What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams' head was abused at the facility. Johnson claims a technician took baseball-like swings at Williams' frozen head with a monkey wrench.
What?
Up in Nederland CO, there is the body of Bredo Morstoel. Most years the town holds the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival to celebrate his cryopreservation, complete with ice cream, coffin races, and frozen salmon tossing. Yes really.
I've been on the tour of his cryonics 'facility'. It is a Tuff Shed on the side of a mountain next to a chemical toilet and a home-made above ground nuclear bunker (with sliding glass doors). The Morstoel family was ... eccentric. During the 'champagne' tour, you are allowed to help restock Bredo Morstoel's tomb with dry ice and see his coffin. The coffin is in very rough shape and you can easily see his corpse.
He is very dead and is never coming back.
He looks just like Otzi the Ice Man. There is a lot of mildew in the corners of his styrofoam and plywood cryo-chamber-thing. He is not fully attached together anymore. His caretakers are, honestly, paranoid occult isolated libertarians.
Bredo Morstoel's dream isn't ever going to come true. He is dead and rotten now.
I suspect in hundreds or thousands of years we'll look back at age-related death culturally the same way we look at infant mortality during the medieval ages: commonly accepted as part of life at the time, but unnecessary and completely solvable in retrospective.
I think fear is the wrong word per-say. If it's something I can't change, that's fine. But if there's an avenue to change it, even if unlikely, why not try?
Faced with their own mortality, a bunch of aging billionaires and multimillionaires tend to pour money into longevity research. I'd be very upset if governments increased spending on fighting senescence today, instead of lower-hanging fruit .
I suppose there are others but like you I don't understand why there isn't more focus and media attention on the root causes of aging, the ultimate killer.
Most of it is on fruit flies and mice then takes a life time to test on humans!
What we do know is that being fit and exercising with some semblance of healthy eating helps people live a lot longer. But no one wants to do it.
Death is good on so many levels - equalizer that removes most horrible tyrants like Stalin who would easily burn whole world just to be immortal and stay on top. If you are a normal decent person you can't even comprehend mindset of such sociopaths and their eternal greed. Don't think there are few people like that in a generation, rather few millions, just with fewer options.
Death also makes whole nations eventually forget wrongs on the past, otherwise we would still be hating mongols and huns and romans and swedes and british and slavers and germans as nazis etc. If for nothing else, just to remove threat of semi-eternal planetary dictator death is great.
My grandparents from my dads side both died few months ago aged 94 and 95. They saw all their friends, neighbors and colleagues die decades ago, and they were witnessing same starting to happen to kids of those close people. They were both depressed from this, gradual loss of everything that has any long term meaning plus decline of everything health-related. It sucks to be the last living guy from say group of friends, you think you would find tons of solace in the fact you are still alive but thats not how reality on the ground looks like. People just wait for death to come and many prefer it comes soon.
When something is very painful and inescapable you can: Fight it, run away from it (not talk about it, ignore it, pretend it's not there or won't happen, mentally distract away from it with constant stimulation), freeze (dissociate, numbness, ie shut down emotions, be stoic, feel nothing or little) or fawn (appease, please, embrace the pain in order to feel a sense of control over it, believe it's good, you want it or is positive in some way, thereby releasing yourself from the torment of powerlessness+pain).
Is that enough? Can I go now? Isn't that enough? I still have possibly 3-4 decades of life left to average life expectancy, and for what - to grind through more experiences? Even though I've already had vastly more than most humans who ever lived? I have no great purpose to achieve, there's nothing I can do which millions of others can't do. The main reason to go on living is because dying would hurt others unnecessarily. Brute forcing through everything-there-is-to-experience is not an enticing vision for the future at all, it's a grind.
> "but if it wasn't for some limit forced upon me, if it was really my choice, then there's a lot more I'd like to do."
It seems common that people who become rich enough to do anything end up depressed doing nothing. Taking the forcing function out seems to make people miserable rather than happy. Even people who said beforehand that they had lots they'd like to do often seem to lose motivation to actually do any of it.
[1] there's a phrase.
Speak for yourself, but please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective. (I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to.)
Personally, I've always had the itch to recreate as much of the computing stack I rely on as possible. I love the idea of running my own text editor in my own shell, written in my own programming language, compiled with my own compiler, running on my own operating system. Not because I think I would be pushing the state of the art forward or that it would be commercially viable, but just for kicks. The joy of truly understanding.
I think this is not a completely uncommon feeling, which is why a lot of programmers could look at Terry Davis and say "okay, aside from the obvious mental illness, the racism and the antisemitism, there is something there." He spent years building something with little value to anybody beyond himself. Zach and Tarn Adams spending twenty years on Dwarf Fortress also comes to mind, to the extent they are doing it for themselves. These projects require huge sacrifices on the part of their creators. The opportunity costs incurred shape their lives (e.g. the Dwarf Fortress decisions currently being made based on health insurance coverage). I can't imagine inflicting the programmer monk lifestyle that would come along with such long term non-commercial work on my young kids when the end state is just "Yeah, it's useless but I got a kick out of doing it."
