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Comment by tene | Hacker News Reader

Cryonics is pretty unlikely to succeed! I'm signed up for cryonics through Alcor, and I am not confident at all that there's much chance that I'll be revived post-vitrification. I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation. I see it as a low-percentage last-chance life support. It's early and underdeveloped and flawed in many ways, but it's still the best (only) game in town for when all other medical technology has failed.

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This is precisely what I mean when I talk about hope. That value is real, and I don't discount it the way most cryonics non-supporters seem to.

>Cryonics is pretty unlikely to succeed!

There seems a surprising amount of techno pessimism here. Just to take the other side I think it's very likely to succeed at least to some extent. If you just assume computing and scanning keep improving a similar amount per year to what they have been then we'll have the tech to scan and simulate for example in two or three decades.

>I do it because there's an infinitely greater chance of life after vitrification than there is of life after burial, or life after cremation.

Except that there are other things you could do with the money, some of which could potentially even give you a much greater chance of not vitrifying in the first place.

Like, living long enough to benefit from other life-extension procedures? I'm not sure how a few hundred dollars a years are going to hasten those processes. (I'm assuming that losing this money wouldn't prevent someone to live a healthy life in the first place.)

Now if you would divert all cryonics resources towards existential risk mitigations, AI or rejuvenation research, that would be a different story. But pretty soon we'd have to discuss how other resources are allocated right now, and next thing we know, we're talking politics.

If you ask me, the world can probably finance cryonics for everyone and AI research and anti-ageing research and existential risk mitigation and many other things I didn't think of, while preserving and improving our standards of living at the same time. The (huge) problem is getting our act together.

>Now if you would divert all cryonics resources towards existential risk mitigations, AI or rejuvenation research, that would be a different story. But pretty soon we'd have to discuss how other resources are allocated right now, and next thing we know, we're talking politics.

You say "talking politics" like it's a bad thing!

>If you ask me, the world can probably finance cryonics for everyone and AI research and anti-ageing research and existential risk mitigation and many other things I didn't think of, while preserving and improving our standards of living at the same time. The (huge) problem is getting our act together.

Well yes.

> You say "talking politics" like it's a bad thing!

That was unintended. But it is difficult: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer

It's a lot less difficult when you're allowing for the fact that politics will be political: that it is about finding compromises and combinations, and sometimes just about the contest, between competing worldviews, interests, and values.

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