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Comment by annnnd | Hacker News Reader

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!

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.

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.

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).

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/

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.

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.

> 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".

Plus what companies from 50 years ago are still 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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