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Comment by reasonattlm | Hacker News Reader

The biggest thing? Since arguably sometime in the 1930s the technological capacity has existed to store at least the brains of dead individuals at liquid nitrogen temperatures indefinitely, waiting on a future that can restore them. In a different, better world, the funerary industry was swept aside by mass cryopreservation, and the vaults of those who would one day live again would be now be vast. The biggest thing we get wrong is that we continue to equate clinical death to oblivion, rather than it being only the second worst thing that can happen to you, and acting accordingly.

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If anybody wonders why this is currently downvoted it might be because it shows a huge lack of understanding of the real issues here. Let me mention a couple:

Who decides people living now are more worthy of living than future generations?

Who decides who will live forever?

There's not necessarily a "who is more worthy of living" judgment here. Future generations are free to turn off the cooling mechanisms which suspend the bodies or heads of the dying, if they deem it important to have the resources now. In the meantime, it doesn't take that many resources to suspend a head; and the burden would become less if suspension became common enough practice that the "extremely expensive, will either fail or make the rest of your life a hell" procedures were phased out and those resources freed up.

The problem I have with your sentences is that they prove too much. They can easily be read, for instance, as advocating that it might be worth abandoning medical science.

Surely a future generation which has the means to resuscitate cryogenically-preserved individuals, has the capability to decide whether to do it or not? "Who decides" - surely the generation of would-be resuscitators decides, how can it be otherwise? As to whether "people living now are more worthy of living than future generations" - why does it have to be an either-or proposition? I think you may be assuming that overpopulation is a permanent problem, but I think that this is far from certain in the very-long-term...

1. Every life is precious, everything that thinks and knows itself and doesn’t want to die.

2. Everyone we can save.

> Who decides people living now are more worthy of living than future generations?

That's not an either-or, it's a false dichotomy.

> Who decides who will live forever?

Once we have the technology, who is going to try murdering people by trying to make them not live forever?

The very obvious answer for "who should live forever" is everyone.

That's literally billions of brains for all the people that have died since that time. Who foots the cost for an indefinite time until technology becomes available to rectify the situation? And that's assuming technology does become available. There's no guarantee that freezing doesn't cause some irreversible problem with other aspects of the brain, so even if we can do something like this in the future, it doesn't mean we are preserving these brains correctly now.

Also, what about people that don't want to come back? Those that are content with their lot, or have religious beliefs that something like this would be in violation of? Should we go against people's beliefs because we think it's better for them?

If not, this seems like a personal decision for each person, and a complaint such as yours seems to be missing the forest for the trees.

>>Who foots the cost for an indefinite time until technology becomes available to rectify the situation?

Do you have any idea what the costs are, and how they compare to the rent-cost of the land occupied by cemeteries? I'm assuming these frozen heads could be stored with less pomp and decorum than dead bodies are today, so could be housed in multistory buildings.

>>Also, what about people that don't want to come back?

Couldn't people decide beforehand whether their brains are cryogenically preserved in the event of clinical death?

>>If not, this seems like a personal decision for each person, and a complaint such as yours seems to be missing the forest for the trees.

I don't think the parent comment is suggesting making this mandatory or done without explicit consent. Only that we would have benefited from having a cultural shift which makes this the primary response to death.

> Do you have any idea what the costs are, and how they compare to the rent-cost of the land occupied by cemeteries?

How about the one time fee for cremation?

> I don't think the parent comment is suggesting making this mandatory or done without explicit consent.

I admit that I was interpreting it along those lines originally. I'm not sure if that was my mistake based on local context or if it was edited afterwards to clarify their intended point.

I do still believe it's a bit naive to think we can assume the ability to rectify the problem of a frozen brain in a jar within the semi-near future, or even that we are preserving them correctly, but I'm all for giving people the choice as long as we ruthlessly weed out those who present their services as scientifically sound when they aren't (if they present it as mumbo jumbo, then whatever).

>Do you have any idea what the costs are

I've been pondering that and I don't think it would be much if you did a cheap and cheerful version. The cryonics institute charge about $30k/person for indefinite storage for whole body and only do about 4 a year. Chop the heads off and put them in a large refrigerated building and you could probably get it to a fraction of that. I figure you could get about 5 million in a WalMart sized building.

In the US lifetime healthcare costs were $316k in 2004. So now maybe 400k. Why spend 400k to die miserably when you could maybe spend 396k on that and 4k putting your head in the freezer and maybe beating the whole death thing for millions of years? Instead of the whole sad funeral thing it could be a more upbeat see you in the 22nd century party.

I'm assuming how this would play out is that post singularity there would be lots of resources for brain scanning and uploading and we'd probably have a largely virtual reality existence but with the ability to use robot bodies when wanted. But who knows...

While that's a (tenuous) possibility, it flies directly in the face of the main argument of the article: that people, doctors included, need to fully come to terms with death, not shy away from it. It could be possible to do both, to calmly face your own death and also preserve your brain just on the off chance, but it tends to have more of a secular afterlife appeal to my eyes.

> it flies directly in the face of the main argument of the article: that people, doctors included, need to fully come to terms with death, not shy away from it.

I think flying directly in the face of that argument was the point. There's a third alternative: don't shy away from it, don't "come to terms" with it, fight it with every fiber of your being.

How do you know you aren't already just a frozen brain in a liquid N2 canister, whose scan was uploaded to a simulation server with severely restricted outside communication?

Just a word of caution, however: if things around you seem to be reverting to an earlier era, get some Ubik, quick.

The technology exists to feed and house everyone too, which seems like a more pressing goal.

A hundred and fifty thousand people die every day. We have the resources to solve multiple problems at once.

Yes, but not the political will. Death in and of itself doesn't bother me since it's a natural process, albeit a sad one. I've had ample opportunity to consider my own mortality, having had quite a few brushes with death.

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