33 ms·

What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

330 points by fbn79 4y ago

Veedrac 4y ago
As far as I can tell, the thesis of this article amounts to ‘cryonics is a weird idea, but what's even more weird is believing in the future.’ If you put aside the overt scorn, it's actually a fairly interesting article, and surprisingly upbeat at that.
- RajT88 4y ago
  That scorn seems earned. Little progress has been made on raising the dead in 50 years. I mean, CPR has gotten better for sure. But that's just for people who are mostly dead. Not going to work on people who are all-the-way-dead. Anyone claiming high chances of resurrection in some sci-fi future are just blathing.
  - smaddox 4y ago
    I'm not sure that's entirely true. Scientists have successfully sliced, imaged, and analyzed (i.e. determined the connectome for) the entire brain of very small animal, the common fruit fly, Drosophila. We're still a long way from turning that into a virtual simulation of the creature, but it's a significant step towards it.
    - rewgs 4y ago
      The idea of eventually creating a virtual simulation of the human brain, or even human body, modeling environmental variables and all, totally fascinates me. Are there any sources you’d recommend for someone looking to learn more about this?
  - gpm 4y ago
    I agree the scorn seems earned, but for a bit of a different reason. Based on the article it sounds like these bodies are being "preserved" in an absolutely destroyed state. They've kept the outside pretty, but they've pulverized their insides during the freezing process. Even if cryogenics works one day, the chance that these people can be revived seems extremely remote. The chance that the "store the body and not just the head" idea helps seems even more remote given that the organs, blood veseels, etc are destroyed. They didn't discuss it (presumably verifiable information is hard to come by), but if the rest of the body is that destroyed, it seems unlikely that the brain is doing much better..
    - radu_floricica 4y ago
      Haven't read the article (have to finish coffee and start work) but modern cryo procedures are the opposite of this. They guarantee perfect preservation, but they offer no known restoring process.
  - nwiswell 4y ago
    Yeah. I just read the entire Wait But Why article linked elsewhere in the thread, and it seems to be taken as a given that technology will continue to increase at an exponential rate, and so the ability to precisely detect and arbitrarily manipulate the positions of individual atoms has got to be in our not-impossibly-distant future. But I think we are having trouble really grasping the magnitude of that challenge compared to the progress made by science and rationalism so far. Today's medical interventions are breathtaking in effect compared to the state of the art of a hundred years ago, but the complexity of those interventions themselves does not even approach the complexity of the biological systems which are being restored. They are really very crude solutions. Even cutting-edge stuff like mRNA vaccines involves hijacking existing machinery rather than creating new machinery from whole cloth. Anyhow, it's possible that humanity will go a long way, and that extinction is not in our future, but that nevertheless some problems will simply forever be beyond our intellectual capacity. It's not hard to imagine that all the requisite knowledge to accomplish this kind of techno-necromancy might not even be attainable in a single lifespan -- even a lifespan augmented by future technology. Maybe AI solves that problem, but it would also be real weird to wake up in the future to discover that a race of incomprehensibly brilliant machines has resurrected you as a pet out of sheer boredom. Ultimately, it appears that the odds of "successful cryonic preservation" due to any foreseeable reason are 0%. So a decision to do it would come down to betting against my own ability to predict the future. Fair enough: I've been wrong before, but I'm probably not wrong this time.
joshu 4y ago
disney on ice
DrNosferatu 4y ago
I see this as the central plot device of a great new TV streaming series! With all the quirkiness of the 70s and giving Westworld a run for its money ;)
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Woody Allen already wrote the pilot with "Sleeper" (1973). https://youtu.be/D2fYguIX17Q https://youtu.be/D2fYguIX17Q
- riffic 4y ago
  "Welcome to the world of tomorrow!"
- yreg 4y ago
  Is the title of the series a secret?
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Futurama?
richbell 4y ago
If this article piqued your interest, Atrocity Guide has a fantastic video about the history of cryonics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ2YEESTQUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ2YEESTQUI
jcampbell1 4y ago
I thought the idea is the brain is going to be scanned and uploaded to the Matrix.
- lavezza 4y ago
  I think that’s the most likely successful outcome. 1) human mind can be simulated 2) human consciousness is totally dependent on physical connections of brain neurons 3) something like nanobots are able to determine the frozen brain connections despite the damage of being frozen 4) some organization is curious enough to do the work to bring you back 5) live your second life, hopefully in some type of humanoid android and not your great-great-great-grandkids PlayStation 25 The likelihood of all of that happening is probably pretty low. But you have 0% chance of coming back if you don’t get frozen.
User23 4y ago
Was it Niven or Heinlein that speculated people in the future would be like screw you popsicles, we need organ donors?
- evronm 4y ago
  Niven.
- wombatpm 4y ago
  Niven also had the idea that cryopreservation failed, but the the frozen brains could be liquified to extract the RNA encoded memories and injected into criminals who had been mind wiped. See World Out of Time, Integral Trees, and Smoke Ring
- twelve40 4y ago
  that doesn't sound practical. a few hundred donors, and in a weird condition, too? that's negligible.
schneems 4y ago
If you like sci-fi the “bobiverse” series that starts with We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is good and use cryogenics as a central part of the setup. One question it explores: what exactly might people in the future want to do with the consciousness that have been frozen (hint it might not be good), and why? Not award winning like Octavia Butler but it’s a fun read.
- sircastor 4y ago
  I very much enjoyed The Bobiverse series, and those parts frightened me a little. I'm a competent programmer, but I think faced with the challenge of writing (for instance) my own VR to maintain a semblance of self would require a lot of self-discipline. I'd probably end up driving a garbage truck as was suggested early in the first book...
drchiu 4y ago
Years ago when I was in medical school, I concluded to improve quality of life, no matter how finite, is a better endeavour than to prolong it. There's something tremendously philosophically satisfying to recognizing that death is just the recycling of life so that new life can happen.
- abletonlive 4y ago
  This is the mindset of most of the medical field so basically you bought into the status quo. Nothing profound about that. Those that are interested in longevity reject such notions because it leads to very little research in how to prolong life, or see death as a disease worth curing.
  - drchiu 4y ago
    I suppose what I didn’t reveal is that I spent a lot of time before medicine trying to coax cells whether in a culture or some other medium to grow in the way I wanted it to grow. And it was hard. It’s been a while, but if I could recall correctly, cells tended to have a finiteness in their very nature. I think at some subconscious level, I interpreted this as nature’s way of expressing that is how things are designed to be. I don’t do life science anymore, but deal with computers now. And it’s a whole lot more predictable and malleable. (Heck, it’s easy if I were to compare it to running gels or prepping cell lines.) But I would be ecstatic if I could witness some science fiction level advancement in this field in my lifetime. I doubt it, but I would be amazed should it happen.
    - RajT88 4y ago
      > It’s been a while, but if I could recall correctly, cells tended to have a finiteness in their very nature. This is known: https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hayflick_limit https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hayflick_limit
      - drchiu 4y ago
        Yeah that. There’s something even more subtle. Experiments run with certain older lines just… failed more. It’s weird. The supervisor would say, “Yeah go to X’s lab and grab theirs.” Like the reproducibility is contingent on so many factors. Very depressing and tedious. There’s definitely a lot we don’t know and the knowledge gap is huge. And even if it can be done in the lab, translating some finding to a workable therapeutic is another story.
adolph 4y ago
The article refers to cryonic storage units as Dewars: The vacuum flask was designed and invented by Scottish scientist Sir James Dewar in 1892 as a result of his research in the field of cryogenics and is sometimes called a Dewar flask in his honour. While performing experiments in determining the specific heat of the element palladium, Dewar made a brass chamber that he enclosed in another chamber to keep the palladium at its desired temperature. He evacuated the air between the two chambers, creating a partial vacuum to keep the temperature of the contents stable. Dewar refused to patent his invention, and the flask, as developed by others using new materials such as glass and aluminium, became a significant tool for chemical experiments and also a common household item. Dewar's design was quickly transformed into a commercial item in 1904 as two German glassblowers, Reinhold Burger and Albert Aschenbrenner, discovered that it could be used to keep cold drinks cold and warm drinks warm and invented a more robust flask design, which was suited for everyday use. . . . In his subsequent attempt to claim the rights to the invention, Dewar instead lost a court case to the company.
- smaddox 4y ago
  > it could be used to keep cold drinks cold and warm drinks warm The classic dad joke: So if I put my cold beer and my hot soup in there, how does it know which is which?
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Or a warm beer and gazpacho.
deleted 4y ago
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tempestn 4y ago
This actually reminds me of something I was thinking about a couple days ago. You know how people can be resuscitated after hours with their hearts stopped, if they were in near-freezing conditions? Like people who have drowned in frozen lakes and then been brought back hours later? Someone coined the phrase, "You're not dead until you're warm and dead." Well, I wonder if that could be done long term. I'm guessing all the body's processes would be dramatically slowed in such a scenario, giving similar benefits to cryopreservation. Presumably it would come with many new problems (I doubt the brain would survive long term like that without at least some circulation of oxygenated blood for starters), but it's at least conceivable those would be easier to solve than the problem of freezing and thawing a body without irreversible damage.
