10 ms·

I wish more people would learn about cryonics. It's either 0 or something above zero probability.

by biolurker1 6y ago

libertine 6y ago
Either that or learn to accept death.
- podgaj 6y ago
  ...or understand you were never born in the first place.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mp3k 6y ago
    explain
    - podgaj 6y ago
      We are told we are born form our parents and from our culture. What if there was another story? what if we are dreaming, asleep? Or as I said before, maybe our birth is actually a death. Logically and superficially, yes, there is a thing we call birth. But what is it if you do not name it? What did your face look like before you were born?
croon 6y ago
But not giving your family closure, and an indefinite cost to the environment/them, for 0 or something above 0 success.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Alcor, for example, charges what amounts to a fee to perform the preservation and a fee to go into a fund that will be invested to pay for your ongoing preservation. "Not giving your family an additional $80,000 on your death" amounts to the same thing as "taking $X from them in perpetuity", but it's psychologically different. It's all about the cost-benefit analysis, whose outcome may be different for different people; some people just don't value their lives very much and are more willing to die the true death, some people have family who are getting on just fine without the cash injection provided by their death so are more willing to spend the money on preservation, and so on. "Not giving your family closure" is something you just have to discuss with your own family. I, for one, would treat cryopreservation as effectively death with a rather unusual body-disposal mechanism, for the purposes of grieving etc; there's certainly almost no chance I'll see a cryopreserved person again before my own first death. For a family made up of people like me, that particular argument holds no water at all.
  - PowerBar 6y ago
    "Alcor, for example, charges what amounts to a fee to perform the preservation and a fee to go into a fund that will be invested to pay for your ongoing preservation." Which just adds another gamble. What are the chances of the economy having enough consistent growth that those investments last longer than it takes to revive you?
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Are you saying life is a gamble and immortality is not guaranteed? Yes, most people know that.
NateEag 6y ago
I have not seen a reason to think cryonics will work at all. Even if we actually do find a way to restore frozen near-death people to life, you'd better write a heck of a pitch as to why future humans should spend resources on reviving and healing you. Never mind all the resources being spent on keeping you properly frozen all that time. That's all assuming the company running your freezer doesn't just go belly-up after ninety years, leaving you to thaw and rot after all that expense was dumped into keeping your now-corpse uselessly preserved for decades. Cryonics actually plays the role so many atheists believe religion plays for the religious - comfort in the face of The End that is inevitably coming to you. It is false hope, a tool to help you deceive yourself into thinking you can defeat death.
- biolurker1 6y ago
  the argument is this: certain death vs a miniscule one in a quadrillion chance or lower. It will always tilt the other way no matter what the current scientific status quo is saying because it's possible in theory and it has happened to living organisms before just not humans. Whether it's good for environment, your siblings pocket etc is not part of the core argument.
  - fipar 6y ago
    I think even if you ignore the environment, and cost, the argument for cryonics is not very good. Let's say someone is successfully revived, there's still heart attacks, cancer, crime (and not just "lowly" criminals, crime also happens within families for inheritance, for example), accidents (car, or just slipping in the shower), earthquakes, ... The list is pretty much endless. Death is unavoidable, IMHO it's best to learn to cope with it, and focus efforts on reducing what most people would consider the worst deaths (infants, long and painful diseases, wars and torture, etc). That said, as long as not many people try this (the environmental cost would be high), if many people think about this possibility and that helps them cope with their mortality, and that of their loved ones, good for them.
    - Smaug123 6y ago
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Surely mass cryogenics is a non-starter in this day and age when we are concerned with lowering carbon emissions. All that refrigeration in perpetuity would consume so much energy, and keeping the dead frozen would erase the gains that we expect to get from the gradual decline in birthrates.
- Cpoll 6y ago
  Are the carbon emissions that big of a deal? Every house in North America has at least one freezer. What scale are you envisioning when you say "mass"? I've sometimes fancied that the discovery of immortality might be good for the environment, it changes the incentives for the biggest abusers. With that said, I'm not entirely confident of that in practice.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    > Every house in North America has at least one freezer. Cryonics requires the maintenance of a temperature far colder than any household freezer. > What scale are you envisioning when you say "mass"? I just mean that it might hardly seem acceptable to freeze more terminally ill people than just a few ultra-wealthy eccentrics.
- est31 6y ago
  Volume scales cubically while surface area with the square of the length. It should be possible to build large scalable cooled facilities. I do agree though that we aren't ready for such a system yet, both legally (currently a frozen person counts as dead, leading to their assets being taken away) and ecologically (carrying capacity limits of our planet). One day we might, who knows.
dr_dshiv 6y ago
I'm a fan! Seems like a nice way to die. Would you have a planned death at 75 to potentially get resurrected in 200 years? I say yes. I like how it creates death planning. Just better hope the interest keeps compounding!
klmadfejno 6y ago
I think you'll have better luck trying dark majycks to become a ghost personally.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  … por que no los dos?
lonelyasacloud 6y ago
What, risk waking up to be transported to a "re-education" facility because what you did (or believed) in the past is no longer acceptable/legal to the current Maoist/Rightwing/Religious/Populist nut jobs in charge. Wake up to find the planet inundated and starving. Wake up to find that every single person you loved is now dead ... seems a bit of a hard sell.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  My gut says that people into cryogenics aren't big on human relationships.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Wake up to get put to work for another 100 years so you can pay more bills and then either die or be frozen again if you can afford it. Actually this would be a cool short story about someone who has to constantly go through this process, each time working deeper and deeper in the future only to be frozen again.
marcinzm 6y ago
That depends on how cynical you are. There's also a non-zero probability that you're woken up in some sort of dystopia, made immortal and tortured until the heat death of the universe. Basically "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Death isn't the worst outcome imaginable.
biolurker1 6y ago
One would wonder on the rules of the forum where 500ers can downvote a comment that sparked such a nice discussion. Internet never ceases to dissapoint.
- biolurker1 6y ago
  Classic downvoter downvoted :) do it again!
- Talanes 6y ago
  I'm not someone who downvoted you, but you can't just assume everyone else sees value in the same things as you. Perhaps those votes are from people who find the whole digression about cryonics off-topic and boring?
  - biolurker1 6y ago
    So any topic that I don't like I downvote even if other people like to discuss about it and it's about science. Cool I guess HN is not fairing better than reddit here.
- podgaj 6y ago
  People fear what they do not understand. This has been happening to me for the 25 years I have been on the internet. It does not happen when people talk to me in person. Most people come to the internet to validate their existence. I come to dismantle it.

