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If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout
- Negative1 11y agoFunny to me that they call out the excellent Vanilla Sky (yes, I know Abre los Ojos is better) and the horrible (but fun) Demolition Man, but don't mention the much more likely Idiocracy. In seriousness, people who will wake up will face a form of Future Shock that will look tame by our standards. The Forever War touched on this incredibly well.
- ToastyMallows 11y agoWhat about Futurama? The whole show is about someone who gets woken up from being cryogenically frozen. We could stand to learn a lot about Fry and his adventures.
- nradov 11y agoI love Futurama, but come on. The only thing you're going to learn by watching that show is how to write a funny TV script.
- surfaceTensi0n 11y agoReally? What about Jurassic Bark[0]? That episode is extremely sad and precisely about the fallout of being cryogenically frozen. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Bark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Bark
- ToastyMallows 11y agoMy comment was a little tounge-in-cheek, but as mentioned there are good episodes about the perils of being cryogenically frozen.
- nradov 11y agoJust like "Mars Attacks!" is a good movie about the perils of an alien invasion. If things that will never happen in our lifetimes can legitimately be described as perils.
- tim333 11y agoOr Sleeper? The only film mentioned to get 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
- surfaceTensi0n 11y agoWarren Ellis' excellent Transmetropolitan touches on this as well. [0] - http://amzn.to/1Tzbd5T http://amzn.to/1Tzbd5T
- siquick 11y agoJust ordered a copy of The Forever War on the back of this, thanks for bringing it up.
- Negative1 11y agoHope you enjoy it -- it's one of my top 5 favorite scifi books!
- analognoise 11y agoIf.
- xyzzyz 11y agoI feel like when we're able to put frozen brains in fresh bodies, refugees coming back from a different era will be lesser concern than the whole technological immortality thing. How do we ensure everyone has access to immortality (because this obviously needs to be a human right)? How then do we deal with population growth when people don't die of old age?
- branchan 11y agoHow would immortality be a human right when most people around the world don't even have access to basic health services??
- iliis 11y agoBecause having a right to something and actually getting said thing are sadly two quite different things.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y agoHe doesn't understand the difference between a "right" and something that would be really nice if everyone had.
- sliverstorm 11y agoRight; this is more like when the UN declared internet access a basic human right.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoMost ethical theories of "rights" are sufficiently incoherent that there's very little difference.
- oppositelock 11y ago> How then do we deal with population growth when people don't die of old age? That's a great future problem to have, and it's the same problem that people brought up at the dawn of the age of antibiotics. Our lives have gotten better for it. Who knows, maybe by the time immortality is possible, Earth won't be our only home, so population will be less of a problem.
- Smaug123 11y ago> "There’s no guarantee that this ‘being’ would be the same one who first entered into the cryogenic process, either. As de Grey says, the question remains of “whether scanning the brain and uploading it into a different substrate is revival at all, or if you’d be creating a new individual with the same characteristics.” I think this is probably a bit misleading. I can't imagine de Grey being anything other than reductionist in his views about the mind, so I can only imagine his interpretation of this question to be as follows: "has the scanning process captured all the relevant information about the person's mind?" Have you created a new person (by missing out some information from the original's physical instantiation), one who is perhaps very similar to the original, but where some details are different because the scan was not of high enough fidelity? Of course, it's still unknown whether it's even possible to extract sufficient detail from the brain; if by unhappy chance it turns out that some of the quantum details of the brain's state are important to the mind, then it's possible we may simply never be able to copy a person. Let us hope that is not the case.
- stcredzero 11y agoif by unhappy chance it turns out that some of the quantum details of the brain's state are important to the mind, then it's possible we may simply never be able to copy a person. I should think that such a circumstance would mean we wouldn't be able to copy a consciousness while being able to copy the mind. Of course, this would bring in to question exactly what person would mean.
- sliverstorm 11y agoThis is like the thought experiment around teleportation. What if the way to teleport was to make a copy of you at the new location, and then disintegrate the old you. What has happened here, esp. wrt. consciousness? Is the copy really you? Is the old you OK with being disintegrated? What if the old you escapes, are there now two of you, and what does that mean? etc.
- EGreg 11y agoStart Trek: the Next Generation explored exactly this scenario. https://youtu.be/geMGo2P94j4 https://youtu.be/geMGo2P94j4
- Kutta 11y agoIf cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the extremely serious question of why we let almost everyone die before, i. e. how we could've made one of the most catastrophic humanitarian and public health oversights ever.
- gech 11y agoUh, we didn't know better? I don't even understand how you could force guilt on ignorance
- xyzzyz 11y agoWe can start freezing people now. The question would be, since cryo worked, why we didn't start freezing people when we already knew it could work in principle and had the technology.