- purpleflame1257 4y ago
  Good thought, and we are in fact working on it. Here's a layman's article about it from WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/mars-hiberators-guide-to-the-galaxy/ https://www.wired.com/story/mars-hiberators-guide-to-the-gal...
- sigmar 4y ago
  There are a bunch of examples of that (mostly referred to as suspended animation) and a few that even have been covered in medical journals. There are examples on wikipedia[1]. I researched it as a topic for a very strange class I took in college and remember there were more than a few gov't research projects (DARPA and others) trying to achieve various means of suspended animation for military and space applications. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation#Basic_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation#Basic_prin...
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  Surgeons do use induced hypothermia in some situations. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-11389464 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-11389464
esturk 4y ago
Regardless of how some might use this tech to prolong life, I'm confident this tech, or "Hibernation" in other literature, is needed if humanity ever hopes for interstellar space travel.
yreg 4y ago
Wait But Why has an in-depth article advocating for cryonics. (As usual, very tech-optimistic.) https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
kragen 4y ago
unfortunate that the author didn't bother to distinguish between the effects of state-of-the-art cryopreservation by vitrification and the older cryopreservation procedures that produced the massive fracture damages they mention an awful lot of the article seems to be about how weird it is for people to study things carefully and try to do things that are not known to be possible, with the implicit subtext that being weird is bad abandoning that ideology is how we got the industrial revolution and modern civilization, but unfortunately its adherents didn't die out completely, and will likely bring an end to that epoch
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > unfortunate that the author didn't bother to distinguish between the effects of state-of-the-art cryopreservation by vitrification and the older cryopreservation procedures that produced the massive fracture damages they mention Your comment also does not do this. What are these techniques that have results that are not like the ones described in the article?
  - kelnos 4y ago
    Er, the parent literally did that, in the bit you quoted. All the results of thawing mentioned in the article are from the older freezing procedures. Current methods (as mentioned in the article) use a form of vitrification. My understanding is that no one has been (intentionally, carefully) thawed after being vitrified using "modern" techniques, so we really don't know what condition a body would be in after unthawing using current technology. Now, "not knowing" doesn't prove anything, of course, and I think it was correct for the article to describe the evidence we do have, even if it's necessarily out of date. But it would have been nice for them to acknowledge that the unthawing data we have is not representative of what would happen if a "current-gen" cryonics "patient" were to be thawed today.
    - chordalkeyboard 4y ago
      > My understanding is that no one has been (intentionally, carefully) thawed after being vitrified using "modern" techniques, so we really don't know what condition a body would be in after unthawing using current technology. why haven't they tested this on animals or non-paying cadavers? It would seem unwise to pay to keep vitrified bodies frozen if one had no understanding of how the bodies would be when they were unfrozen.
1970-01-01 4y ago
How long before SpaceX starts up a service to dump these into a lunar lava tube for hyper-long term storage?
- thombat 4y ago
  They're relatively warm places so are conjectured to make a nice(ish) place for the quick rather than the dead. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube
- Tepix 4y ago
  Wouldn't it be better to be put into a crater that never sees sunlight? Ideally with some protection against micro-meteorites. There's still the radiation issue...
harry8 4y ago
So here is one of my current fav. conspiracy theories AND it involves Elon. Remember the first payload of his "Falcon Heavy" rocket - some tesla or other? Had a tailor's dummy in a space suit strapped in the front seat. That was a real person in the suit who had paid for the most effective, reliable and longest lasting cryogenic freeze available. No maintenance power required. Will continue to be frozen even if the earth explodes. Not beholdent to anyone alive to make the right decisions... Elon decided not to just hide it in plain sight but make a spectacle of it with live feeds etc. Probably nonsense but makes a certian amount more logical sense than a dummy in a space suit, huh?
- pnpnp 4y ago
  It can actually get really hot in space without some kind of active heat transfer. The body in the suit would probably alternate between freezing and frying. Not a great way to preserve a body IMO.
  - elkos 4y ago
    Depends on where in space. In LEO... sure. In the orbit of the Tesla Roadster it's mostly warm isn't it?
    - pnpnp 4y ago
      Since it’s never really in the shadow of a planet (heliocentric orbit), it’s probably hotter overall. From the videos I’ve seen, it’s also spinning really slowly. I think you could see off-gassing in some of the videos. I looked into it a little further, and there was speculation it was from the plastics and paint getting extremely hot in direct sunlight. “Space” is roughly the same temperature (a little warmer near stars with particles and free gas), but the direct solar radiation is what is so hot. Since space is an excellent insulator, getting rid of the thermal energy becomes a problem when you’re not shaded. If you want to read some more on this, check out what the JWST has done for thermal management. It’s really cool (no pun intended).
  - harry8 4y ago
    Trying to use facts, logic, and this "science" stuff against me is futile as I have a perfectly good conspiracy theory! The silver suit couldn't insulate and keep the heat out?
moloch-hai 4y ago
How could this be published without mentioning the Bide-a-Wee Scandal touched on in Larry Niven fiction?
- mannykannot 4y ago
  I was going to say that Larry Niven wrote a novel (A World out of Time?) in which the cryogenically frozen were resurrected to perform menial or otherwise undesirable jobs, as a form of indentured servitude. IIRC, trust funds set up by the deceased to pay for their preservation and resurrection had been dissolved on the grounds that they were strangling the economy. If Bide-a-Wee was not from this novel, a reference would be much appreciated, as my cursory search has not found it.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Bide-a-Wee was about organ harvesting. It is mentioned off-hand in various stories as a throwaway world-building detail. It deserves a Wikipedia page.
  - LordGrey 4y ago
    Trust funds: Pierce the Checker (Peersa) said, "The dead cannot own money. The courts decided that long ago." "Corsicles" had to pay The State back for storage and resurrection, as you mentioned, which was the reasoning behind the Bussard Ramjet training Corbell received. Niven sidestepped the whole "how to correctly resurrect a frozen person" problem by claiming that Corbell's memory/personality were somehow extracted from his corpse (destroying the body completely), and then used to reanimate a convicted felon. If Corbell failed his training, the felon's mind would be wiped and another corpsicle's personality would be tried. That book introduced so many big ideas to the young me. It was the first Niven book I'd read; Ringworld was the second.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      "Corpsicles".
simonw 4y ago
Something I find fascinating about living in the San Francisco Bay Area is that Cryonics has had occasional bursts of interest around here dating back to the 1970s... which means there are genuinely warehouses out here that have had frozen human bodies sitting in them for 40+ years at this point! I keep hoping to score a tour of one some day.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  That's assuming the companies managing those bodies/warehouses haven't gone bankrupt and chucked the bodies in a dumpster in that intervening 40 years
banga 4y ago
I find the whole concept hilarious. There's an implicit assumption that someone in the future will be bothered to resurrect a frozen body, then resurrect them from death (since they already died before being popsicle-ified). And even if they could be bothered, the thawed would be a lab experiment, owned by whatever corporation pulled off the magic. And if magically they came out of the ordeal functional and free, there'd be those pesky bureaucrats to deal with (id, taxes, all the fun stuff). Hilarious.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  >”there'd be those pesky bureaucrats to deal with (id, taxes, all the fun stuff). Hilarious.” Turns out, death can be cheated but the taxman cannot.
- renonn 4y ago
  that was great to read
- dmreedy 4y ago
  If you haven't already, and without too many spoilers further than some (non-comedic) resonance with your comment, Charles Sheffield's Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a worthy read.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  People spend millions on the lottery. Old rich people spending their money on a revival ticket with similar chances doesn't seem that bad to me.
- pmichaud 4y ago
  I’m not signed up, but I know many people who are, and none of them assume any of these things. No one “expects” it to work, it’s just that they figure a long shot is better than no shot. The people I’ve talked to about it put their chances of successful revival at significantly less than 1%, and they think that’s worth it.
  - veilrap 4y ago
stephc_int13 4y ago
Cryonic preservation might or might not be possible, this is clearly a difficult process but we're never going to find out without trying. Dead people have no use for money, doing this kind of research is not a waste, in my opinion, even if it is very unlikely to work at this stage.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  > Dead people have no use for money, doing this kind of research is not a waste, in my opinion, even if it is very unlikely to work at this stage. Umm, people still alive have use for money. The money could go towards helping the lives of the living, so it absolutely is a waste.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    Well, if we accept the reality that the wealthy people doing this weren't going to have that money taxed away, I'd rather it go into a scientific pursuit that might have some payoff than just go into some generationally wealthy kids trust fund
  - veilrap 4y ago