Being honest, it's also hard to imagine that once my kids move out and I can pick a more austere lifestyle just for myself, I'll look at the remaining ~20 years of my life and say, "I think I will devote the rest of my life to this one single 'that would be kinda neat' drive."
If I had, say, 100, 200, 500 more good years where I could just subsist and pursue passion projects? I'd love to spend 10-20 years going down the "recreate all your software from scratch" rabbit hole.
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A thought on the "society needs death" idea: if my continued existence pursuing obscure hobbies without economic value is a drain on society, maybe the fix isn't that I must die at some arbitrary age fixed by evolution, maybe the fix is just a better way to account for the costs and benefits of our actions. Don't say nobody can spend 10,000 years jetsetting from tourist spot to tourist spot, just require them to offset it through their other actions so that on balance they've made a positive contribution.
This isn’t absolute. Of course with an infinite life some of these restrictions go away, but unless we get rid of the meat minds I think we’ll have some built-in limitations that are core to who we are as humans. I honestly think I learn more than most of my peers because I keep trying to, but I do find myself getting less interested in the latest fad. Some amazing people can learn entirely new life journeys, Carmack or SamA, say. But look at most people you know. Most are going to keep plugging away getting crankier and crankier. If those people hold power and grow their wealth indefinitely, I think that’s a net negative.
Max Plank said, paraphrased: Science progresses one funeral at a time.
We make way for the youth to have their go, with our influence reducing over time.
This all ends when AI arrives anyway. Change has to outpace us. Someone or something will get your wish of indefinite life, and we’ll find out how these patterns change.
Currently our culture/civilisation can be expected with my life. We won't adapt as you can see by us not adapting even now for mitigation on a societal level at all.
But yes, death of old age is the sorrow of our days!
There are a couple of things that make death bearable. Any longevity treatment should placate the first and we should aim to compensate the second with plenty of change in our lives.
First is physical ailments. Even a healthy person will accumulate aches, and those will slowly erode they will to live. Several of my grandparents (and some that were not mine) have expressed that they were waiting to be taken, and I'd wager that would be a part.
Second is the mental fatigue. Not only your mental state is akin to your physical one, so you might be mentally exhausted, but also you begin to get bored with most media. It's hard to find a story that hasn't been told before, music that you find original and good, few dishes that you still dare to discover, ... .
Apart from the personal point of view there's also the general one. There two more problem arise.
Sustainability, as the planet can support what it can. The society and the way resources are managed will have to change a lot if people live longer. But don't worry because...
Power. You'd go from families holding power to individuals. No longer the young master will spend all the money and none will be left, because their parents will have control over that. Situation could become even more oppressive with them withholding the longevity treatments, giving some to their employees and none to the general public.
So while I agree with your sentiment, which is also beautifully expressed in HPNOR, I'd say that there's a lot of transformations to be made before it's good.
I'd certainly rather live 100 years with a 20 year old body than 200 years with a 90 year old one.
As parent poster wrote, we like nostalgia, because we clutch to our experiences. We compare them instead of collecting it. On the other side the more we experience something the more we stall or get bored. Even with other people - with increase of lifespan we also increased number of divorces, lost connections etc. That doesn’t make us happier.
One could argue that we, as humans, suffer more today from out deteriorating bodies, than people in medieval time, when it was shorter, and that we suffer more psychologically due to increased influx of information, global conscience and artificial constructs we build every day.
Resources would also be an issue, so even if immortality would be obtainable it’d be either reserved for the richest or would divide people with almost impassable line splitting centuries of servitude and centuries of indulgence.
So to answer your question - why not? Because it’ll bring suffer to many on many levels except for a blessed few and we should focus first on making life great for everyone present before trying to make it infinitely longer.
Joking lightly (as subject is very deep) - it’s somewhat useful skill to know when to get off the stage.
Humans dont progress in terms of biological evolution anymore but instead technologically. The increased lifespan would allow scientist to master multiple fields which would be great for progress.
If we think of some collective 'Gaia Hypothesis' rather than yourself, then keeping you (specifically) around forever is kind of a big commitment, no?
Perhaps you are just not that big of a deal to be worthy of keeping around? And how would you square keeping you around and not Joe? Is it resources based? Than we would be stuck with a collective of eternal wealthy people, which judging by the sample of mortals available today sounds pretty uninteresting.
Yes it's amazing and you're having your turn at it right now! Enjoy it and then pass it forward.
Quick note because you seem like the type of person who’d like to know, it’s “per se”: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per_se
To offer one example democracy would be mostly impossible in a post mortality world.
Also immortal humans would be either fertile or infertile and both cases would create quite weird situations.
If I can conclude with some posturing, it is part of human nature to strive toward better conditions and solve the problems around us. This might be our demise, as both giving up on that nature and following it to its logical end might lead to our end.
But rarely do you get an excellent back and forth as these thought provoking, diametrically opposite but equally compelling comments!
My guess is that we’ll inevitably begin to forget the older, less important stuff even with a completely healthy brain simply due to size constrain.
