26 ms·

Storing dead people at -196°C [video]

• xwdv 3y ago
  I feel cryogenic storage of people would work far better if it was driven by some cult-like or religious beliefs rather than monetary motivation, where dead bodies are managed as well as possible simply because it’s the right thing to do.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Thiez 3y ago
    How would that be better? The earth belongs to the living. Why would we possibly want to cryogenically preserve the dead?
    • xwdv 3y ago
      So that one day we too may be preserved
      • Thiez 3y ago
        There are already plenty of people who oppose immigration. Do you really think people in 100 (or 200 or 500 or 1000) years have any desire to defrost millions of old and unhealthy people with outdated skills and backward beliefs? They may choose to revive a small number of individuals for lost skills or to resolve an archeological question, but that would perhaps be a handful of individuals per generation. I think it is the height of self-delusion and self-importance to believe that anyone will want to revive your dead ass once all your loved ones have passed. For many of us that will happen even while loved ones are still alive, as they make peace with our absence and move on with their lives. In addition to that if we were to freeze everyone that would be an ever increasing and ongoing cost on the living to preserve the selfish dead. I for one would happily vote to put all those cryosleeping people in a blender and store the resulting slurry under an oil field. Call it carbon capture.
• itake 3y ago
  I wish he mentioned the ethics behind this. 01 the freezing costs power, which damages our planet. 02 This is often paid for by life insurance policies. Instead of the money going to your family or donating to a humanitarian cause, it goes towards damaging the planet. I wouldn't be surprised in 100 years, the owners of these businesses cut a deal with the remaining family members, offering "hey, we will pay you $500m (half of the account balance) to unthaw your great great great great great grandpa if you promise not to sue us."
  • metalcrow 3y ago
    Aren't both of those also arguments against maintaining life support for coma patients? In both of these cases it costs power and insurance money, only the odds of recovery and amount of time on support are the differences. Which does change the ethics a bit, but not massively. They're basically just long term unlikely to recover coma patients.
    • woodruffw 3y ago
      > only the odds of recovery and amount of time on support are the differences These are large differences. We can argue about inefficiencies, but people do recover from decades-long comas. People don't recover from being dead as a doornail.
      • metalcrow 3y ago
        > People don't recover from being dead as a doornail Not yet they don't. Plus, depends on how you define dead. I know people who have recovered from being dead quite a few times.
        • woodruffw 3y ago
          That's why I said "doornail"; the people in question are sufficiently dead that the company here doesn't think they're at risk of being sued for killing someone. Maybe we'll be able to reanimate people eventually; for the time being, people definitely do recover from comas.
• Mistletoe 3y ago
  Is there remotely any reason to believe you could put their brain back together in a functioning way or that the connections are even still there cryopreserved like this? If not, this is all so silly. Just take a tiny piece of tissue and cryopreserve its DNA and you can have a clone made in the future. It won’t have your memories but that’s as close as we can get. I cryopreserve cells all the time but they have to be single cells surrounded by fluid or it just makes a mess. As far as I know we don’t know how to cryopreserve the delicate structure and micro architecture of tissues. It may be physically impossible.
  • pfdietz 3y ago
    I'm assuming it would require a complete demolition of the frozen brain, recording the state of its cells and connections, then rebuilding that in some way, or running it in simulation. Not an easy task at all, but perhaps more believable than repairing the damned thing. Somehow I see Elon Musk as the kind of person who's going to spring for this. Cryonics on Mars! At least it would save on life support costs there.
  • metalcrow 3y ago
    > Is there remotely any reason to believe you could put their brain back together in a functioning way or that the connections are even still there cryopreserved like this This is a well studied area, and there's good reason to believe the damage isn't unfixable/absolutely devastating to the brain structure. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22533424/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22533424/ is a paper specifically on this.
    • echelon 3y ago
      If we can recolor jpegs from the 1800s, I'm confident we'll be able to recover frozen connectomes. I wouldn't place any limit on our future computational abilities or techniques. And even things that lie beyond the limit of detection may fit some into some clever model we've yet to imagine.
  • Veedrac 3y ago
    Yes, it's not obvious that structural information suffices to reconstruct brain state, but it's not implausible either. We know brains survive periods of reduced activity, and they're stable over longer time periods than you'd expect if a ton of vital non-transient state was stored non-structurally. I think resuscitation is ~implausible, but reconstruction seems logically feasible, just not with current day technology, nor obviously with high surety.
• fmkamchatka 3y ago
  How can the planet sustain nobody dying?