    The people running the Cryo business are living people who get paid for the task. No more wasteful than any other relatively benign thing someone is going to spend their money on.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Yeah, we should expropriate the assets of [Nonprofit that does thing I don’t like] to spend it on [thing I like]. Almost everything people in rich countries do is a ridiculous luxury compared to the fact that it costs about $1,000 to save someone from dying of malaria. Most of everything humans do is clearly a waste. We can’t even get it together to prepare for the next pandemic, never mind existential risk. This is besides the fact that nothing matters. There’s no God to ascribe meaning to things. Things only matter if they matter to you.
    - 4y ago
twelve40 4y ago
great little summary about the state of cryonics. However, as an aside, absolutely hated those force-injected spoilers in large fonts scattered throughout the article. What is even the purpose of these annoying things?
plasticeagle 4y ago
I wonder what leads people to believe that anyone in the future will be interested in applying their staggering new re-animation technologies to centuries-old frozen corpses? There's a comment somewhere in this thread about perpetual motion. This tech seems to be its mirror-image, equal in impossibility, but opposite in aim. To stop all motion and decay, forever. Sometimes, it's wise to be circumspect, and to admit the possibility of a future technology that will change everything. In the case of cryogenic storage of viable humans, however, I think it is straight-up, bona-fide, no-exceptions, impossible.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  If we found a caveman now we would definetely thaw it out to try to ask it some questions and study it. Why anyone Would actually want to be put in such a position in the future, I'm honestly not sure. You would be more akin to a zoo animal than a person allowed to walk around in a certainly completely alien society, I'd imagine.
  - ridgered4 4y ago
    I watched a pretty horrifying scifi recently (I think it was on netflix) about a guy who chose to be frozen and was thawed in the early experimental stages of the reviving process and ends up as a lab rat basically.
- twelve40 4y ago
  why not? i think it would be an awesome experiment. If we somehow had a few hundred frozen people from say the middle ages, I think it would be very interesting and worth it to wake them up. So I believe it comes down to technology to do that, and these clumsy horrible initial attempts will hopefully improve over time.
wintorez 4y ago
Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.
- ranUltra 4y ago
  Four years ago, I moved to a different continent with a totally different culture. After four years, I love living here more than in my home country where I grew up. So your argument isn’t really convincing.
- brnt 4y ago
  I've lived as a stranger in a strange land and I regret returning 'home', whatever that means. Sounds like cryo is right up my alley! If it only worked...
  - b1zguy 4y ago
    Can you please elaborate on why your regret returning home?
    - antonvs 4y ago
      I’m not the person you replied to, but for many of us “home” is not a first world or Western country. The opportunities there are much fewer, quality of life is lower in many tangible ways - do you like having reliable power, internet, mail/shipping, safe roads? Dangerous crime is a much more serious problem, and corruption is rife. Healthcare is subpar if you’re not wealthy. Education is generally poor, which has all sorts of consequences for society as a whole. There’s also the fact that after living elsewhere for many years, the home you go back to is not the same as the home you left.
    - brnt 4y ago
      Moving abroad and making some sort of life for yourself is two things: 1. a review of your preconceptions and a test for your ability to adapt, 2. if you stick it out, you may integrate new ways and viewpoints into who you are and what you think. When you then go back to people who are similar (because that's always going to be the case to some extent, even if locally the community feels and/or thinks itself diverse) you will frequently feel that others have not 'progressed' or are 'stuck' in those culturally determined ways. It's hard to share that growth with people that haven't done the same, which is I think why expats stick together, even when they're back. I moved between Western countries I should perhaps add.
ggm 4y ago
I would love to know how this is handled in other parts of the world. Particularly the regulatory side because this is a potential health nightmare for OH&S if not the water table and the neighbourhood. The escrow requirements for maintainance of state would be interesting too. Who exactly benefits from the spend? Is this contestable by a future generation? In effect, does the corpse become property? Perpetual funding is a pretty bizarre concept, but that said the entire 'south sea bubble' debt exist inside British gilts for hundreds of years, they only wiped them out recently at the same time as the WW1 debt, so carrying forward into the future does happen, albiet mostly at scale by governments. I guess if you turned the dewer flasks into a freak show and charged, you might even be able to fund the cooldown by revenue.
- Loic 4y ago
  We have this in Germany, in the Ruhr area. If they do not pump water non-stop, the complete area would be flooded[0]. This is because coal mining has been bringing the complete cities below the natural level of the water table. Costs are taken care of by a foundation. [0]: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewigkeitskosten https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewigkeitskosten Sadly no English version but some pictures.
hellothere1337 4y ago
In my opinion at least clawing desperately for more time on this world is a pretty bad idea. Say there is nothing after death, then every such advancement in life extension will create even more dread of dying because you can lose eternal life (in the ideal case). I'd personally be much more scared to live knowing that at any point I can lose possibly millions of years of experiences by dying.
donatj 4y ago
> ten months had elapsed between his death and freezing, so his body was in rotten shape — no pun intended — from the get-go and was eventually thawed There is literally no way that pun was unintended. Were it so, it’d be easier to just choose a different word rather than note it’s unintentionality.
- terminal_d 4y ago
  Yeah they probably were in that deal just for the easy money.
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Mistletoe 4y ago
As someone that has frozen cells down many times successfully, I don’t think this will ever work for bodies. If you could save your DNA and a few cells and be cloned at a later date is that good enough for you? No memories but the same code. Is that still “you”? It’s like being an identical twin of yourself.
- Self-Perfection 4y ago
  Can you imagine any experiment that will adjust your belief? Show you that there is a chance it might work for bodies?
  - Mistletoe 4y ago
    Yes, any experiment that freezes down something large and multicellular like an organ and thaws it and it works. The reason freezing cells works is that they have no large 3d structure and the surface area to volume works with the slow freeze down process (1 deg. C per min.) and rapid thawing (as fast as possible) necessary for them to survive.
    - Self-Perfection 4y ago
      Cold resistant frogs fit your description. Hyla japonica withstands freezing to -30°C They function just fine after thawing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_tree_frog#Cold_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_tree_frog#Cold_resist...
- yreg 4y ago
  No, that's not good enough, software (beyond epigenetics) is what matters here. I would say, that personality is the key thing that one might want to preserve. Ideally, memories as well, the more intact they are, the better. If possible, running it on the original hardware (i.e. the same brain) will satisfy people who believe in continuity of consciousness. (People hesitant to use a teletransporter[0]) Even a computer-simulated mind based on a scan of the original brain would I think be more 'me' than my clone. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox
UberFly 4y ago
I wanted to know the state of Ted William's head, so I did a search. This is what I found: In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams' head was abused at the facility. Johnson claims a technician took baseball-like swings at Williams' frozen head with a monkey wrench. What?
- pavlov 4y ago
  As the pharaohs already discovered, an immortality plan that depends on generations of low-paid underlings to maintain the dead elite's physical bodies is fundamentally flawed.
  - wiz21c 4y ago
    Fortunately, this statement is true for many plans of the elite :-)
    - recuter 4y ago
      I too upon hearing of a lunatic beating a frozen disembodied head to gallagheresque pulp with a blunt instrument can't help but smile sardonically if the resulting goop was formerly wealthier than me. Cool and normal. Power to the people bro. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
      - aussieshibe 4y ago
        It's just like I always say: class warfare is a dish best served cryogenically frozen.
      - lovich 4y ago
        Might have done the world a service. Immortality combined with winner takes all capitalism will just lead to an entrenched race of god emperors that won’t be removed ever except by society wide violence, basically like medieval kingdoms or dynastic empires. Market economies have helped limit that a bit(wealth inheritances still have a problem), but one of the unstated backstops of that system is that eventually the rich people in question do eventually die
scarygliders 4y ago
If one of the reasons for wishing to be frozen, is to see what the future looks like, then there is an alternative; Einstein to the rescue! Just strap yourself into a spaceship capable of reaching within a few % of the speed of light, and fly around for a bit. No need to wait till you're at death's door and turned into a corpsicle. Just head on out there for a few years at relativistic speed. By the time you slow down and return, you'll be having pina coladas with your new Felidae-Sapiens masters ;)
- eouwt 4y ago
  "just"
  - scarygliders 4y ago
    The whole post was made in "humorous irony" ;) However, successfully producing a relativistic spaceship is probably more possible right now than successfully creating and reviving human corpsicles... just sayin' ;)
- Topgamer7 4y ago
  The flaw in your theory being that it would take you equally as long to slow down as it would to reach that speed. So you would age out on the deceleration. I suppose you could accelerate in an orbit around earth to maintain contact. But my understanding of relativity is poor
  - scarygliders 4y ago
    Depends on how good your spacecraft is at speeding up and slowing down, really. There are many designs which could probably do this relatively (heh) quickly. I'm sure producing one of these things is more possible right now than freezing/thawing/reviving a human. Alternatively, to compensate for how long it would take to speed up and slow down, just have our intrepid time-o-naut climb into their suspended animatio--- oh heck ;)
