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> When I talk to people that say dying is a natural process I just laugh because it seems unnatural to NOT want to give yourself every chance of survival. Not

> When I talk to people that say dying is a natural process I just laugh because it seems unnatural to NOT want to give yourself every chance of survival. Not when survival only entails increased and prolonged suffering.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
Nobody is aiming for this. That’s the standard rejoinder to talk of extending life because we’re not very good at extending life yet. That’s like saying in 1935 “why would we want nuclear power when it entails everybody on earth being irradiated and dying of cancers?”
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Once you run out of U235 and expand reprocessing by a factor of 5000, this is true though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton-85#Anthropogenic_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton-85#Anthropogenic_pro...
- yellowapple 4y ago
  It's less about not being very good at extending life yet and more about not having good answers to information-theoretic injury/death - i.e. the sort that's permanent, no matter how far along technology progresses. As it stands, most jurisdictions haven't legalized assisted suicide and the ones that have don't count cryonics as a means of such. That means that, when faced with a condition that entails a slow and agonizing death (particularly one which entails neurodegeneration - which includes probably most terminal illnesses, due to the injury to brain cells such illnesses often entail), there's no option to freeze oneself before that process happens; instead, one must endure that slow decline until one "dies naturally", then get frozen in that already-injured state. And then what? Repairing the damaged parts of the brain won't do much to recover the data permanently lost in the process; would one still be the same person? Even if that legal obstacle gets "fixed", and you're legally allowed to cryogenically "kill" yourself, at what point do you do so? Too early, and you miss out on things in your own normal lifetime; too late, and you run into the same irreversible damage described above. All the while there is zero guarantee that you'll ever be thawed out however many centuries later, zero guarantee that you'll be able to live a meaningful life even if the procedure succeeds - and that's assuming cryonics is already perfected, i.e. ruling out permanent information loss from the freezing/thawing itself.

unsupp0rted 4y ago

Nobody is aiming for this. That’s the standard rejoinder to talk of extending life because we’re not very good at extending life yet. That’s like saying in 1935 “why would we want nuclear power when it entails everybody on earth being irradiated and dying of cancers?”

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Once you run out of U235 and expand reprocessing by a factor of 5000, this is true though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton-85#Anthropogenic_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypton-85#Anthropogenic_pro...
yellowapple 4y ago
It's less about not being very good at extending life yet and more about not having good answers to information-theoretic injury/death - i.e. the sort that's permanent, no matter how far along technology progresses. As it stands, most jurisdictions haven't legalized assisted suicide and the ones that have don't count cryonics as a means of such. That means that, when faced with a condition that entails a slow and agonizing death (particularly one which entails neurodegeneration - which includes probably most terminal illnesses, due to the injury to brain cells such illnesses often entail), there's no option to freeze oneself before that process happens; instead, one must endure that slow decline until one "dies naturally", then get frozen in that already-injured state. And then what? Repairing the damaged parts of the brain won't do much to recover the data permanently lost in the process; would one still be the same person? Even if that legal obstacle gets "fixed", and you're legally allowed to cryogenically "kill" yourself, at what point do you do so? Too early, and you miss out on things in your own normal lifetime; too late, and you run into the same irreversible damage described above. All the while there is zero guarantee that you'll ever be thawed out however many centuries later, zero guarantee that you'll be able to live a meaningful life even if the procedure succeeds - and that's assuming cryonics is already perfected, i.e. ruling out permanent information loss from the freezing/thawing itself.