I wish more people would learn about cryonics. It's either 0 or something above zero probability.

libertine 6y ago

Either that or learn to accept death.

podgaj 6y ago
...or understand you were never born in the first place.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mp3k 6y ago
  explain
  - podgaj 6y ago
    We are told we are born form our parents and from our culture. What if there was another story? what if we are dreaming, asleep? Or as I said before, maybe our birth is actually a death. Logically and superficially, yes, there is a thing we call birth. But what is it if you do not name it? What did your face look like before you were born?

croon 6y ago

But not giving your family closure, and an indefinite cost to the environment/them, for 0 or something above 0 success.

Smaug123 6y ago
Alcor, for example, charges what amounts to a fee to perform the preservation and a fee to go into a fund that will be invested to pay for your ongoing preservation. "Not giving your family an additional $80,000 on your death" amounts to the same thing as "taking $X from them in perpetuity", but it's psychologically different. It's all about the cost-benefit analysis, whose outcome may be different for different people; some people just don't value their lives very much and are more willing to die the true death, some people have family who are getting on just fine without the cash injection provided by their death so are more willing to spend the money on preservation, and so on. "Not giving your family closure" is something you just have to discuss with your own family. I, for one, would treat cryopreservation as effectively death with a rather unusual body-disposal mechanism, for the purposes of grieving etc; there's certainly almost no chance I'll see a cryopreserved person again before my own first death. For a family made up of people like me, that particular argument holds no water at all.
- PowerBar 6y ago
  "Alcor, for example, charges what amounts to a fee to perform the preservation and a fee to go into a fund that will be invested to pay for your ongoing preservation." Which just adds another gamble. What are the chances of the economy having enough consistent growth that those investments last longer than it takes to revive you?
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Are you saying life is a gamble and immortality is not guaranteed? Yes, most people know that.