  - BreakfastB0b 4y ago
    You would age the same amount during deceleration that you did during acceleration. I think your misunderstanding comes from the relativistic twin paradox. From the perspective of the twin on the spaceship accelerating away from earth, the twin on earth seems to age slowly as well until the space ship twin decelerates and then turns around, during which they perceive the twin on earth to age rapidly. The acceleration / deceleration of the space ship twin’s frame of reference is what breaks the symmetry of the no-preferred frame of reference during flight.
stareatgoats 4y ago
According to Wikipedia, more than 9 million people in the US have reported Near Death Experience (NDE) [0]. Some common traits that were reported: - A sense/awareness of being dead. - A sense of peace, well-being, and painlessness. Positive emotions. A sense of removal from the world. - An out-of-body experience. - A perception of one's body from an outside position, sometimes observing medical professionals performing resuscitation efforts. - A "tunnel experience" or entering a darkness. A sense of moving up, or through, a passageway or staircase. - A rapid movement toward and/or sudden immersion in a powerful light (or "Being of Light") which communicates telepathically with the person. - An intense feeling of unconditional love and acceptance. I'm not sure, but this feels relevant juxtaposed the prospect of returning to life in a body of unsure quality, with all my friends, relatives and acquaintances long gone, into a world that I can not expect to understand much of. Even if it ever became possible, which I sincerely doubt. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience
- pavlov 4y ago
  If you ask people to describe their dreams and find similarities, it’s not reasonable to assume those dreams represent some kind of hidden reality rather than simply shared psychological responses and social influences. I don’t see why these reports should be treated any differently.
- Retric 4y ago
  That’s hardly the only or even most common response. As mentioned in that Wikipedia link people often report: anguish distress a void devastation vast emptiness etc Not mentioned but common is extreme pain. But, such responses are less comforting and therefore less often repeated. It’s the same sort of filtering that makes specific kinds of posts go viral. As mentioned in Parnia's study where 63 people with NDE and none of them had an out of body experience, the actual breakdown of experiences don’t line up with what is generally reported.
  - dmix 4y ago
    Yeah that wikipedia article did not support the comment very well at all.
tomgp 4y ago
“ All but one of the first frozen futurists failed in their quest for immortality.” Seems like it might be premature to claim that the remaining one succeeded in their quest for immortality
- ttyyzz 4y ago
  As far as I understood, it's the only one that hasn't turned into jelly (yet).
xg15 4y ago
Assuming all of this doesn't just end with the bodies being dumped at some point, I wonder if future medicine will use the frozen bodies and brains more like a kind of reference to construct an AI from, instead of really trying to revive them. Sort of how historians can read badly damaged ancient documents, but usually copy over their results to a new medium instead of trying to repair the original document. A lot of the usual philosophical discussions following whether or not the AI is the same as the real person would probably follow...
- the__alchemist 4y ago
  The book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell dives into a related topic; both frozen bodies, and brain reconstruction, reasoning through its potential consequences, and the experiences of a brain without a physical reference. It's quite long though! Also explores some unrelated concepts like finding truth an an internet world, Paradise Lost, and a fantasy adventure.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  I have a vague memory of watching a sci-fi mini-series in the nineties with a similar premise… something with "Lazarus" in the title. Ah, found it: Cold Lazarus. [0] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  One of the big cons of this brand of immortality is that there is a pretty reasonable probability that if you manage to get uploaded at all someone will use copies of the result for horrific experiments or even just entertainment. You could wake up in hell, basically. Seems to me anyone who thinks this option is strictly better than death lacks imagination.
hennell 4y ago
> All but one of the first frozen futurists failed in their quest for immortality. I really felt like I'd missed some big headline here.
DonHopkins 4y ago
My somewhat eccentric friend Keith Henson once performed the grisly task of "converting whole body to neuro", which the article mentions: downgrading some of Alcor's full-body customers to head-only by removing their heads from their bodies with a chainsaw, or as Alcore's illustrated report delicately explained, "a rapid conversion to neuropreservation was done using a high-speed electric chain saw." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson Keith is quite a character, who also successfully performed one of the most hilarious trolls ever against Scientology lawyers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891 >Just be glad you didn't have to explain an in joke about ftp sites, the local loopback address, and a troll, in a deposition, under oath, to Scientology lawyers, like Keith Henson did. The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, page 93-94: https://www.gwern.net/docs/transhumanism/1990-regis-greatmambochickenandthetranshumancondition.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/transhumanism/1990-regis-greatmam... >Finally some evidence about the success of cryonics emerged from among the ranks of the frozen themselves. Not that they were revived, they were only defrosted. Or at least parts of them were. >In November of 1983, for the first time ever, a cryonics firm conducted autopsies on the defrosted mortal remains of two Trans Time patients who had been converted to neuro. The parties in question were a married couple who had wanted to be frozen after death. They hadn’t had the required lump sum in advance, but Trans Time didn’t want to turn them away, so it accepted them on a contingency, pay-as-you-go basis. Monthly maintenance costs would be covered by their loving son. >When the son’s parents died, Trans Time suspended them as whole-body patients, which was their desire, and for a number of years everything went along exactly as planned. But then the son himself died, in an automobile accident, after which the monthly payments ceased. Trans Time kept the parents frozen for a while, but it was clear that sooner or later something had to be done. It was a private company, operating without government support — indeed, often in the teeth of government opposition — and could not afford an extended period of unpaid maintenance, especially when for fifteen out of its sixteen years of existence the company had run at loss. >But then the Alcor Life Extension Foundation came to the rescue. It would take care of the frozen parents, essentially on a charity basis, but only on the condition that they could be “converted” first, which is to say, converted from whole-body to neuro, the latter being far less expensive than the former. “The same capsule that you put a whole body in,” Saul Kent once explained, “you can probably put twenty heads in.” >This, of course, meant that the heads had to come off while the patients were still frozen. Not that this was much of a problem. As Alcor’s illustrated report on the case explains, “a rapid conversion to neuropreservation was done using a high-speed electric chain saw.” >This was now a golden opportunity to see how frozen bodies actually fared over their years in storage—nine years for the husband, five for the wife. So the Alcor men thawed out and autopsied the newly decapitated bodies. >There was both bad and good news. “The most unexpected finding as a result of these autopsies,” says the report, “is the discovery of serious fracturing in all of the suspension patients.” There were fractures in the outer skin, in the subcutaneous fat, in the blood vessels next to the heart, in the arteries and veins. The right lung of one patient was cracked almost in half, as was the liver, and there were open wounds on the hands and right wrist. >This was not encouraging, but it was all too easy to lose one’s perspective. The fact of the matter was that the injuries suffered by these frozen corpses were no worse than what’s seen in hospital shock-trauma units every day of the week—broken (if not absent) arms and legs, and so on—but many of these people end up recovering. The fact that the frozen corpses were not in pristine shape was not by itself any cause for alarm. >The good news was that much of the bodies survived perfectly intact. The palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, and other structures were all in fine shape. As for the brains, they remained in suspension and were not examined. >To Alcor, the whole thing was a learning experience. The initial suspensions had not been perfect, but all things considered, the patients came through the whole process about as well as anyone could expect.
Tyndale 4y ago
credit_guy 4y ago
Isochoric supercooling looks much more promising. The body does not freeze solid. The temperature is lowered to below freezing, but all fluids remain fluids. I'm not aware of experiments with animals, and obviously not humans. But here's an experiment with human cardiac tissue [1], which went quite well. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02650-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02650-9
- tabtab 4y ago
  Preserving sufficient structure of the brain is the most important. Hearts may not be a good test.
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    This test was a pragmatic one directed by the needs of heart transplants. There is no brain tissue transplant as of now. But there's no reason for science to not try other tissues and then even lab animals, then even pets, and at some point humans.
acqbu 4y ago
Is there life after death? Why is there anything at all?
tim333 4y ago
>Cryonics — attempting to cryopreserve the human body — is widely considered a pseudoscience. It's not really. It's an attempt to preserve the body and not much more of a science than me attempting to preserve some food by putting it in my freezer. Who knows if future technology will be able to bring people back? Claiming it definitely will not without evidence doesn't seem very scientific.
Maursault 4y ago
I, Hatchet Jack ...do hearby leaveth my bear rifle to whatever finds it.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKUPu1epqnU&t=3m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKUPu1epqnU&t=3m20s
hahamaster 4y ago
Sucks being an early adopter.
Wadajot 4y ago
> The family of a man frozen in 1978 eventually got tired of paying for him. The facility offered to cut off his head and store it for free, but the family turned them down. Instead, the body was thawed, submerged in a vat of formaldehyde like a laboratory specimen, and buried in that condition. What?!

