving a legend", kickstarter style, to recover the costs involved during the years.

Fine – that frozen body is an asset. But any random frozen body is not.

Not only are they in a contract, but Alcor is only going to be staffed by people committed to advancing the cause of cryonics. They don't have some shady fly by night low bidder maintaining their patients.

If you put one in a storage unit, possibly yes, but not with a dedicated nonprofit staffed by experts in the field.

I am talking about what the incentives are, and you are replying with, essentially, “Surely they wouldn’t do such a thing!”. Maybe not, but that’s not the point. The incentive is what I’m talking about. And the fact is that a head or body and a contract is a straight liability, with nobody (literally!) to complain if they don’t fulfill their part.

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.

Alcor is specifically structured for longevity - their money is invested to provide long term (longer than human life) returns to ensure their operation. As it is, ongoing maintenance is cheap - they receive a delivery of liquid nitrogen every week IIRC, which is used to top up the dewars, but it is weeks to months between required top ups, with no power required.

Seems like quite many companies have actually survived for centuries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Demanding a particular form of proof, and one which might be impossible to get even if we knew for sure that cryonics perfectly preserved the brain, is a logical fallacy. It's the same type of argument creationists make when they demand biologists give them video footage of monkeys evolving into humans. See eg. http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_....

I never did that - they just need to prove that reviving (which is the end goal I suppose) is possible. I really don't care how they prove it, I just suggested a pretty good way (IMHO).

Also, did anyone read Pet Cemetary? Yeah, it would be nice to be revived, but in what condition?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/

tl;dr: A rabbit kidney was vitrified, then revived and successfully implanted into another rabbit which remained healthy.

Because they are a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing the state of life extension via cryonics as their entire goal. They aren't some shady for-profit scheme.

Every DBA knows that in its most basic form, a database is just a big text file.

It's the same with a human's memory/personality. Just bits in a brain.

> 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".

If you don't know how to decompress data, you can't know that your compression is preserving all of the original information. If you backup a system but can't restore from it, you can't know that your backup has enough information to restore from. Same goes for this junk.

Besides the technical discussion in this thread I'd like to question this procedure from an other perspective:

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.

Alcor will undertake the process themselves, and large parts of their operating budget are earmarked for this.

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.

> 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.

nothing about the future is fact.

We already have that 'fridge' in the form of Pyramids of Giza or other ancient tombs. They even have their 'insurance' and incentives as the treasures and golden coins they are buried with. After thousands of years we are still unable to resurrect them and arguably we wouldn't even if we could.

That's not a fair comparison. The mummy creators removed the internal organs of the deceased, replacing them with preservatives like natron --

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?

Mummification is for display, not preservation. The chemical structure of the body is changed, while all the organs (including the brain, which was removed through the nose) are placed in jars.

Cannot upvote enough.

Let's assume they find a way to start waking you up, they will need to experiment for many years getting this process right. The first 100(0?) might wake up and remain in perpetual hell (no sensory input for instance or having some parts of the brain operational and others not) during that experimental time which might take years or might even never end.

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/ .

It is assumed that it will be a last in first out type of process.

Is it? Anything to read up on that? I would have myself frozen if this was my only worry though; I think the problem of having these vats survive even 100 years is unlikely, let alone more if that would be needed. It feels somehow that people are too optimistic about the whole process. Maybe when I have a lot of money to spare and the doctor brings bad news I will do it. I think I have to move to the US for it though?

Patients can be transferred between dewars if necessary. They are also very well designed, of a sturdy steel construction specifically built to last. they are regularly topped up with liquid nitrogen weekly, but can 3 months if not topped up[1].

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.

[1]http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot

Why not just do it like any other medical process, namely extensive animal trials before even considering human? Then why not a trial on a human volunteer who dies in the present day being preserved for a month and then revived, followed by increasing lengths to build confidence and a data base to ensure the process is perfect for the patients?

It's expensive to preserve people near-indefinitely, and they invest their money with that in mind. There are no billions because it doesn't cost that much (~$75,000 for neuropreservation and ~200,000 for whole body). As it is, I think they do very well with their resources - remember that cryonics is still such a small field, and Alcor are the largest company by a significant margin.

Not an Alcor member yet, but will be when I can afford it.

>It's a pretty long, annoying process to become a member, but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die.

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?

You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order. Which is the general plan.

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).

> You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order.

That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have any reliable cites for that?

There are cases where people who were apparently dead for minutes to hours, were then successfully revived. All the cases involved very low temperatures that presumably prevented brain damage.

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.'"

Legal death is arbitrary as it's just a decision by a trained person. People have been revived after 10 minutes or so after 'drowning' in cold water. Even in cases of heart failure, pronouncement of death is when the doctor/nurse feels further efforts to revive would be futile. In the long past, someone who would today be revived in that case might have been pronounced dead earlier; the issue is that resuscitation efforts are stopped immediately after pronouncement of legal death - if they were not, it would be a more common occurrence.

Sadly no, because it would legally be considered killing them. As it is, when you're dying, you get what's called a standby where you have a team waiting by your bedside with a doctor, then they get to work as soon as death is pronounced. Generally, perfusion (replacement of blood with cryoprotectants) can be started in situ within 15 minutes or so, while cardiopulmonary support is provided via a machine from in many cases seconds after legal death. It isn't perfect, but it's the best that can be done in the current legal climate.

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.

How do those numbers make sense? 300k to maintain a body indefinitely? Then pay for the operation to revive the body? I just don't see it. Not to mention there's nothing you can do to make sure that someone 1000 years from now will see the contract through in good faith.

Long term investment. When your timescale is longer than a human life, suddenly that becomes a lot easier to generate money. Remember that the longest term 'normal' investment funds (outside of banks and individual special cases like Nintendo's $10bn in the bank that is estimated to allow it to survive as a loss maker for 38 years) are probably pensions, which are generally a 50-70 year timeframe.

Because there are better things to waste your money on?

but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die.

This appears to assume that your physical body will be enough for you to come back to 'life'.

What else do you think will be necessary?

A soul, if one exists.

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.

Or a better anology. Your brain is (possibly) like ram and once you turn it off the data is whiped. So you'd need some thing like a hard drive to store the data on until the brain is powered up again and can be reloaded.

you forgot some 12 "if"s on your comment.

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