Sure we will, just not in the traditional natural-selection sense. In many ways humans have "beaten" evolution by finding medical means to allow "unfit" humans to live full lives, and often pass on their genes.
Evolution in the future could be via technical means, either through advancements in medicine, or with cybernetic implants. If humans could ever become intellectually & ethically pure enough to be trusted with genetic engineering ourselves, that's another form of self-made evolution.
> If we had many lives then each one would be less meaningful.
That's a very personal thing, and just an opinion. With changes in lifespan, attitudes change, purpose changes, and people change their outlook. Once upon a time, humans lived much shorter lives, with many/most not making it out of their 30s. Now life expectancy is in the 70s and 80s. And yet we don't look at this doubling of our lifespans and believe that all that extra time robs our lives of meaning. So why should that be the case if we could live to be 500?
> We’d at least need to put age limits on political participation.
Perhaps, but that should be a floating limit that gets adjusted upward with life expectancy. If people regularly lived to be 200, maybe 190-year-olds wouldn't be fit to serve, but a 100-year-old? Why not? And if we managed to push that to 400, those 190-year-olds would start to seem pretty relevant; it would be an injustice to deny them participation in the political system.
Regardless, our idea of society itself would need a huge overhaul even if our lifespans were doubled, let alone made effectively limitless. Political participation would likely be the least of our worries.
Not as a species though. We just have to keep reproducing more of us that are good at staying alive and also reproducing to evolve. You and I theoretically could live forever in the same state, and still, our species would evolve via our offspring and theirs and so on.
If you're actually worried about evolution you'll want to bring back eugenics. Current selective pressures are quite relaxed, leading to an increase in deleterious mutations and rising future healthcare costs.
> I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery
No, you couldn't. You would still be your aged brain, not capable of learning hundreds of professions, and your frail body, not capable of replacing its cells any longer. It requires more than a better way to heat up a corpse to extend life.
I'll leave you with this (paraphrase of a) quote: millions long for immortality, but don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
I'm not really afraid of dying, per se, but as a sci-fi buff, I am deeply sad that there are amazing technological advancements that I will never get to see. Even if the world 300 years from now (assuming humans still exist by then) looks nothing like what any sci-fi author could have envisioned, it still bums me out that I won't get to see what that ends up being like. (And yes, I've considered the possibility that things could be much much worse than now in 300 years, at least for humans.) My only worry about this is that if I were "asleep" for 300 years, that "stranger in a strange land" bit could be very real, and I don't know that humans are well-equipped psychologically to deal with that kind of... dislocation.
I'm not religious, and don't believe in an afterlife, reincarnation, or of anything after we die. So if I want to see the future, in any shape or form, life extension is the only way. I doubt medicine will solve aging and mortality in my lifetime, so even a moonshot like cryonics would likely be my only hope -- even such a remote hope -- of seeing the future. Not sure I'd actually go for it, though, but I get the appeal.
My reasoning is that I simply like living. I think that arguments against longevity often sound deep, but if you rephrase them in more straightforward terms, they'll seem completely devoid of substance.
For example, what does "we're children of our times mean?" That once world changes too much, death is preferable to adapting? I would absolutely love to see how the world will look in a hundred years, and I sincerely hope it will be strange and unique.
Same with "death will simply take us back to where we came from"... I'm sorry, but it doesn't really mean anything. If my loved one dies, that's bad. If my friend gets sick, I hope they recover. Again, I'm sorry but once we strip the poetics, there's really nothing left here.
Basically every religion has some hope of afterlife/reincarnation. So for non religious people this also kinda provides this hope. And if it doesnt work out it is just a expensive funeral. If your dead body is burned, frozen or buried doesnt really matter in this case.
So... would my grandparents feel alienated now? Hell no! My surviving grandma is complaining about constant pain and ailing vision, not that things are too strange. She needs somebody else to call me or show her pictures I send on whatsapp because she can't physically use a phone anymore, not because she can't adapt to it.
There is some truth in what you're saying, but it's due to something we don't like to talk or think about: dementia. Not just Alzheimer, but dozens of ways the aging brain is deteriorating. Fix that, and suddenly you'll find out that old people aren't children anymore, and are perfectly capable of adapting to the new.
I'll see you all at the heat death of the universe.
Therefore, no, we should not search for immortality, Terra will be unliveable for carbon-based organisms in 1 billion years [1], but we should look for mechanisms to preserve a somewhat trivial metabolism of ~50-90 kg of mass for 10,000 to 100,000 years.
[1] "1.2 billion years [from now], high estimate until all plant life dies out [...] rising temperatures will make any animal life unsustainable from this point on" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear...
I'm not involved with that organization, but I find their work very interesting.
As a backup plan, there's Alcor. https://www.alcor.org/
I personally think we need better tooling. We need atomically precise manufacturing, so as to create medical interventions on the smallest scale.
To this end I hope to be launching a molecular nanotechnology startup in the near future.
It sickens me when people romanticize death. There's nothing romantic about the world being taken away from you at the time when you've understood so much of it and found your place in it — and could have contributed so much more to it, and enjoyed it so much more. It's an artificial limit imposed on us by the nature that needs to be fought with all available resources. It should definitely not be accepted.