330 points by fbn79 4y ago

As far as I can tell, the thesis of this article amounts to ‘cryonics is a weird idea, but what's even more weird is believing in the future.’ If you put aside the overt scorn, it's actually a fairly interesting article, and surprisingly upbeat at that.

RajT88 4y ago
That scorn seems earned. Little progress has been made on raising the dead in 50 years. I mean, CPR has gotten better for sure. But that's just for people who are mostly dead. Not going to work on people who are all-the-way-dead. Anyone claiming high chances of resurrection in some sci-fi future are just blathing.
- smaddox 4y ago
  I'm not sure that's entirely true. Scientists have successfully sliced, imaged, and analyzed (i.e. determined the connectome for) the entire brain of very small animal, the common fruit fly, Drosophila. We're still a long way from turning that into a virtual simulation of the creature, but it's a significant step towards it.
  - rewgs 4y ago
    The idea of eventually creating a virtual simulation of the human brain, or even human body, modeling environmental variables and all, totally fascinates me. Are there any sources you’d recommend for someone looking to learn more about this?
- gpm 4y ago
  I agree the scorn seems earned, but for a bit of a different reason. Based on the article it sounds like these bodies are being "preserved" in an absolutely destroyed state. They've kept the outside pretty, but they've pulverized their insides during the freezing process. Even if cryogenics works one day, the chance that these people can be revived seems extremely remote. The chance that the "store the body and not just the head" idea helps seems even more remote given that the organs, blood veseels, etc are destroyed. They didn't discuss it (presumably verifiable information is hard to come by), but if the rest of the body is that destroyed, it seems unlikely that the brain is doing much better..
  - radu_floricica 4y ago
    Haven't read the article (have to finish coffee and start work) but modern cryo procedures are the opposite of this. They guarantee perfect preservation, but they offer no known restoring process.
- nwiswell 4y ago
  Yeah. I just read the entire Wait But Why article linked elsewhere in the thread, and it seems to be taken as a given that technology will continue to increase at an exponential rate, and so the ability to precisely detect and arbitrarily manipulate the positions of individual atoms has got to be in our not-impossibly-distant future. But I think we are having trouble really grasping the magnitude of that challenge compared to the progress made by science and rationalism so far. Today's medical interventions are breathtaking in effect compared to the state of the art of a hundred years ago, but the complexity of those interventions themselves does not even approach the complexity of the biological systems which are being restored. They are really very crude solutions. Even cutting-edge stuff like mRNA vaccines involves hijacking existing machinery rather than creating new machinery from whole cloth. Anyhow, it's possible that humanity will go a long way, and that extinction is not in our future, but that nevertheless some problems will simply forever be beyond our intellectual capacity. It's not hard to imagine that all the requisite knowledge to accomplish this kind of techno-necromancy might not even be attainable in a single lifespan -- even a lifespan augmented by future technology. Maybe AI solves that problem, but it would also be real weird to wake up in the future to discover that a race of incomprehensibly brilliant machines has resurrected you as a pet out of sheer boredom. Ultimately, it appears that the odds of "successful cryonic preservation" due to any foreseeable reason are 0%. So a decision to do it would come down to betting against my own ability to predict the future. Fair enough: I've been wrong before, but I'm probably not wrong this time.

joshu 4y ago

disney on ice

DrNosferatu 4y ago

I see this as the central plot device of a great new TV streaming series! With all the quirkiness of the 70s and giving Westworld a run for its money ;)

JKCalhoun 4y ago
Woody Allen already wrote the pilot with "Sleeper" (1973). https://youtu.be/D2fYguIX17Q https://youtu.be/D2fYguIX17Q
riffic 4y ago
"Welcome to the world of tomorrow!"
yreg 4y ago
Is the title of the series a secret?
HideousKojima 4y ago
Futurama?

richbell 4y ago

If this article piqued your interest, Atrocity Guide has a fantastic video about the history of cryonics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ2YEESTQUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ2YEESTQUI

jcampbell1 4y ago

I thought the idea is the brain is going to be scanned and uploaded to the Matrix.

lavezza 4y ago
I think that’s the most likely successful outcome. 1) human mind can be simulated 2) human consciousness is totally dependent on physical connections of brain neurons 3) something like nanobots are able to determine the frozen brain connections despite the damage of being frozen 4) some organization is curious enough to do the work to bring you back 5) live your second life, hopefully in some type of humanoid android and not your great-great-great-grandkids PlayStation 25 The likelihood of all of that happening is probably pretty low. But you have 0% chance of coming back if you don’t get frozen.

User23 4y ago

Was it Niven or Heinlein that speculated people in the future would be like screw you popsicles, we need organ donors?

evronm 4y ago
Niven.
wombatpm 4y ago
Niven also had the idea that cryopreservation failed, but the the frozen brains could be liquified to extract the RNA encoded memories and injected into criminals who had been mind wiped. See World Out of Time, Integral Trees, and Smoke Ring
twelve40 4y ago
that doesn't sound practical. a few hundred donors, and in a weird condition, too? that's negligible.

schneems 4y ago

If you like sci-fi the “bobiverse” series that starts with We Are Legion (We Are Bob) is good and use cryogenics as a central part of the setup. One question it explores: what exactly might people in the future want to do with the consciousness that have been frozen (hint it might not be good), and why? Not award winning like Octavia Butler but it’s a fun read.

sircastor 4y ago
I very much enjoyed The Bobiverse series, and those parts frightened me a little. I'm a competent programmer, but I think faced with the challenge of writing (for instance) my own VR to maintain a semblance of self would require a lot of self-discipline. I'd probably end up driving a garbage truck as was suggested early in the first book...

drchiu 4y ago

Years ago when I was in medical school, I concluded to improve quality of life, no matter how finite, is a better endeavour than to prolong it. There's something tremendously philosophically satisfying to recognizing that death is just the recycling of life so that new life can happen.

abletonlive 4y ago
This is the mindset of most of the medical field so basically you bought into the status quo. Nothing profound about that. Those that are interested in longevity reject such notions because it leads to very little research in how to prolong life, or see death as a disease worth curing.
- drchiu 4y ago
  I suppose what I didn’t reveal is that I spent a lot of time before medicine trying to coax cells whether in a culture or some other medium to grow in the way I wanted it to grow. And it was hard. It’s been a while, but if I could recall correctly, cells tended to have a finiteness in their very nature. I think at some subconscious level, I interpreted this as nature’s way of expressing that is how things are designed to be. I don’t do life science anymore, but deal with computers now. And it’s a whole lot more predictable and malleable. (Heck, it’s easy if I were to compare it to running gels or prepping cell lines.) But I would be ecstatic if I could witness some science fiction level advancement in this field in my lifetime. I doubt it, but I would be amazed should it happen.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    > It’s been a while, but if I could recall correctly, cells tended to have a finiteness in their very nature. This is known: https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hayflick_limit https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hayflick_limit
    - drchiu 4y ago
      Yeah that. There’s something even more subtle. Experiments run with certain older lines just… failed more. It’s weird. The supervisor would say, “Yeah go to X’s lab and grab theirs.” Like the reproducibility is contingent on so many factors. Very depressing and tedious. There’s definitely a lot we don’t know and the knowledge gap is huge. And even if it can be done in the lab, translating some finding to a workable therapeutic is another story.

adolph 4y ago

The article refers to cryonic storage units as Dewars: The vacuum flask was designed and invented by Scottish scientist Sir James Dewar in 1892 as a result of his research in the field of cryogenics and is sometimes called a Dewar flask in his honour. While performing experiments in determining the specific heat of the element palladium, Dewar made a brass chamber that he enclosed in another chamber to keep the palladium at its desired temperature. He evacuated the air between the two chambers, creating a partial vacuum to keep the temperature of the contents stable. Dewar refused to patent his invention, and the flask, as developed by others using new materials such as glass and aluminium, became a significant tool for chemical experiments and also a common household item. Dewar's design was quickly transformed into a commercial item in 1904 as two German glassblowers, Reinhold Burger and Albert Aschenbrenner, discovered that it could be used to keep cold drinks cold and warm drinks warm and invented a more robust flask design, which was suited for everyday use. . . . In his subsequent attempt to claim the rights to the invention, Dewar instead lost a court case to the company.

smaddox 4y ago
> it could be used to keep cold drinks cold and warm drinks warm The classic dad joke: So if I put my cold beer and my hot soup in there, how does it know which is which?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Or a warm beer and gazpacho.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tempestn 4y ago

This actually reminds me of something I was thinking about a couple days ago. You know how people can be resuscitated after hours with their hearts stopped, if they were in near-freezing conditions? Like people who have drowned in frozen lakes and then been brought back hours later? Someone coined the phrase, "You're not dead until you're warm and dead." Well, I wonder if that could be done long term. I'm guessing all the body's processes would be dramatically slowed in such a scenario, giving similar benefits to cryopreservation. Presumably it would come with many new problems (I doubt the brain would survive long term like that without at least some circulation of oxygenated blood for starters), but it's at least conceivable those would be easier to solve than the problem of freezing and thawing a body without irreversible damage.

