The question of people being frozen in the hope of being revived is mentioned in a very peculiar way in the "Transmetropolitan" comics (by Waren Elis) . I really hope for Mr Winborn that the future's going to be a better place :))
That's not to say that the people practising it don't believe in what they're preaching - I'm sure many people involved in the cryonics industry deeply believe in the technology. But consider this: what value is there in reviving the dead and frozen rather than preserving the living?
As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science. And you're more than welcome to believe in it, just like any other faith, but I personally don't see why future society would put the needs of the frozen above those of the living. And unlike some other faiths, it's a very expensive option to partake in.
Most cryonicists agree. It's often said that getting cryopreserved is the second-worst thing that can happen to you.
How long does someone have to be dead before you say, "What value is there in reviving the dead and frozen rather than preserving the living?" Is it a valid argument after 5 minutes? A year? 100 years? If it were technologically possible to revive people from the 18th century without significantly taxing our own resources, some organization would probably be doing that right now. And the newly-revived 18th century people would probably try to revive their friends if they could.
Of course cryonics organizations don't just toss heads in dewar flasks and forget about them. If revival becomes feasible, the organizations doing it will probably be the same organizations that have maintained frozen heads for decades.
You say cryonics is an act of faith. Most people sign up not because they're convinced it will work, but because they think the expected value is positive. For someone moderately well-off, even a 3% chance at a much longer life is worth the $120/month that a typical life insurance policy and membership costs. Heck, many medical procedures are more expensive and less likely to benefit. If we were talking about an experimental cancer treatment that cost $80k and had a 5% chance of working, few would reject it due to the price.
Those who sign up are usually convinced by evidence. Which brings me to the question: What evidence would convince you that cryonics is worthwhile?
If scanning electron micrographs of cryopreserved mammal brain tissue showed intact nanostructure, would that convince you? How about reversibly-cryopreserved mammal organs? What if a team of scientists cryopreserved a bit of rat hippocampus, then warmed and re-fused it, and couldn't distinguish the cryopreserved cells from control cells?
These have all been done in the past decade. Rabbit kidney: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ Rat hippocampus: http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf
As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science. And you're more than welcome to believe in it, just like any other faith...
I don't think cryonics in its current form is likely to work, but I do think the probability of it working is high enough that it's worth signing up. Does this sound like a faith-based argument? If reasoning combined with scientific journal citations is faith, then call me a zealot.
There'd be lots of value in being able to revive people who died a long time ago, if only for their value as contemporary witnesses. Hell, a few years ago the scientific community went pretty crazy for some frozen dude we found in Austria, and that one was thoroughly dead. [1]
We already don't have anyone left who remembers the First World War. In a few years, we'll lose the last Holocaust survivor. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to preserve some of that first-hand experience? And come on, how cool would it be to be able to unfreeze an Ancient Egyptian, or a bunch of people from the Middle Ages?
I agree that the future probably won't have a use for a whole horde of our living dead, but I can see there being quite a bit of interest in reviving a few hundred or thousand people - and once you've gone to all the trouble to develop the technology, maybe it'll be cheap enough to go to the trouble of unfreezing everyone else.
WTF? How would you like to be revived 2000 years after you died, with everyone and everything you loved gone, in a place that looks nothing like home, only to be shown around like an animal in a zoo?
Current cryonics is perhaps too crude to work, or you can cast doubt on the long-term sustainability of the organizations, or whatever, but that doesn't make it an act of "faith", at least not any religious sense.
It's an act of decision making under some very big uncertainties, but it's not unscientific. If you accept the physicalist tenet that the brain is a machine, that the mind is the result of information processing, that there is no unmaterial "ghost" an so on then trying to preserve the "state variables" of that meat computer with vitrification is perfectly reasonable, specially compared with the only current alternative, total annihilation.
It's totally unscientific! It's pure pseudo-science.
> If you accept the physicalist tenet that the brain is a machine
...okay...
> that the mind is the result of information processing, that there is no unmaterial "ghost" an so on then trying to preserve the "state variables" of that meat computer with vitrification is perfectly reasonable, specially compared with the only current alternative, total annihilation.
Well, no. We don't know what the mind is, nor how it works. We've only recently discovered that your unconscious self does stuff before your conscious self decides to do it. (http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-...) {With interesting video clip}.