It's about time humanity stops being humble about this stuff, ffs.
So one might say that there's a degree of hypocrisy in such views. They romanticize death unless it's their turn.
I prefer existing and being conscious to not existing, everything else is just details.
The finality of death is perhaps the only thing that human beings should be truly afraid of and treat as an engineering/biology problem to be solved as soon as possible, the other details and impact of this should be addressed later.
This complacence with the status quo is harmful in that regard.
Even if you don't want immortality, not having the last decades of your life being trapped in a decaying flesh prison while your brain and organs are riddled with various diseases does sound like how things should be. Even if aging cannot be eliminated entirely (for now), its effects definitely should be lessened, so people can live out their lives respectfully and comfortably, what modern medicine is very gradually advancing towards.
Cryogenics just acknowledge that focusing on this to the point of beating aging altogether is unlikely and that we're all born in the wrong time and come to the conclusion that maybe 1% chance at survival is better than 0%. Most if not all will sadly not survive.
IMHO this is a generally benefitial viewpoint in life, except when specifically discussing mortality.
This is not really convincing argument. If and when that happens and I find it so inconvenient that it is not worth continuing I shall end my life on my own terms.
> Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth.
Nah. We don’t “go” anywhere after we die. This is simply propaganda invented and formulated to get people over their fear of death. It has zero basis in reality other than the fact that people want it.
Problem I have with immortalists isn't that they have some desire to live forever, it's that they rarely are able to articulate what lives forever. Self is a construct, an narrative abstraction created by our minds that has utility as regards our functioning in the world, but is ultimately not real. I am not the same person I was 5 years ago, nor will the version of me that exists 5 years from now be the same as me. There are probably several people out there who are more like 5-years-ago me than I am currently, but for some reason they aren't considered to be the same person.
What is it that makes me me? It can't be memory, because memories are extremely fallible, and often confabulated. If we are our memories then we have forgotten most of who we are and will continue to forget ourselves as time passes. If you erased my memories somehow, you'd still likely consider me the same person anyway, so clearly memories aren't me.
Of course, even forgotten experiences leave some kind of mark on our being, but just by existing we leave our mark on the people and world around us but we don't consider those things us, do we?
And clearly anyone who imagines a digital-self in their future doesn't consider their physical form to be them either, so what's left? Illusions and abstractions, a heuristic notion of self that has utility but not reality.
Sure, go ahead and solve "immortality", I don't have a philosophical objection to the concept. What I have a problem with is the insistence that death is some kind of fundamental evil we must place a high priority on solving. Some would go so far as to preserve their own lives at the cost of many others, so terrified they are of something that has basically already happened to previous versions of themselves. Its perverse.
Except it doesn't. Death is the end of everything for you. It's ultimate loss of any game you might have participated in. And there's nothing else. When you die then there's no longer any you. And there will never be you in any shape or form. When you die it's as if your family home burnt to ashes along with your family inside and family business and there not even any cinder left. What was there doesn't exist anymore.
Once you actually understand death without the layer of culture that we built to distract ourselves from the reality there's really no wonder why some people would take any chances to avoid it in any way conceivable.
> Death is the end of everything for you.
Both of you these are objective. You can think you are insignificant or you can think that you are part of the big bang which is still happening. It's just narration and if it makes no practical difference (as it would seem in these cases), everybody can choose whatever makes him feel better, there is no need to put down the other narration.
And you can only choose what makes you feel better in matters that don't matter. In all others you are almost always better off choosing what is actually correct.
You can choose a narrative that pi equals 3 because it makes you feel better but you won't be doing world or yourself any favors if you choose to make real world decisions based on that narrative.
https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
It’s a nice, short metaphorical story for our acceptance of death.
Me neither, it sounds like a punishment.
> We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia.
Now here, I disagree. If someone offered me to become displaced in time, being frozen most of the time, but waking up for a few months or a year (assuming I’d not be pennyless on the street) every decade or century, I’d love it until I tire and either retire in the "now" or end my life.
I love that my life will eventually end, I hate that I won’t be able to see everything to come.
# I LIKE BIG BUTTS AND I CANNOT LIE / YOU OTHA BROTHAS CAN'T DENY...
You can't just sit here in the dark listening to classical music, Fry.
When we go return to where we came from before our birth it simply means the absence of consciousness. In this universe, you can either be conscious or not. There is something mysterious and magical about this phenomenon that seemingly differentiates our lives from simpler or even single celled organisms which seem more like biological robots.
It may very well be that the next time a consciousness manifests and forms a 'you' from 'the place before birth' you may as well be born as a cow, shackled in the darkness among feces. Kept from the warmth of your mother with cold metal spikes attached to her udder, ripping open the young flesh of your nose when you seek its nourishment.
How many times did we wake up yet from this 'place before birth'? How likely is it to be born as human among the conscious life forms on Earth? Nevermind being born as healthy human in the developed world in the 21st century.
Between the clear dry science and the mysterious wonder of a perception of 'self' and being consciously aware I just feel dizzy about it all.
