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If, in 20 years, they discover how to revive a frozen rodent, it would still be worth it to freeze it today.
by loader 10y ago
If, in 20 years, they discover how to revive a frozen rodent, it would still be worth it to freeze it today.
- nradov 10y agoWhy? I doubt we'll have a shortage of lab animals in 20 years.
- FeepingCreature 10y 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.
- FeepingCreature 10y agoEh, if you factor in economy of scale cryonics can arguably be competetive with end-of-life desperation measures or actually save money.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoPossibly, but my point was that the actually-effective measures come decades before end-of-life.