Freezing your brain is as scientific as stitching corpse-body-parts together to create a living human.
We're pretty sure the mind is what the brain does.
> nor how it works.
We don't need to, for this purpose. This is a low-level dump of all the information stored, to enable (much) later analysis.
As I said, current cryonics is perhaps too crude. But the idea itself is not unsound. IF current procedures are not detailed enough to preserve the details then perhaps throwing a few millions into research to find better cryoprotectants or procedures could solve the problem.
> We've only recently discovered that your unconscious self does stuff before your conscious self decides to do it
I don't see the relevance. Your unconscious self is still made of neurons and other material stuff, not magic.
Doesn't it seem weird to go from "This part of the problem seems unsolved to me" to "this idea is completely pointless"? Just because you didn't immediately see a solution?
To answer the specific objection: People are curious, and people aren't jerks. Cryonics is still extremely novel, and if revival is possible the subjects of this decade will be incredibly rare individuals any self-respecting anthropologist would fund in an instant - to name one of a dozen possible solutions.
Mmmm, not sure this is a good analogy.
While cryonics isn't proven science yet, we have frozen dogs, pigs, and other animals and revived them after a few days. Granted, this isn't a human, but if I am ever in a situation where the end is there in front of me with a little bit of time to contemplate it, I'd rather take the frozen brain/body route.
I'm sorry, you are mistaken. The largest reversibly-cryopreserved chunk of mammal so far has been a rabbit kidney. The kidney was cryopreserved, re-warmed, and transplanted back into the rabbit. The untreated kidney was removed. The rabbit recovered and survived until the researchers euthanized it for autopsy 6 weeks later. Autopsy showed some areas where the cryoprotectant hadn't reached, so the kidney wasn't perfectly healthy. The whole paper is at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
Counterpoint: if we had the technology to reanimate someone who died only 100 years ago (say, born in 1860), don't you think we'd find a hell of a lot of value in that from historical utility alone?
>And unlike some other faiths, it's a very expensive option to partake in.
If you're healthy and young, and you fund it with life insurance, the cost is on the order of $50/month. I'm not really willing to spend much time doing a rigorous comparison to "other faiths", since this line of thought is spurious, but according to one source[0], the average Protestant in the US gave about $1100 to their church in 2001.
[0] http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/religious-people-donate...
Not as unlikely as you'd think.
Going the opposite direction, poor icecube man might be revived only to die almost immediately due to measles or something similar. Assuming that "able to cure all diseases" must come before "defrost cycle" on the civilization tech tree is not a good assumption because there seems to be no obvious technological link other than both being kinda difficult.
Being defrosted, assuming it actually works perfectly, probably means spending some time (maybe rest of life) in a biohazard lab. Or worse, yet maybe more likely, getting defrosted to live in a bioweapon lab.
Science has a much better track record than organized religion: http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/DarkAges.gif
If I remember correctly, a lot of of the ancient knowledge was kept on the monasteries after all the destruction caused by the plague and the fall of the roman empire.
The image also seems to imply that the greek, the egyptians and the romans were not religious civilizations.
BTW, I am not even a religious person. And I totally agree that science has a better track record than religion on curing disease.
For those HN readers (not necessarily implying the poster) uneducated in liberal arts, the topics to google for are "edward gibbon" and "the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire". If you're going to talk about something complicated, at least throw the noobs a bone.
Gibbon in the 1780s is pretty much the source of this argument, or at least its strongest promoter. Not to say its universally agreed with. I'm not even going to attempt to paraphrase Gibbon's couple hundred pages of reasoning here, but a bit of google will take care of it for you.
As a life goal I finished reading Gibbon a couple years back. Its kind of long, like 3000 or so pages and took me about two seasons, reading about a half hour per night. Maybe a foot or so on a bookshelf, although I read the project gutenberg ebook version. And a bit repetitious in parts, probably because that's just how life was back then. It was worth the time, overall, and I'd recommend it.
Its a metagraph where the Y axis is the number of graphs produced by humanity with unlabeled Y axis.
I'm not particularly religious (or Catholic), but let's not minimize the positive impact members of the clergy have had on science.
>>http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/DarkAges.gif
Yeah, you know what, not so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV7CanyzhZg