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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Let us know when someone successfully revives a frozen rodent. Until then this stuff is just idle speculation, on par with worrying about the "fallout" from an alien invasion.

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If, in 20 years, they discover how to revive a frozen rodent, it would still be worth it to freeze it today.

Why? I doubt we'll have a shortage of lab animals in 20 years.

I mean the argument for cryo basically goes "if, in 60 years, we discover how to revive frozen people, we'll probably wish we could go back and tell the people of 2016 to start freezing everybody who's dying right away. So since the only ways to avoid this outcome are total stagnation and mass extinctions that kill us _anyways_, we should probably allocate some money to doing that."

Money is finite. Given the available evidence, I'd rather spend it on universal health-care for the poor than on scientifically unsupported medical treatments. Besides which, the largest boosts to life-expectancy have tended to come from public health interventions that cross-cut the age spectrum rather than end-of-life desperation measures anyway.

We'd all like to act as if each human life had infinite value, but unfortunately, we don't have infinite resources to act with.

Eh, if you factor in economy of scale cryonics can arguably be competetive with end-of-life desperation measures or actually save money.

Possibly, but my point was that the actually-effective measures come decades before end-of-life.

No one frozen has been revived yet, but animals cooled have been and the procedure is being tested on human trauma victims in hospitals now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Res...

There's not much you can do today about future alien invasions. You can however freeze today.

I could also pray to Zeus to grant me eternal life. It would be cheaper, and have exactly the same probability of success.

We differ on the probabilities. If you think of the brain as a biological computer then saying freezing is hopeless is a bit like saying keeping the hard drive from a broken computer is hopeless because you have zero chance of ever getting the data off.

I think most "believers" in cryopreservation would agree that it's a long shot. Even if restoration is theoretically possible, a lot of things need to line up for it to actually happen for an individual. But as you say, there's a significant difference between unlikely and impossible (which I'm going to assume is what was meant by praying to Zeus). The hard drive probably has rather better chances than the frozen brain though.

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