A though experiment: Imagine I have no consciousness, but I can run circles around you, outperform you, outpredict you, game you, have a better intuition (gasp), or be more creative (gasp squared). What's left of the magic now?
When we strip away all of these aspects from 'the magic' it gets really interesting to think about what's left. And this is always where it becomes hard to articulate for me. Would you describe yourself as a robot performing a set of finite predetermined tasks? A system merely responding to pattern recognition? Are we just a more complex version of ants following some chemical impulses?
I cannot shake the feeling that it's more of a 1+1=3 kind of thing, where the sum is more than the addition of parts. In Complex Systems Theory it would be emergent behavior, I suppose.
Before we were dying in our 20s, then in our 30s, then in our 60s, now in our 80s. Perhaps in 200 years we could say we die in our 120s? That would be a good thing (and no, this doesn't mean to live the years between 90 and 120 in the worst conditions possible, barely able to walk, eat, talk...; it means to extend our good years and make the 110-120 just like our current 80-90).
I myself am in my 40s but I look younger than many people in their late 20s/early 30s (mainly because I don't smoke, and I don't eat crap. I excerise regularly and sleep a lot). Some celebrities right now in their 50s look younger than many regular people in their 30s. So, I think there is hope for future generations to extend their lives by a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_under_constant_ac...
I feel like that now, in my, ahem, later years, and watching the 20-somethings tie themselves in knots over things, that are actually quite trivial. Friends and family are important, social media not so much. I don't really get it. When I was that age, and I was angry, it took a bit of effort. I'd have to cut the letters out of newspapers, glue them to a bit of paper, and post it to people.
The only really pleasant, anxiety-free way to die is to not see it coming. We should wish for that rather than wish for immortality.
The amount of all forms of suffering and sadness this would lift seems hard to describe in a few paragraphs.
We are already there. We already face this challenge. We will overcome it before immortality. Immortality will be just the next step.
Self-preservation, this is hardwired into us. You may rationalize, refer to a higher power, philosophize, etc... to make you accept the inevitable, sometimes successfully, but that's not what your body is telling you.
When you then go back to people who are similar (because that's always going to be the case to some extent, even if locally the community feels and/or thinks itself diverse) you will frequently feel that others have not 'progressed' or are 'stuck' in those culturally determined ways. It's hard to share that growth with people that haven't done the same, which is I think why expats stick together, even when they're back.
I moved between Western countries I should perhaps add.
There’s also the fact that after living elsewhere for many years, the home you go back to is not the same as the home you left.
I think 100 years is far too short to experience everything our world has to offer. I get that motivation could be an issue for some, but a motivated individual would certainly appreciate extra time to broaden their experiences!
an awful lot of the article seems to be about how weird it is for people to study things carefully and try to do things that are not known to be possible, with the implicit subtext that being weird is bad
abandoning that ideology is how we got the industrial revolution and modern civilization, but unfortunately its adherents didn't die out completely, and will likely bring an end to that epoch
Your comment also does not do this. What are these techniques that have results that are not like the ones described in the article?
Now, "not knowing" doesn't prove anything, of course, and I think it was correct for the article to describe the evidence we do have, even if it's necessarily out of date. But it would have been nice for them to acknowledge that the unthawing data we have is not representative of what would happen if a "current-gen" cryonics "patient" were to be thawed today.
why haven't they tested this on animals or non-paying cadavers? It would seem unwise to pay to keep vitrified bodies frozen if one had no understanding of how the bodies would be when they were unfrozen.
Or at least they did the last time I looked.
And if you're still pessimistic, consider this. A person I otherwise rabidly disagree with once said "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". Well, military power is also now accruing to those with the best ideas (see all the drones and cyber-war lately).
The world is slowly turning into nerd paradise!
a world dominated by military power is not a nerd paradise
consider the plight of the iranian nuclear scientists
Since 1950, the global population has more than tripled, while militaries have shrunk. Since 1960, military spending as a share of global GDP has gone down from over 6% to less than 3%.
The world isn't perfect, but it has become a lot less warlike and more hospitable for nerds in recent decades.
2000 years ago, you needed a couple of engineers in charge of sword production and an army of Jocko Willinck types to wield the swords.
Now, you have an army of engineers producing drones, some other nerds remotely piloting the drones, and a couple of J.W.'s to do specialized strikes.
I don't see this trend reaching a stopping point anytime soon.
The only hard jobs left are things involving physical labor, like plumbing (ironically extremely hard to automate).
Nerds are capital F "ucked"
I personally think the way forward is to derive the neural connectivity and transcriptional state map of the brain on a single cell level. This can be done today, albeit at great expense, on tissue that is chemically fixed. Maybe this will be enough to reanimate someone in a new substrate. Maybe more data will be required, but eventually we’ll get there, accepting that human consciousness is subject to the laws of physics.
I mean, suppose you could do that while the person is still alive. Assuming the reanimated person even has consciousness, then surely(?) the two won't share the same experience, like some hive-mind with two bodies. I don't think the original person being dead makes any difference.