NateEag 6y ago

I have not seen a reason to think cryonics will work at all. Even if we actually do find a way to restore frozen near-death people to life, you'd better write a heck of a pitch as to why future humans should spend resources on reviving and healing you. Never mind all the resources being spent on keeping you properly frozen all that time. That's all assuming the company running your freezer doesn't just go belly-up after ninety years, leaving you to thaw and rot after all that expense was dumped into keeping your now-corpse uselessly preserved for decades. Cryonics actually plays the role so many atheists believe religion plays for the religious - comfort in the face of The End that is inevitably coming to you. It is false hope, a tool to help you deceive yourself into thinking you can defeat death.

biolurker1 6y ago
the argument is this: certain death vs a miniscule one in a quadrillion chance or lower. It will always tilt the other way no matter what the current scientific status quo is saying because it's possible in theory and it has happened to living organisms before just not humans. Whether it's good for environment, your siblings pocket etc is not part of the core argument.
- fipar 6y ago
  I think even if you ignore the environment, and cost, the argument for cryonics is not very good. Let's say someone is successfully revived, there's still heart attacks, cancer, crime (and not just "lowly" criminals, crime also happens within families for inheritance, for example), accidents (car, or just slipping in the shower), earthquakes, ... The list is pretty much endless. Death is unavoidable, IMHO it's best to learn to cope with it, and focus efforts on reducing what most people would consider the worst deaths (infants, long and painful diseases, wars and torture, etc). That said, as long as not many people try this (the environmental cost would be high), if many people think about this possibility and that helps them cope with their mortality, and that of their loved ones, good for them.
  - Smaug123 6y ago

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

Surely mass cryogenics is a non-starter in this day and age when we are concerned with lowering carbon emissions. All that refrigeration in perpetuity would consume so much energy, and keeping the dead frozen would erase the gains that we expect to get from the gradual decline in birthrates.

Cpoll 6y ago
Are the carbon emissions that big of a deal? Every house in North America has at least one freezer. What scale are you envisioning when you say "mass"? I've sometimes fancied that the discovery of immortality might be good for the environment, it changes the incentives for the biggest abusers. With that said, I'm not entirely confident of that in practice.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > Every house in North America has at least one freezer. Cryonics requires the maintenance of a temperature far colder than any household freezer. > What scale are you envisioning when you say "mass"? I just mean that it might hardly seem acceptable to freeze more terminally ill people than just a few ultra-wealthy eccentrics.
est31 6y ago
Volume scales cubically while surface area with the square of the length. It should be possible to build large scalable cooled facilities. I do agree though that we aren't ready for such a system yet, both legally (currently a frozen person counts as dead, leading to their assets being taken away) and ecologically (carrying capacity limits of our planet). One day we might, who knows.

dr_dshiv 6y ago

I'm a fan! Seems like a nice way to die. Would you have a planned death at 75 to potentially get resurrected in 200 years? I say yes. I like how it creates death planning. Just better hope the interest keeps compounding!

klmadfejno 6y ago

I think you'll have better luck trying dark majycks to become a ghost personally.

Smaug123 6y ago
… por que no los dos?

lonelyasacloud 6y ago

What, risk waking up to be transported to a "re-education" facility because what you did (or believed) in the past is no longer acceptable/legal to the current Maoist/Rightwing/Religious/Populist nut jobs in charge. Wake up to find the planet inundated and starving. Wake up to find that every single person you loved is now dead ... seems a bit of a hard sell.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
My gut says that people into cryogenics aren't big on human relationships.
xwdv 6y ago
Wake up to get put to work for another 100 years so you can pay more bills and then either die or be frozen again if you can afford it. Actually this would be a cool short story about someone who has to constantly go through this process, each time working deeper and deeper in the future only to be frozen again.

marcinzm 6y ago

That depends on how cynical you are. There's also a non-zero probability that you're woken up in some sort of dystopia, made immortal and tortured until the heat death of the universe. Basically "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." Death isn't the worst outcome imaginable.

biolurker1 6y ago

One would wonder on the rules of the forum where 500ers can downvote a comment that sparked such a nice discussion. Internet never ceases to dissapoint.

biolurker1 6y ago
Classic downvoter downvoted :) do it again!
Talanes 6y ago
I'm not someone who downvoted you, but you can't just assume everyone else sees value in the same things as you. Perhaps those votes are from people who find the whole digression about cryonics off-topic and boring?
- biolurker1 6y ago
  So any topic that I don't like I downvote even if other people like to discuss about it and it's about science. Cool I guess HN is not fairing better than reddit here.
podgaj 6y ago
People fear what they do not understand. This has been happening to me for the 25 years I have been on the internet. It does not happen when people talk to me in person. Most people come to the internet to validate their existence. I come to dismantle it.