- sliverstorm 11y agoIt isn't that simple. You can't just toss people in a freezer and figure out how to revive them in a few centuries. We already know that the freezing process damages and destroys tissues.
- xyzzyz 11y agoI'd argue burying them or cremating damages and destroys tissues even worse.
- kaybe 11y agoWe obviously don't care that much, not for the price of ressources needed.
- prodigal_erik 11y agoWe haven't proven it cannot work. But we don't know if we're doing it right. We don't know if just the head is enough, or if including the whole body slows the process so much the brain is damaged. We don't know if we're using chemicals that best accommodate thawing or scanning, whichever turns out to work better. We don't know if waiting until death causes some kind of irreversible damage or psychological problems.
- reasonattlm 11y agoReversible vitrification is a serious field of research that actually appears pretty close to realization for use in the fields of tissue engineering and organ transplant. A number of independent research groups are working on a variety of approaches. Some sample reading: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34190/title/Icing-Organs/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34190/... http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21690025-after-decades-piecemeal-progress-science-cryogenically-storing-human http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2169002... http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/nov/discovery-could-open-door-frozen-preservation-tissues-whole-organs http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/nov/discovery-co... It is also the case that a rabbit kidney has been vitrified, thawed, transplanted, and it worked for a while. See: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ I think that progress towards reversible vitrification of organs is one of the most important drivers of growing support and acceptance of cryonics among those who write and opinionate. It is hard to throw out the evidence for preservation of fine structure in the brain when there is earnest progress towards preserving the similarly fine structure needed for organ function.
- mrbill 11y agoThere was a section about this in the _Transmetropolitan_ comic/graphic novel, if my memory is correct. Lady gets reanimated in some sort of assembly-line mass process, gets a few days in a shelter, then gets kicked out into society at large. She then basically has some sort of culture shock and ends up homeless again.
- ivanca 11y agoOne of the reasons may be that the future in transmetropolitan is a very dystopian one. They already expected their close ones to be long dead, but they didn't expect the world to be much worse and bizarre-looking.
- nradov 11y agoLet us know when someone successfully revives a frozen rodent. Until then this stuff is just idle speculation, on par with worrying about the "fallout" from an alien invasion.
- Kinnard 11y agoNo one frozen has been revived yet, but animals cooled have been and the procedure is being tested on human trauma victims in hospitals now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Resuscitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Res...
- loader 11y agoIf, in 20 years, they discover how to revive a frozen rodent, it would still be worth it to freeze it today.
- nradov 11y agoWhy? I doubt we'll have a shortage of lab animals in 20 years.
- FeepingCreature 11y agoI mean the argument for cryo basically goes "if, in 60 years, we discover how to revive frozen people, we'll probably wish we could go back and tell the people of 2016 to start freezing everybody who's dying right away. So since the only ways to avoid this outcome are total stagnation and mass extinctions that kill us _anyways_, we should probably allocate some money to doing that."
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoMoney is finite. Given the available evidence, I'd rather spend it on universal health-care for the poor than on scientifically unsupported medical treatments. Besides which, the largest boosts to life-expectancy have tended to come from public health interventions that cross-cut the age spectrum rather than end-of-life desperation measures anyway. We'd all like to act as if each human life had infinite value, but unfortunately, we don't have infinite resources to act with.
- facepalm 11y agoThere is that joke about Cobol - just wondering what could motivate people in the future to actually wake you up. Some skill only you have? Maybe Cobol really isn't such a bad bet.
- Kinnard 11y agoCheck out EPR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Resuscitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Res... This I expect will converge with cryonics.
- phasmantistes 11y ago“You can’t have the technology to wake people up and not have the technology to do a bunch of other great things, like provide abundance to the population.” Sure you can. Just a couple paragraphs previously, you were making the point that cryonics is "just medicine", and medicine and (for example) agronomy advance at very different rates. I can easily imagine a future in which we have the technology and medicine to revive all of the frozen cancer patients, or all of the frozen ALS patients, but are still struggling with drought, climate change, and widespread poverty.
- alpineidyll3 11y agoProponents of cryonics completely misunderstand natural selection, and frankly suffer from narcissism. If it were advantageous for organisms to live forever, they would. Without any type of genetic recombination, undying things will not outcompete dying things, period. I hate to break it to anyone, but you're not the perfect human and we do not live in a world of unlimited free energy. The only world in which "you" could live forever is a world where identity itself doesn't exist. This basic misconception is just the tip of an iceberg of delusional thinking. Disease would have to already be conquered. There would be no economic incentive for reanimation, etc. etc. History's greatest cultures focused on what they could achieve, not longevity. Remarkable people often die young, and there's more to that than coincidence. This vapid quest to live forever is part of the banality of our time.