Cryonics As A Large Scale Enterprise | Hacker News Reader

Cryonics As A Large Scale Enterprise

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15 pointslsparrish13 comments

First, let's get the freezing thing out of the way. Modern cryonics doesn't freeze, it vitrifies. Very important difference. The difference between freezing and vitrification is clearly explained for the layperson in the Alcor FAQ:

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/vitrification.html http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/index.html

Now here are a bunch of economics and cryonics thoughts:

http://fightaging.org/archives/2009/06/cryonics-and-economic...

"I note that the cryonics community, rather like the diverse libertarian community, possesses a sizeable minority with a great (and I think misplaced) belief in the power of contracts - of words on paper. You see it in the constitutionalists in the US or the fellows looking for loopholes in tax laws that will enable them to escape the IRS entirely. Words on paper, however, have only as much weight as there are economic incentives aligned with them."

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/01/you-cant-take-it-...

"The trouble with property left undefended, as the ancient Egyptians and every other culture that buried wealth with the dead has handily demonstrated, is that no-one else's interests are aligned with yours."

http://fightaging.org/archives/2009/04/pastinate-everyone.ph...

"You might recall the recently voiced suggestion that it's something of an accident of history that the cryonics movement is the cryonics movement versus the plastination movement. Plastination is plausibly just as good a way of preserving the fine structure of the brain into a future where a patient can be restored to life as low-temperature storage."

Let us make the (imho unjustified) assumptions that (a) folks in the future will have the technology to unfreeze and revive cryogenically frozen bodies and that (b) present-day cryogenically frozen bodies will last that long without getting unfrozen due to... whatever. Oh, and (c) that a revived cryogenically frozen person is actually the "same person" that went into the deep freeze, ie that it will be "me" conscious in the future rather than a disconnected consciousness who shares my memories.

Anyway, isn't it likely that the larger the cryogenic facilities the less likely they are to unfreeze you? If we had the opportunity to bring back a dozen neanderthals we probably would, because that would be fascinating.

But if we had the opportunity to bring back a hundred million neanderthals, and then had to figure out what to do with them (I'm thinking a series of District 9 style shantytowns would probably be the most likely scenario) we'd probably think it was kinder to leave them dead.

So if I were planning to freeze myself I'd be trying to discourage too many other folks from doing so. On the other hand, I'd also want to have a steady stream of a small number of people doing it well into the future, to keep the cryogenics companies active and solvent.

The revival idea is, at its core, this: cryonics providers are communities as much as business entities. They are trying to establish (a) technology for ever better preservation, (b) a community that will continue across generations (success so far), and (c) the means of restoration - in more or less that order of priority. Though some groups are more focused on (b) than (a).

The revival will be accomplished by the community once it is possible, not some third party, because this is just as much the established goal of the cryonics community as preserving people in the first place.

It will happen once it's possible because that's their current goal?

I can imagine the (already small) amount of interest in cryonics would greatly diminish in the future if aging is ever cured (and I think curing aging will be easier than bringing back the dead). Once my own survival is assured, why should I give a damn about the "cryonics community" and a bunch of frozen heads?

Are you seriously like that?

ETA: Shouldn't it be obvious that severed heads are human in a circumstance where they can be restored to life?

People are seriously like that, yes.

Maybe people will get revived if and when the technology exists to do so, maybe they won't. It would be a bad idea to rely purely on the kindness of people whose culture may have very little in common with our own, though.

Heck, if I get frozen and woken up in the future I'll give you two to one odds that I'm either a zoo exhibit or a slave.

You are giving two to one odds on humanity completely losing their moral compass then.

If that's the case, something is seriously wrong and needs to be fixed.

Actually I'm not, I just think that most of the scenarios where someone does wake me up are scenarios in which they don't have my best interests at heart.

Far more likely they never wake me up, either because (a) the technology never gets developed or (b) the technology gets developed but my body is too far gone to be revived or (c) the technology gets developed and my body could be revived but nobody ever chooses to do so, for whatever reason.

Everybody acknowledges the possibilities (a) and (b), but I do want to bring attention to possibilities (c) and "slave", since I think too many people have too much faith that the people of the far future will consider reviving the frozen heads of long-dead cryonics geeks to be a good use of their presumably-still-not-infinite resources.

I'm confused. Scenario (c) sounds inherently dependent on humanity losing its moral compass. So it sounds like your assessment of the risk of such an event occurring is much higher than two to one.

What I would expect is that once given an assurance of survival for a longer period of time, people would become more sensitive to death and thus feel more moral duty to bring cryonauts back and treat them with dignity.

If nothing else, cryonicists certainly have motive to build a community which has these sorts of values.

Do a consistency check. Neanderthals might lack modern human cognition, but we lack the ability to increase their cognitive abilities for much the same reasons we can't reanimate a severed head. Further, if we did bring them back there would be educational opportunities available. Also, life in a shanty town is not worse than death; only extreme suffering is worse than death.

"life in a shanty town is not worse than death"

Honest question: how do you know?

One clue is the large percentage of people that live there instead of opting for suicide. The other clue is the fact that it is a situation they can, at least potentially, get out of.

I'm not saying it is a pleasant situation. It sounds miserable to me. But people still tend to have friendships, laughter, enough food to survive on (if barely). The human psyche is more adaptable than it is frequently given credit for being. Personally, I'd rather wake up and have to adapt to a shanty town for a few hundred years and then die, than simply die. Better yet would be to escape and live for thousands of years as part of an enlightened civilization that does not make their fellow humans live like pigs.

The assumption that people brought out of cryostasis would be immediately herded into shanty towns strikes me as ridiculous to begin with, i.e. inconsistent with a society being able to revive me. It assumes resource scarcity. To get resource scarcity, you either need technological stagnation or high birthrates. Birthrates are dropping, technology is not. And if technology does, I won't be brought out of cryostasis to begin with.

As far as birthrates go, that is one reason I am so much in favor of everyone (as opposed to a tiny group of geeks) getting cryopreserved. Cryonics is a belief system that lowers conception rates, because a person can (in theory) always have their children later. Resource consumption while in the fridge is minimal -- extremely minimal when done in large quantities. Suspended animation (the no-damage kind) is a necessary prerequisite for revival of cryonauts, and it provides an excellent safety valve for overpopulation (even assuming (!) that space travel is never made economical). Any time populations grow too dense, if you don't have the money to live comfortably you can rent out your stuff and go into suspension for a few decades or until the job market improves. All your cash builds interest in the meantime, and there's laws to protect you because the first few people who get swindled during stasis got mad.

It's interesting to imagine what this will do to the term "human resources". You can always recruit someone fresh off their last job. Their specific skills (like a specific programming language) might be obsolete, but general skills (programming in general) would still be fresh. This would help prevent useful aspects of older paradigms from getting forgotten -- you'd have live experts preserving the knowledge rather than just what happened to get recorded in books.

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