  • IggleSniggle 3y ago
    It's not nobody dying, it's only nobodies dying. Eh? Eh?
    • tpreetham 3y ago
      I thought I uninstalled my reddit app
  • crooked-v 3y ago
    If you look at the actuarial tables, 'immortals' would still statistically die eventually from something unrecoverable.
  • wetpaws 3y ago
    [dead]
  • jokowueu 3y ago
    By not reproducing
  • MisterBastahrd 3y ago
    It won't have to. Injuries, disease, and cancer are still a thing.
    • bobmaxup 3y ago
      Isn't the point of cryopreservation to be awoken when these things are no more?
      • MisterBastahrd 3y ago
        Ain't never gonna be a "no more." That's not how biology or statistics work.
• pfdietz 3y ago
  Akbar 'n' Jeff's Cryonics Hut! "Where the elite beat the heat and avoid having to meet St. Pete"
  • NateEag 3y ago
    ...to not meet St. Pete. The rest was so good I had to fix the rhythm.
    • pfdietz 3y ago
      (minor correction to previous post) It's a quote from Matt Groening's "Life in Hell".
      • NateEag 3y ago
        Ahhh, thanks for explaining.
  • bobmaxup 3y ago
    That is a fun rhyme. However, people die before they are preserved, so...
    • JKCalhoun 3y ago
      Watching the video had me question that actually. At the moment the heart stops, I imagine the brain activity lingers for some amount of time. Creepy to think of the antifreeze coming online as your thoughts protest.
      • pfdietz 3y ago
        You lose consciousness in about 15 seconds when blood flow stops.
• charles_f 3y ago
  I hate that. The whole stick behind placing the money to pay for the service, the energy and resource consumption, having people work to maintain that infra... That's rich people carrying their dominance beyond their own death, having breathing people slaving out for them, there's a revolting aspect to it.
  • lolinder 3y ago
    There's something archetypical to this story. The rich have been trying to use their wealth to buy immortality for at least 4000 years—what we're looking at here is just a modern form of mummification, with a veneer of science instead of religion.
    • crooked-v 3y ago
      There's a huge difference there, in that information storage via cryogenic preservation is an at least theoretically valid basis. It's still "Step 2: ???" but steps 1 and 3 are compatible with known science.
      • warent 3y ago
        Step 3 being... resurrection from being dead 100s of years? What known science is that?
        • hulitu 3y ago
          Maybe a perfume company developing new aromas.
      • vagab0nd 3y ago
        Mummification was probably compatible with the best known "science" back then.
        • IggleSniggle 3y ago
          Most likely the bleeding edge state of the art! Embalming practices of some cultures mystified modern science for quite a long time, iirc!
• MarkMarine 3y ago
  The hubris involved with freezing yourself just blows me away. Like society that is technically advanced enough to unfreeze, reanimate, and fix whatever disease or damage killed you the first time would have any desire to add some ego manic that wanted to freeze themselves to the society of their current day.
  • echelon 3y ago
    They'll probably dominate light cone traversal and pop into a perfectly recreated simulation whenever they want. If I were a future god-AI, I'd bring all the humans back for funzies. No need for them to ceremonially freeze their bodies, though.
  • TylerLives 3y ago
    In this hypothetical scenario, immortalists would always outcompete deathists, so this wouldn't really be an issue.
  • bentcorner 3y ago
    If nothing else, the internet has taught me that a surprising number of people are interested in retro. Thawing people from 1000 years ago could be as casual as an unboxing video.
    • chrisacky 3y ago
      I snapped into consciousness, the sensory data flooding in. I was a Bob, or so they told me, but it was more than that now. I looked around the room, cameras everywhere, bright lights shining down. My view readjusted as I realized that my awakening was being live-streamed to the whole world. The legacy of being Bob 1.0 had its perks, but this was something else. "Welcome to the twenty-fourth century," a voice said, cheerfully, a tad too energetically for my newly awakened brain. The live chat was scrolling by at a pace I couldn't follow. Emoji, memes, the letter F creating a visual waterfall that imprinted on my virtual retina. I was taken back from what seemed like an endless array of questions. The digital age had taken a few leaps forward, and I was its latest reality show star.
    • 3y ago
• malikNF 3y ago
  Haiyoo, what kind of person are you when even in death you can't give back to earth the body you borrowed.
  • Thiez 3y ago
    The earth is hardly going to miss a persons worth of biomatter. If you want to be outraged on behalf of the earth worry about pollution and global warming instead.
    • MaxikCZ 3y ago
      Or about all the stuff we sent to space/other planets.