So it's less about preserving "yourself" (whatever that means), and more about assuring that a backup clone exists after you die. I can see why that might be useful (it's kind of like leaving a will), but your experience probably ends when you die.
I think the way I see it now is, your mind is a black box to your current consciousness (with some interfaces to recall things), if you replaced this black box with a perfect simulation, your consciousness might not even notice it. Of course your consciouness has also been programmed since the day you were born, but wouldn't a perfect copy of your mind also copy the current consciouness? Either of you would wake up and think "Ah, I'm brap, and I'm currently in my bed, and yesterday I did x and felt y, and the day before... [iterate until there's nothing else to remember]."
If Original You remains alive, it does get weird, both of you will think "There's someone else with my own exact brain and memory, but I can't feel what s/he's currently feeling!".
There's an Apple movie that explores about what I've written, although I haven't watched it: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/mahersha...
what difference does it make?
I disagree, I think salvaging them will be of tremendous historical interest. Imagine if we could bring back a peasant from the 1400s. Medieval scholars would be all over that.
It has been said that death has the most euphemisms of any subject. Cephalon? As in cephalic, Greek for head. Passive voice, too. I suppose one would want to create some distance. "We removed the tubes from the arteries and put the head in a thermos."
I'm skeptical of this cryonics stuff, but I can see the appeal: even if the chance of being eventually revived is a tiny fraction of 1%, if money isn't an issue, why not? If humanity doesn't destroy itself over the next century or two, it might be fun to see what the future is like.
I don't like getting super deep into these threads, because my normal tendency will be to nerd out on all the reasons I think Alcor is kind of shady, but I'm acutely aware that there are real people involved here and these situations are always incredibly sad. I really just want to chime in to push back on the idea that "modern" cryonics have the problems worked out; I think it's kind of likely that the insurmountable problems here are fractal.
hmm. So was this like a minor repositioning or was there a head rolling onto the floor?
Seems like a false dichotomy.
Aside from life support in one's final days, most practical medical interventions for prolonging life also result in significant improvements in quality of life.
For example, healthy diet and exercise contribute to extended lifespan, but they also improve quality of life significantly during all stages of life.
I can assure you that you'd never ever hold that opinion if you were a healthcare worker. A big part of our job is to maintain alive people with a horrible quality of life who should be long dead, oftentimes without even being able to know if they'd in fact prefer dying...
Healthy diet for example is not a singularly defined term and depending on specifics can be argued to lower quality of life even if they improve health.
I don’t do life science anymore, but deal with computers now. And it’s a whole lot more predictable and malleable. (Heck, it’s easy if I were to compare it to running gels or prepping cell lines.)
But I would be ecstatic if I could witness some science fiction level advancement in this field in my lifetime. I doubt it, but I would be amazed should it happen.
Nothing profound in being scared shitless of it either
I mean, it'll flip our whole value system.
Do you think GP's decision not to focus their work on life extension is forcing you to die?
[1] https://majorspoilers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Sandman...
This is Stockholm syndrome. We all die, so some of us choose to think it's a good thing. Death in general is needed for recycling, but not human death. Humans represent 0.00000001% (warning, made up number) of the available matter. We don't need to die for others to live.
You're not recognizing anything you're deluding yourself to accept the incredible loss that is death.
You have no idea if that is true or not though.
Dead people have no use for money, doing this kind of research is not a waste, in my opinion, even if it is very unlikely to work at this stage.
Umm, people still alive have use for money. The money could go towards helping the lives of the living, so it absolutely is a waste.
Almost everything people in rich countries do is a ridiculous luxury compared to the fact that it costs about $1,000 to save someone from dying of malaria. Most of everything humans do is clearly a waste. We can’t even get it together to prepare for the next pandemic, never mind existential risk. This is besides the fact that nothing matters. There’s no God to ascribe meaning to things. Things only matter if they matter to you.
The article covers the state of the physical complications quite well. I doubt we will be able to reverse the physical damage and safely reanimate before we learn how to digitize people, so I think the best bet is likely going to be in digitizing the brain after death.
Even if that comes with some damage, we know the brain is pretty plastic and functions well enough even with entire areas missing.
Still seems like a reach. But what's the other option? You can't take the money with you and there's no better alternatives if you would like more time.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation#Basic_prin...
I'm not aware of experiments with animals, and obviously not humans. But here's an experiment with human cardiac tissue [1], which went quite well.
Remember the first payload of his "Falcon Heavy" rocket - some tesla or other? Had a tailor's dummy in a space suit strapped in the front seat.
That was a real person in the suit who had paid for the most effective, reliable and longest lasting cryogenic freeze available. No maintenance power required. Will continue to be frozen even if the earth explodes. Not beholdent to anyone alive to make the right decisions...
Elon decided not to just hide it in plain sight but make a spectacle of it with live feeds etc.
Probably nonsense but makes a certian amount more logical sense than a dummy in a space suit, huh?
> but makes a certian amount more logical sense than a dummy in a space suit, huh?
It makes sense as a Heavy Metal reference.