purpleflame1257 4y ago
Good thought, and we are in fact working on it. Here's a layman's article about it from WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/mars-hiberators-guide-to-the-galaxy/ https://www.wired.com/story/mars-hiberators-guide-to-the-gal...
sigmar 4y ago
There are a bunch of examples of that (mostly referred to as suspended animation) and a few that even have been covered in medical journals. There are examples on wikipedia[1]. I researched it as a topic for a very strange class I took in college and remember there were more than a few gov't research projects (DARPA and others) trying to achieve various means of suspended animation for military and space applications. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation#Basic_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation#Basic_prin...
hotpotamus 4y ago
Surgeons do use induced hypothermia in some situations. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-11389464 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-11389464

esturk 4y ago

Regardless of how some might use this tech to prolong life, I'm confident this tech, or "Hibernation" in other literature, is needed if humanity ever hopes for interstellar space travel.

yreg 4y ago

Wait But Why has an in-depth article advocating for cryonics. (As usual, very tech-optimistic.) https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html

kragen 4y ago

unfortunate that the author didn't bother to distinguish between the effects of state-of-the-art cryopreservation by vitrification and the older cryopreservation procedures that produced the massive fracture damages they mention an awful lot of the article seems to be about how weird it is for people to study things carefully and try to do things that are not known to be possible, with the implicit subtext that being weird is bad abandoning that ideology is how we got the industrial revolution and modern civilization, but unfortunately its adherents didn't die out completely, and will likely bring an end to that epoch

pessimizer 4y ago
> unfortunate that the author didn't bother to distinguish between the effects of state-of-the-art cryopreservation by vitrification and the older cryopreservation procedures that produced the massive fracture damages they mention Your comment also does not do this. What are these techniques that have results that are not like the ones described in the article?
- kelnos 4y ago
  Er, the parent literally did that, in the bit you quoted. All the results of thawing mentioned in the article are from the older freezing procedures. Current methods (as mentioned in the article) use a form of vitrification. My understanding is that no one has been (intentionally, carefully) thawed after being vitrified using "modern" techniques, so we really don't know what condition a body would be in after unthawing using current technology. Now, "not knowing" doesn't prove anything, of course, and I think it was correct for the article to describe the evidence we do have, even if it's necessarily out of date. But it would have been nice for them to acknowledge that the unthawing data we have is not representative of what would happen if a "current-gen" cryonics "patient" were to be thawed today.
  - chordalkeyboard 4y ago
    > My understanding is that no one has been (intentionally, carefully) thawed after being vitrified using "modern" techniques, so we really don't know what condition a body would be in after unthawing using current technology. why haven't they tested this on animals or non-paying cadavers? It would seem unwise to pay to keep vitrified bodies frozen if one had no understanding of how the bodies would be when they were unfrozen.

1970-01-01 4y ago

How long before SpaceX starts up a service to dump these into a lunar lava tube for hyper-long term storage?

thombat 4y ago
They're relatively warm places so are conjectured to make a nice(ish) place for the quick rather than the dead. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube
Tepix 4y ago
Wouldn't it be better to be put into a crater that never sees sunlight? Ideally with some protection against micro-meteorites. There's still the radiation issue...

harry8 4y ago

So here is one of my current fav. conspiracy theories AND it involves Elon. Remember the first payload of his "Falcon Heavy" rocket - some tesla or other? Had a tailor's dummy in a space suit strapped in the front seat. That was a real person in the suit who had paid for the most effective, reliable and longest lasting cryogenic freeze available. No maintenance power required. Will continue to be frozen even if the earth explodes. Not beholdent to anyone alive to make the right decisions... Elon decided not to just hide it in plain sight but make a spectacle of it with live feeds etc. Probably nonsense but makes a certian amount more logical sense than a dummy in a space suit, huh?

pnpnp 4y ago
It can actually get really hot in space without some kind of active heat transfer. The body in the suit would probably alternate between freezing and frying. Not a great way to preserve a body IMO.
- elkos 4y ago
  Depends on where in space. In LEO... sure. In the orbit of the Tesla Roadster it's mostly warm isn't it?
  - pnpnp 4y ago
    Since it’s never really in the shadow of a planet (heliocentric orbit), it’s probably hotter overall. From the videos I’ve seen, it’s also spinning really slowly. I think you could see off-gassing in some of the videos. I looked into it a little further, and there was speculation it was from the plastics and paint getting extremely hot in direct sunlight. “Space” is roughly the same temperature (a little warmer near stars with particles and free gas), but the direct solar radiation is what is so hot. Since space is an excellent insulator, getting rid of the thermal energy becomes a problem when you’re not shaded. If you want to read some more on this, check out what the JWST has done for thermal management. It’s really cool (no pun intended).
- harry8 4y ago
  Trying to use facts, logic, and this "science" stuff against me is futile as I have a perfectly good conspiracy theory! The silver suit couldn't insulate and keep the heat out?

moloch-hai 4y ago

How could this be published without mentioning the Bide-a-Wee Scandal touched on in Larry Niven fiction?

mannykannot 4y ago
I was going to say that Larry Niven wrote a novel (A World out of Time?) in which the cryogenically frozen were resurrected to perform menial or otherwise undesirable jobs, as a form of indentured servitude. IIRC, trust funds set up by the deceased to pay for their preservation and resurrection had been dissolved on the grounds that they were strangling the economy. If Bide-a-Wee was not from this novel, a reference would be much appreciated, as my cursory search has not found it.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Bide-a-Wee was about organ harvesting. It is mentioned off-hand in various stories as a throwaway world-building detail. It deserves a Wikipedia page.
- LordGrey 4y ago
  Trust funds: Pierce the Checker (Peersa) said, "The dead cannot own money. The courts decided that long ago." "Corsicles" had to pay The State back for storage and resurrection, as you mentioned, which was the reasoning behind the Bussard Ramjet training Corbell received. Niven sidestepped the whole "how to correctly resurrect a frozen person" problem by claiming that Corbell's memory/personality were somehow extracted from his corpse (destroying the body completely), and then used to reanimate a convicted felon. If Corbell failed his training, the felon's mind would be wiped and another corpsicle's personality would be tried. That book introduced so many big ideas to the young me. It was the first Niven book I'd read; Ringworld was the second.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    "Corpsicles".

simonw 4y ago

Something I find fascinating about living in the San Francisco Bay Area is that Cryonics has had occasional bursts of interest around here dating back to the 1970s... which means there are genuinely warehouses out here that have had frozen human bodies sitting in them for 40+ years at this point! I keep hoping to score a tour of one some day.

HideousKojima 4y ago
That's assuming the companies managing those bodies/warehouses haven't gone bankrupt and chucked the bodies in a dumpster in that intervening 40 years

banga 4y ago

I find the whole concept hilarious. There's an implicit assumption that someone in the future will be bothered to resurrect a frozen body, then resurrect them from death (since they already died before being popsicle-ified). And even if they could be bothered, the thawed would be a lab experiment, owned by whatever corporation pulled off the magic. And if magically they came out of the ordeal functional and free, there'd be those pesky bureaucrats to deal with (id, taxes, all the fun stuff). Hilarious.

BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
>”there'd be those pesky bureaucrats to deal with (id, taxes, all the fun stuff). Hilarious.” Turns out, death can be cheated but the taxman cannot.
renonn 4y ago
that was great to read
dmreedy 4y ago
If you haven't already, and without too many spoilers further than some (non-comedic) resonance with your comment, Charles Sheffield's Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a worthy read.
Sebb767 4y ago
People spend millions on the lottery. Old rich people spending their money on a revival ticket with similar chances doesn't seem that bad to me.
pmichaud 4y ago
I’m not signed up, but I know many people who are, and none of them assume any of these things. No one “expects” it to work, it’s just that they figure a long shot is better than no shot. The people I’ve talked to about it put their chances of successful revival at significantly less than 1%, and they think that’s worth it.
- veilrap 4y ago

stephc_int13 4y ago

Cryonic preservation might or might not be possible, this is clearly a difficult process but we're never going to find out without trying. Dead people have no use for money, doing this kind of research is not a waste, in my opinion, even if it is very unlikely to work at this stage.

