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Comment by itake | Hacker News Reader

I wish he mentioned the ethics behind this.

01 the freezing costs power, which damages our planet.

02 This is often paid for by life insurance policies. Instead of the money going to your family or donating to a humanitarian cause, it goes towards damaging the planet.

I wouldn't be surprised in 100 years, the owners of these businesses cut a deal with the remaining family members, offering "hey, we will pay you $500m (half of the account balance) to unthaw your great great great great great grandpa if you promise not to sue us."

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Aren't both of those also arguments against maintaining life support for coma patients? In both of these cases it costs power and insurance money, only the odds of recovery and amount of time on support are the differences. Which does change the ethics a bit, but not massively. They're basically just long term unlikely to recover coma patients.

Coma patients are actually alive, though, and have been known to come back.

If you believe that dead people have come back, you're religious.

...this might be controversial, but I'll argue that thinking you'll live again if you get chronically frozen requires as much faith as believing you'll live again in an afterlife.

There's not much evidence for either, so you're left squinting heavily at vague suggestive outlines, making your bets, then hoping and trusting it works out.

The difference is what you put that faith in, and why.

> ...this might be controversial, but I'll argue that thinking you'll live again if you get chronically frozen requires as much faith as believing you'll live again in an afterlife.

I would say they are similar, but there's a key difference there. One relies on believing in the ingenuity of humans and the improvement of technology, both of which have been observed. The other relies on believing in the word of people who came long before you, which has been observed to be less then stellar.

The fact of the matter is you literally have to choose between those 2 or giving up completely.

> I'll argue that thinking you'll live again if you get chronically frozen requires as much faith as believing you'll live again in an afterlife.

It actually requires more because there are numerous documented cases of the dead coming back to life within certain religious ontologies whereas cryonics is only a potential resurrection in the future with no precursor. Imagine a Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead without the Empty Tomb.

> only the odds of recovery and amount of time on support are the differences

These are large differences. We can argue about inefficiencies, but people do recover from decades-long comas. People don't recover from being dead as a doornail.

> People don't recover from being dead as a doornail

Not yet they don't. Plus, depends on how you define dead. I know people who have recovered from being dead quite a few times.

That's why I said "doornail"; the people in question are sufficiently dead that the company here doesn't think they're at risk of being sued for killing someone.

Maybe we'll be able to reanimate people eventually; for the time being, people definitely do recover from comas.

Haha, i'm not exactly familiar with that medical terminology. But agreed, that's fair, comas do have known examples of recovery, this doesn't. It's more like the first ever comas.

There's a huge difference there: we know for a fact that some coma patients can recover, while recovery of cryogenics subjects is still so completely theoretical that the basis is "somebody will figure it out eventually".

Even if it’s possible in the future there’s a good chance they aren’t getting frozen in the right way now and they’re just irreversibly dead.

mentioning "damaging the planet" twice referring to a handful of refrigerators is pretty farcical

Yeah, it's a bit striking that apparently these refrigerators are morally wrong, but not the billion-plus others.

I am super confused. Where did I say the "billion-plus others" aren't morally wrong? Or is this a straw man demonstration?

So refrigerators are immoral? Are we going to create a better future, including surviving climate change AND prospering, for humanity without modern food preservation?

>the freezing costs power, which damages our planet.

Many completely unnecessary things cost power, and quite a few of them cost much more of it than the freezing costs of cryogenics. If your moral benchmark for people doing or not doing strange but generally modest-in-scope things is a contrived moral argument connected to climate change and energy usage, you could start with much bigger misuses than this. And, unless you live one hell of a minimalist lifestyle, you could also pick many "frivolous" aspects of your own life that you'd have to eliminate by the same logic.

It's extremely short-sighted to dislike something that in practical terms does you no harm for personal reasons and then shoehorn de jure social/political issues around it as justifications for wanting the subject of your dislike to to go away.

It depends on whether or not technology in the future allows the revival of the deceased. If true, then I imagine many people (rich ones) will pay to store their bodies for 10 to 20 years to wait for the progression of medical knowledge ("frozen for a cure", so do speak).

I doubt that such expense will be paid by insurance policies unless 1) the technology became common or 2) it's a privilege only for the powerful.

There are many how-to articles [0][1][2] on using life insurance money to fund cryopreservation.

[0] - https://www.tomorrow.bio/post/how-to-fund-cryopreservation-w...

[1] - https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/one-surprising-thing-life-in...

[2] - https://www.alcor.org/membership/

> 01 the freezing costs power, which damages our planet.

You posted this via computer, which costs power, damaging the planet. Is that unethical?

(I would think any reasonable answer comes down to cost:benefit - but running a freezer doesn't actually use that much power, and obviously provides a benefit, even if you don't like that benefit)

> costs power, which damages our planet.

It's useful to realize that in the long term, more power equals better. Our planet doesn't care how much power we use. So long term, we should not think "let's use less power so we 'protect our planet'", but rather "we should use more power if we can".

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