The last post Ye (Kanye) mades was a symbol that had a star of David with a swastika in it. And Elon personally kicked him off twitter immediately.
But that's actually a symbol for this cultish religious group.
"Raëlism teaches that an extraterrestrial species known as the Elohim created humanity using their advanced technology. It claims that throughout history the Alohim have created 40 Elohim/human hybrids who have served as prophets" You can see the symbol on their wikipedia page.
Raëlism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism
Remember when they cloned Dolly the sheep ... That was over 20 years ago.
Have you heard of Occam's Razor?
I keep hoping to score a tour of one some day.
If you put aside the overt scorn, it's actually a fairly interesting article, and surprisingly upbeat at that.
I mean, CPR has gotten better for sure. But that's just for people who are mostly dead. Not going to work on people who are all-the-way-dead.
Anyone claiming high chances of resurrection in some sci-fi future are just blathing.
As a solution I think there should be a special “bank” like organization which sole purpose it is to survive for hundred of years. It also would need to grow the money to keep up with inflation. In addition this organization needs to be country independent since you can’t guarantee countries to survive that long. This organization would also use some of the investment proceeds to pay for the storage and even transfer frozen people to a different location in case of war or natural disasters.
Turns out, death can be cheated but the taxman cannot.
I imagine that mad scientists, in general, suffer from a lack of test subjects. I'm pretty sure the future will find something to do with frozen humans who signed up to be resurrected.
Which is the plot of several sci-fi books. The most recent I'm aware of being the fun and light "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)"
If we could revive an iceman today, we absolutely would have, if not for science than for profit.
On that note, I'm disappointed by how often the future is assumed to have progressed no farther than today's form of capitalism.
That and TFA both speak to the same problem: the unimaginative belief that now is what was, is, and ever shall be.
Sort of how historians can read badly damaged ancient documents, but usually copy over their results to a new medium instead of trying to repair the original document.
A lot of the usual philosophical discussions following whether or not the AI is the same as the real person would probably follow...
Seems to me anyone who thinks this option is strictly better than death lacks imagination.
One question it explores: what exactly might people in the future want to do with the consciousness that have been frozen (hint it might not be good), and why?
Not award winning like Octavia Butler but it’s a fun read.
I really felt like I'd missed some big headline here.
There's a comment somewhere in this thread about perpetual motion. This tech seems to be its mirror-image, equal in impossibility, but opposite in aim. To stop all motion and decay, forever. Sometimes, it's wise to be circumspect, and to admit the possibility of a future technology that will change everything.
In the case of cryogenic storage of viable humans, however, I think it is straight-up, bona-fide, no-exceptions, impossible.
Just strap yourself into a spaceship capable of reaching within a few % of the speed of light, and fly around for a bit.
No need to wait till you're at death's door and turned into a corpsicle. Just head on out there for a few years at relativistic speed. By the time you slow down and return, you'll be having pina coladas with your new Felidae-Sapiens masters ;)
I suppose you could accelerate in an orbit around earth to maintain contact. But my understanding of relativity is poor
Even then, accelerating and decelerating will take so long, I suspect you'll wish you had some way to freeze yourself for the trip.
The vacuum flask was designed and invented by Scottish scientist Sir James Dewar in 1892 as a result of his research in the field of cryogenics and is sometimes called a Dewar flask in his honour. While performing experiments in determining the specific heat of the element palladium, Dewar made a brass chamber that he enclosed in another chamber to keep the palladium at its desired temperature. He evacuated the air between the two chambers, creating a partial vacuum to keep the temperature of the contents stable. Dewar refused to patent his invention, and the flask, as developed by others using new materials such as glass and aluminium, became a significant tool for chemical experiments and also a common household item.
Dewar's design was quickly transformed into a commercial item in 1904 as two German glassblowers, Reinhold Burger and Albert Aschenbrenner, discovered that it could be used to keep cold drinks cold and warm drinks warm and invented a more robust flask design, which was suited for everyday use. . . . In his subsequent attempt to claim the rights to the invention, Dewar instead lost a court case to the company.
The classic dad joke: So if I put my cold beer and my hot soup in there, how does it know which is which?
With all the quirkiness of the 70s and giving Westworld a run for its money ;)
If you could save your DNA and a few cells and be cloned at a later date is that good enough for you? No memories but the same code. Is that still “you”? It’s like being an identical twin of yourself.
If possible, running it on the original hardware (i.e. the same brain) will satisfy people who believe in continuity of consciousness. (People hesitant to use a teletransporter[0])
Even a computer-simulated mind based on a scan of the original brain would I think be more 'me' than my clone.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox
The escrow requirements for maintainance of state would be interesting too. Who exactly benefits from the spend? Is this contestable by a future generation? In effect, does the corpse become property?
Perpetual funding is a pretty bizarre concept, but that said the entire 'south sea bubble' debt exist inside British gilts for hundreds of years, they only wiped them out recently at the same time as the WW1 debt, so carrying forward into the future does happen, albiet mostly at scale by governments.
I guess if you turned the dewer flasks into a freak show and charged, you might even be able to fund the cooldown by revenue.