cortesoft 4y ago
> Dead people have no use for money, doing this kind of research is not a waste, in my opinion, even if it is very unlikely to work at this stage. Umm, people still alive have use for money. The money could go towards helping the lives of the living, so it absolutely is a waste.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  Well, if we accept the reality that the wealthy people doing this weren't going to have that money taxed away, I'd rather it go into a scientific pursuit that might have some payoff than just go into some generationally wealthy kids trust fund
- veilrap 4y ago
  The people running the Cryo business are living people who get paid for the task. No more wasteful than any other relatively benign thing someone is going to spend their money on.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Yeah, we should expropriate the assets of [Nonprofit that does thing I don’t like] to spend it on [thing I like]. Almost everything people in rich countries do is a ridiculous luxury compared to the fact that it costs about $1,000 to save someone from dying of malaria. Most of everything humans do is clearly a waste. We can’t even get it together to prepare for the next pandemic, never mind existential risk. This is besides the fact that nothing matters. There’s no God to ascribe meaning to things. Things only matter if they matter to you.
  - 4y ago

twelve40 4y ago

great little summary about the state of cryonics. However, as an aside, absolutely hated those force-injected spoilers in large fonts scattered throughout the article. What is even the purpose of these annoying things?

plasticeagle 4y ago

I wonder what leads people to believe that anyone in the future will be interested in applying their staggering new re-animation technologies to centuries-old frozen corpses? There's a comment somewhere in this thread about perpetual motion. This tech seems to be its mirror-image, equal in impossibility, but opposite in aim. To stop all motion and decay, forever. Sometimes, it's wise to be circumspect, and to admit the possibility of a future technology that will change everything. In the case of cryogenic storage of viable humans, however, I think it is straight-up, bona-fide, no-exceptions, impossible.

thatguy0900 4y ago
If we found a caveman now we would definetely thaw it out to try to ask it some questions and study it. Why anyone Would actually want to be put in such a position in the future, I'm honestly not sure. You would be more akin to a zoo animal than a person allowed to walk around in a certainly completely alien society, I'd imagine.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  I watched a pretty horrifying scifi recently (I think it was on netflix) about a guy who chose to be frozen and was thawed in the early experimental stages of the reviving process and ends up as a lab rat basically.
twelve40 4y ago
why not? i think it would be an awesome experiment. If we somehow had a few hundred frozen people from say the middle ages, I think it would be very interesting and worth it to wake them up. So I believe it comes down to technology to do that, and these clumsy horrible initial attempts will hopefully improve over time.

wintorez 4y ago

Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.

ranUltra 4y ago
Four years ago, I moved to a different continent with a totally different culture. After four years, I love living here more than in my home country where I grew up. So your argument isn’t really convincing.
brnt 4y ago
I've lived as a stranger in a strange land and I regret returning 'home', whatever that means. Sounds like cryo is right up my alley! If it only worked...
- b1zguy 4y ago
  Can you please elaborate on why your regret returning home?
  - antonvs 4y ago
    I’m not the person you replied to, but for many of us “home” is not a first world or Western country. The opportunities there are much fewer, quality of life is lower in many tangible ways - do you like having reliable power, internet, mail/shipping, safe roads? Dangerous crime is a much more serious problem, and corruption is rife. Healthcare is subpar if you’re not wealthy. Education is generally poor, which has all sorts of consequences for society as a whole. There’s also the fact that after living elsewhere for many years, the home you go back to is not the same as the home you left.
  - brnt 4y ago
    Moving abroad and making some sort of life for yourself is two things: 1. a review of your preconceptions and a test for your ability to adapt, 2. if you stick it out, you may integrate new ways and viewpoints into who you are and what you think. When you then go back to people who are similar (because that's always going to be the case to some extent, even if locally the community feels and/or thinks itself diverse) you will frequently feel that others have not 'progressed' or are 'stuck' in those culturally determined ways. It's hard to share that growth with people that haven't done the same, which is I think why expats stick together, even when they're back. I moved between Western countries I should perhaps add.

ggm 4y ago

I would love to know how this is handled in other parts of the world. Particularly the regulatory side because this is a potential health nightmare for OH&S if not the water table and the neighbourhood. The escrow requirements for maintainance of state would be interesting too. Who exactly benefits from the spend? Is this contestable by a future generation? In effect, does the corpse become property? Perpetual funding is a pretty bizarre concept, but that said the entire 'south sea bubble' debt exist inside British gilts for hundreds of years, they only wiped them out recently at the same time as the WW1 debt, so carrying forward into the future does happen, albiet mostly at scale by governments. I guess if you turned the dewer flasks into a freak show and charged, you might even be able to fund the cooldown by revenue.

Loic 4y ago
We have this in Germany, in the Ruhr area. If they do not pump water non-stop, the complete area would be flooded[0]. This is because coal mining has been bringing the complete cities below the natural level of the water table. Costs are taken care of by a foundation. [0]: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewigkeitskosten https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewigkeitskosten Sadly no English version but some pictures.

hellothere1337 4y ago

In my opinion at least clawing desperately for more time on this world is a pretty bad idea. Say there is nothing after death, then every such advancement in life extension will create even more dread of dying because you can lose eternal life (in the ideal case). I'd personally be much more scared to live knowing that at any point I can lose possibly millions of years of experiences by dying.

donatj 4y ago

> ten months had elapsed between his death and freezing, so his body was in rotten shape — no pun intended — from the get-go and was eventually thawed There is literally no way that pun was unintended. Were it so, it’d be easier to just choose a different word rather than note it’s unintentionality.

terminal_d 4y ago
Yeah they probably were in that deal just for the easy money.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Mistletoe 4y ago

As someone that has frozen cells down many times successfully, I don’t think this will ever work for bodies. If you could save your DNA and a few cells and be cloned at a later date is that good enough for you? No memories but the same code. Is that still “you”? It’s like being an identical twin of yourself.

Self-Perfection 4y ago
Can you imagine any experiment that will adjust your belief? Show you that there is a chance it might work for bodies?
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  Yes, any experiment that freezes down something large and multicellular like an organ and thaws it and it works. The reason freezing cells works is that they have no large 3d structure and the surface area to volume works with the slow freeze down process (1 deg. C per min.) and rapid thawing (as fast as possible) necessary for them to survive.
  - Self-Perfection 4y ago
    Cold resistant frogs fit your description. Hyla japonica withstands freezing to -30°C They function just fine after thawing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_tree_frog#Cold_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_tree_frog#Cold_resist...
yreg 4y ago
No, that's not good enough, software (beyond epigenetics) is what matters here. I would say, that personality is the key thing that one might want to preserve. Ideally, memories as well, the more intact they are, the better. If possible, running it on the original hardware (i.e. the same brain) will satisfy people who believe in continuity of consciousness. (People hesitant to use a teletransporter[0]) Even a computer-simulated mind based on a scan of the original brain would I think be more 'me' than my clone. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

UberFly 4y ago

I wanted to know the state of Ted William's head, so I did a search. This is what I found: In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams' head was abused at the facility. Johnson claims a technician took baseball-like swings at Williams' frozen head with a monkey wrench. What?

pavlov 4y ago
As the pharaohs already discovered, an immortality plan that depends on generations of low-paid underlings to maintain the dead elite's physical bodies is fundamentally flawed.
- wiz21c 4y ago
  Fortunately, this statement is true for many plans of the elite :-)
  - recuter 4y ago
    I too upon hearing of a lunatic beating a frozen disembodied head to gallagheresque pulp with a blunt instrument can't help but smile sardonically if the resulting goop was formerly wealthier than me. Cool and normal. Power to the people bro. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
    - aussieshibe 4y ago
      It's just like I always say: class warfare is a dish best served cryogenically frozen.
    - lovich 4y ago
      Might have done the world a service. Immortality combined with winner takes all capitalism will just lead to an entrenched race of god emperors that won’t be removed ever except by society wide violence, basically like medieval kingdoms or dynastic empires. Market economies have helped limit that a bit(wealth inheritances still have a problem), but one of the unstated backstops of that system is that eventually the rich people in question do eventually die

scarygliders 4y ago

If one of the reasons for wishing to be frozen, is to see what the future looks like, then there is an alternative; Einstein to the rescue! Just strap yourself into a spaceship capable of reaching within a few % of the speed of light, and fly around for a bit. No need to wait till you're at death's door and turned into a corpsicle. Just head on out there for a few years at relativistic speed. By the time you slow down and return, you'll be having pina coladas with your new Felidae-Sapiens masters ;)

eouwt 4y ago
"just"
- scarygliders 4y ago
  The whole post was made in "humorous irony" ;) However, successfully producing a relativistic spaceship is probably more possible right now than successfully creating and reviving human corpsicles... just sayin' ;)
Topgamer7 4y ago
The flaw in your theory being that it would take you equally as long to slow down as it would to reach that speed. So you would age out on the deceleration. I suppose you could accelerate in an orbit around earth to maintain contact. But my understanding of relativity is poor
- scarygliders 4y ago
  Depends on how good your spacecraft is at speeding up and slowing down, really. There are many designs which could probably do this relatively (heh) quickly. I'm sure producing one of these things is more possible right now than freezing/thawing/reviving a human. Alternatively, to compensate for how long it would take to speed up and slow down, just have our intrepid time-o-naut climb into their suspended animatio--- oh heck ;)
- BreakfastB0b 4y ago
  You would age the same amount during deceleration that you did during acceleration. I think your misunderstanding comes from the relativistic twin paradox. From the perspective of the twin on the spaceship accelerating away from earth, the twin on earth seems to age slowly as well until the space ship twin decelerates and then turns around, during which they perceive the twin on earth to age rapidly. The acceleration / deceleration of the space ship twin’s frame of reference is what breaks the symmetry of the no-preferred frame of reference during flight.