This is because coal mining has been bringing the complete cities below the natural level of the water table. Costs are taken care of by a foundation.
[0]: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewigkeitskosten
Sadly no English version but some pictures.
It's not really. It's an attempt to preserve the body and not much more of a science than me attempting to preserve some food by putting it in my freezer. Who knows if future technology will be able to bring people back? Claiming it definitely will not without evidence doesn't seem very scientific.
What?!
There is literally no way that pun was unintended. Were it so, it’d be easier to just choose a different word rather than note it’s unintentionality.
If Bide-a-Wee was not from this novel, a reference would be much appreciated, as my cursory search has not found it.
Seems like it might be premature to claim that the remaining one succeeded in their quest for immortality
1) human mind can be simulated
2) human consciousness is totally dependent on physical connections of brain neurons
3) something like nanobots are able to determine the frozen brain connections despite the damage of being frozen
4) some organization is curious enough to do the work to bring you back
5) live your second life, hopefully in some type of humanoid android and not your great-great-great-grandkids PlayStation 25
The likelihood of all of that happening is probably pretty low. But you have 0% chance of coming back if you don’t get frozen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson
Keith is quite a character, who also successfully performed one of the most hilarious trolls ever against Scientology lawyers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891
>Just be glad you didn't have to explain an in joke about ftp sites, the local loopback address, and a troll, in a deposition, under oath, to Scientology lawyers, like Keith Henson did.
The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, page 93-94:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/transhumanism/1990-regis-greatmam...
>Finally some evidence about the success of cryonics emerged from among the ranks of the frozen themselves. Not that they were revived, they were only defrosted. Or at least parts of them were.
>In November of 1983, for the first time ever, a cryonics firm conducted autopsies on the defrosted mortal remains of two Trans Time patients who had been converted to neuro. The parties in question were a married couple who had wanted to be frozen after death. They hadn’t had the required lump sum in advance, but Trans Time didn’t want to turn them away, so it accepted them on a contingency, pay-as-you-go basis. Monthly maintenance costs would be covered by their loving son.
>When the son’s parents died, Trans Time suspended them as whole-body patients, which was their desire, and for a number of years everything went along exactly as planned. But then the son himself died, in an automobile accident, after which the monthly payments ceased. Trans Time kept the parents frozen for a while, but it was clear that sooner or later something had to be done. It was a private company, operating without government support — indeed, often in the teeth of government opposition — and could not afford an extended period of unpaid maintenance, especially when for fifteen out of its sixteen years of existence the company had run at loss.
>But then the Alcor Life Extension Foundation came to the rescue. It would take care of the frozen parents, essentially on a charity basis, but only on the condition that they could be “converted” first, which is to say, converted from whole-body to neuro, the latter being far less expensive than the former. “The same capsule that you put a whole body in,” Saul Kent once explained, “you can probably put twenty heads in.”
>This, of course, meant that the heads had to come off while the patients were still frozen. Not that this was much of a problem. As Alcor’s illustrated report on the case explains, “a rapid conversion to neuropreservation was done using a high-speed electric chain saw.”
>This was now a golden opportunity to see how frozen bodies actually fared over their years in storage—nine years for the husband, five for the wife. So the Alcor men thawed out and autopsied the newly decapitated bodies.
>There was both bad and good news. “The most unexpected finding as a result of these autopsies,” says the report, “is the discovery of serious fracturing in all of the suspension patients.” There were fractures in the outer skin, in the subcutaneous fat, in the blood vessels next to the heart, in the arteries and veins. The right lung of one patient was cracked almost in half, as was the liver, and there were open wounds on the hands and right wrist.
>This was not encouraging, but it was all too easy to lose one’s perspective. The fact of the matter was that the injuries suffered by these frozen corpses were no worse than what’s seen in hospital shock-trauma units every day of the week—broken (if not absent) arms and legs, and so on—but many of these people end up recovering. The fact that the frozen corpses were not in pristine shape was not by itself any cause for alarm.
>The good news was that much of the bodies survived perfectly intact. The palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, and other structures were all in fine shape. As for the brains, they remained in suspension and were not examined.
>To Alcor, the whole thing was a learning experience. The initial suspensions had not been perfect, but all things considered, the patients came through the whole process about as well as anyone could expect.
- A sense/awareness of being dead.
- A sense of peace, well-being, and painlessness. Positive emotions. A sense of removal from the world.
- An out-of-body experience.
- A perception of one's body from an outside position, sometimes observing medical professionals performing resuscitation efforts.
- A "tunnel experience" or entering a darkness. A sense of moving up, or through, a passageway or staircase.
- A rapid movement toward and/or sudden immersion in a powerful light (or "Being of Light") which communicates telepathically with the person.
- An intense feeling of unconditional love and acceptance.
I'm not sure, but this feels relevant juxtaposed the prospect of returning to life in a body of unsure quality, with all my friends, relatives and acquaintances long gone, into a world that I can not expect to understand much of. Even if it ever became possible, which I sincerely doubt.
anguish
distress
a void
devastation
vast emptiness
etc