stareatgoats 4y ago

According to Wikipedia, more than 9 million people in the US have reported Near Death Experience (NDE) [0]. Some common traits that were reported: - A sense/awareness of being dead. - A sense of peace, well-being, and painlessness. Positive emotions. A sense of removal from the world. - An out-of-body experience. - A perception of one's body from an outside position, sometimes observing medical professionals performing resuscitation efforts. - A "tunnel experience" or entering a darkness. A sense of moving up, or through, a passageway or staircase. - A rapid movement toward and/or sudden immersion in a powerful light (or "Being of Light") which communicates telepathically with the person. - An intense feeling of unconditional love and acceptance. I'm not sure, but this feels relevant juxtaposed the prospect of returning to life in a body of unsure quality, with all my friends, relatives and acquaintances long gone, into a world that I can not expect to understand much of. Even if it ever became possible, which I sincerely doubt. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience

pavlov 4y ago
If you ask people to describe their dreams and find similarities, it’s not reasonable to assume those dreams represent some kind of hidden reality rather than simply shared psychological responses and social influences. I don’t see why these reports should be treated any differently.
Retric 4y ago
That’s hardly the only or even most common response. As mentioned in that Wikipedia link people often report: anguish distress a void devastation vast emptiness etc Not mentioned but common is extreme pain. But, such responses are less comforting and therefore less often repeated. It’s the same sort of filtering that makes specific kinds of posts go viral. As mentioned in Parnia's study where 63 people with NDE and none of them had an out of body experience, the actual breakdown of experiences don’t line up with what is generally reported.
- dmix 4y ago
  Yeah that wikipedia article did not support the comment very well at all.

tomgp 4y ago

“ All but one of the first frozen futurists failed in their quest for immortality.” Seems like it might be premature to claim that the remaining one succeeded in their quest for immortality

ttyyzz 4y ago
As far as I understood, it's the only one that hasn't turned into jelly (yet).

xg15 4y ago

Assuming all of this doesn't just end with the bodies being dumped at some point, I wonder if future medicine will use the frozen bodies and brains more like a kind of reference to construct an AI from, instead of really trying to revive them. Sort of how historians can read badly damaged ancient documents, but usually copy over their results to a new medium instead of trying to repair the original document. A lot of the usual philosophical discussions following whether or not the AI is the same as the real person would probably follow...

the__alchemist 4y ago
The book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell dives into a related topic; both frozen bodies, and brain reconstruction, reasoning through its potential consequences, and the experiences of a brain without a physical reference. It's quite long though! Also explores some unrelated concepts like finding truth an an internet world, Paradise Lost, and a fantasy adventure.
vanderZwan 4y ago
I have a vague memory of watching a sci-fi mini-series in the nineties with a similar premise… something with "Lazarus" in the title. Ah, found it: Cold Lazarus. [0] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
One of the big cons of this brand of immortality is that there is a pretty reasonable probability that if you manage to get uploaded at all someone will use copies of the result for horrific experiments or even just entertainment. You could wake up in hell, basically. Seems to me anyone who thinks this option is strictly better than death lacks imagination.

hennell 4y ago

> All but one of the first frozen futurists failed in their quest for immortality. I really felt like I'd missed some big headline here.

DonHopkins 4y ago

My somewhat eccentric friend Keith Henson once performed the grisly task of "converting whole body to neuro", which the article mentions: downgrading some of Alcor's full-body customers to head-only by removing their heads from their bodies with a chainsaw, or as Alcore's illustrated report delicately explained, "a rapid conversion to neuropreservation was done using a high-speed electric chain saw." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson Keith is quite a character, who also successfully performed one of the most hilarious trolls ever against Scientology lawyers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791891 >Just be glad you didn't have to explain an in joke about ftp sites, the local loopback address, and a troll, in a deposition, under oath, to Scientology lawyers, like Keith Henson did. The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, page 93-94: https://www.gwern.net/docs/transhumanism/1990-regis-greatmambochickenandthetranshumancondition.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/transhumanism/1990-regis-greatmam... >Finally some evidence about the success of cryonics emerged from among the ranks of the frozen themselves. Not that they were revived, they were only defrosted. Or at least parts of them were. >In November of 1983, for the first time ever, a cryonics firm conducted autopsies on the defrosted mortal remains of two Trans Time patients who had been converted to neuro. The parties in question were a married couple who had wanted to be frozen after death. They hadn’t had the required lump sum in advance, but Trans Time didn’t want to turn them away, so it accepted them on a contingency, pay-as-you-go basis. Monthly maintenance costs would be covered by their loving son. >When the son’s parents died, Trans Time suspended them as whole-body patients, which was their desire, and for a number of years everything went along exactly as planned. But then the son himself died, in an automobile accident, after which the monthly payments ceased. Trans Time kept the parents frozen for a while, but it was clear that sooner or later something had to be done. It was a private company, operating without government support — indeed, often in the teeth of government opposition — and could not afford an extended period of unpaid maintenance, especially when for fifteen out of its sixteen years of existence the company had run at loss. >But then the Alcor Life Extension Foundation came to the rescue. It would take care of the frozen parents, essentially on a charity basis, but only on the condition that they could be “converted” first, which is to say, converted from whole-body to neuro, the latter being far less expensive than the former. “The same capsule that you put a whole body in,” Saul Kent once explained, “you can probably put twenty heads in.” >This, of course, meant that the heads had to come off while the patients were still frozen. Not that this was much of a problem. As Alcor’s illustrated report on the case explains, “a rapid conversion to neuropreservation was done using a high-speed electric chain saw.” >This was now a golden opportunity to see how frozen bodies actually fared over their years in storage—nine years for the husband, five for the wife. So the Alcor men thawed out and autopsied the newly decapitated bodies. >There was both bad and good news. “The most unexpected finding as a result of these autopsies,” says the report, “is the discovery of serious fracturing in all of the suspension patients.” There were fractures in the outer skin, in the subcutaneous fat, in the blood vessels next to the heart, in the arteries and veins. The right lung of one patient was cracked almost in half, as was the liver, and there were open wounds on the hands and right wrist. >This was not encouraging, but it was all too easy to lose one’s perspective. The fact of the matter was that the injuries suffered by these frozen corpses were no worse than what’s seen in hospital shock-trauma units every day of the week—broken (if not absent) arms and legs, and so on—but many of these people end up recovering. The fact that the frozen corpses were not in pristine shape was not by itself any cause for alarm. >The good news was that much of the bodies survived perfectly intact. The palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, and other structures were all in fine shape. As for the brains, they remained in suspension and were not examined. >To Alcor, the whole thing was a learning experience. The initial suspensions had not been perfect, but all things considered, the patients came through the whole process about as well as anyone could expect.

Tyndale 4y ago

credit_guy 4y ago

Isochoric supercooling looks much more promising. The body does not freeze solid. The temperature is lowered to below freezing, but all fluids remain fluids. I'm not aware of experiments with animals, and obviously not humans. But here's an experiment with human cardiac tissue [1], which went quite well. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02650-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02650-9

tabtab 4y ago
Preserving sufficient structure of the brain is the most important. Hearts may not be a good test.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  This test was a pragmatic one directed by the needs of heart transplants. There is no brain tissue transplant as of now. But there's no reason for science to not try other tissues and then even lab animals, then even pets, and at some point humans.

acqbu 4y ago

Is there life after death? Why is there anything at all?

tim333 4y ago

>Cryonics — attempting to cryopreserve the human body — is widely considered a pseudoscience. It's not really. It's an attempt to preserve the body and not much more of a science than me attempting to preserve some food by putting it in my freezer. Who knows if future technology will be able to bring people back? Claiming it definitely will not without evidence doesn't seem very scientific.

Maursault 4y ago

I, Hatchet Jack ...do hearby leaveth my bear rifle to whatever finds it.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKUPu1epqnU&t=3m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKUPu1epqnU&t=3m20s

hahamaster 4y ago

Sucks being an early adopter.

Wadajot 4y ago

> The family of a man frozen in 1978 eventually got tired of paying for him. The facility offered to cut off his head and store it for free, but the family turned them down. Instead, the body was thawed, submerged in a vat of formaldehyde like a laboratory specimen, and buried in that condition. What?!