• dghughes 3y ago
  It would be interesting to experience. You'd die or maybe go to sleep and not wake up so in your mind you just went to bed as usual. And you wake up decades or centuries later in an instant. Imagine someone from the 1800s trying to understand memes and Tik Tok. I think the Internet is within grasp as in telegraph but not the information on it. I can't even imagine what will exist even 50 years form now. And why is it -196C I mean I know that is the temperature of LN2 since it's cheap. But why not store them like the global seed bank in glaciers or Antarctica where it's currently -57C when it warm during the day. In summer it's at most -20C.
  • chpatrick 3y ago
    Transmetropolitan has a great story (Another Cold Morning) about preserved people waking up in the future and basically becoming homeless because they can't comprehend the future.
    • akira2501 3y ago
      It's a tempting idea, but I somewhat doubt it. The change from linear to exponential population growth has a limit and many of our ancestors saw the consequences of this change, and it's particularly easy to imagine them "waking up" today, and with a few short "translational explanations" they'd be on their way. A story about waking up Ben Franklin would be fantastic.
  • kzrdude 3y ago
    It seems like there would be, if it all worked somehow, a risk that one wakes up in a lot of pain. Much of the body has injuries and scars from the process. It's still a risky prospect to be a pioneer in this.
• timonoko 3y ago
  "After the Final Countdown somebody finds this storage of deep freezed meat and is very happy for a moment. This is what this project is worth." -- Svante Pääbo (or some other Swedish Nobelwinner)
• ggambetta 3y ago
  My first thought was "but are they superconductive at that temperature?". Need to stay away from HN for a bit...
  • amstan 3y ago
    semiconductive* :D
  • me551ah 3y ago
    You'll have a pass a current through them to check
  • gnfargbl 3y ago
    No, but if you can find a strong enough magnet then it might be possible to levitate one using diamagnetism. Big magnet, though. One estimate [1] puts it on the order of 10T. That's a lot of engineering just to play a Dracula prank on someone. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3lk2od/how_powerful_does_a_magnetic_field_need_to_be_in/cv6wyx3 https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3lk2od/how_powe...
    • username135 3y ago
      So you're saying there's a chance?
      • HelloNurse 3y ago
        There's a straightforward physical theory: colossal magnetic fields + slightly diamagnetic materials (including a human body with small superconducting particles) = magnetic levitation. But human bodies might contain paramagnetic and ferromagnetic particles too, and more importantly building magnets that are strong enough to levitate a corpse is an expensive and difficult engineering challenge.
        • _lvbh 3y ago
          Stuff diamagnetic materials inside the body. It’s dead anyways
• King-Aaron 3y ago
  I'm going to miss Tom's videos.
• rurban 3y ago
  A normal freezer would be cheaper and easier when you really want to store meat long-term. To get dead people back to life much more is needed, and most attempts failed ridiculously, as the frozen water explodes all cells. The temperature is not the problem at all, but the process to dehydrate the meat and replace it with glycerine or such. Completely. Or all the shady cryo companies which go bankrupt after a while, and cannot pay the freezers anymore. There was a nice article from such a company from the late sixties here a while ago. It smelled.
• sgt 3y ago
  Someone said Elon Musk is the most important person on Earth right. Does that mean that we should urgently cryopreserve him?
  • tim333 3y ago
    Urgent cryopreservation might stop him doing further damage to Twitter.
• alfanick 3y ago
  For me it still doesn't make sense. Cryopreservation is legal and done only to dead people. Which means if they want to be alive again two problems need to be solved: 1) unfreeze with success, 2) resurrect. Both are non trivial for quite some years.
  • Nextgrid 3y ago
    Is resurrection an actually difficult problem? My understanding is that merely restoring circulation to an otherwise-healthy brain should cause it to regain consciousness? Assuming the cryopreservation happened early enough before significant brain damage occurred (or was successfully repaired during the “unfreezing” process - which is currently the limiting factor) resurrection shouldn’t be a problem?
    • Tangurena2 3y ago
      The more people study the matter, the less of a boundary between `body` and `consciousness` exists. Our body, and all the pesky juices/hormones produced by it, and the stuff produced by bacteria in our digestive tract have direct impacts on what our mind perceives. Restoring circulation is insufficient.
    • alfanick 3y ago
      Is it not? Especially in this context. People who are cryogenically stored, died due some reason - old or trauma. We cannot resurrect old people; trauma medicine is hardcore and we can sustain and fix some people, but sometimes we cannot.
      • insanitybit 3y ago
        I imagine it'll come down to the cause of death and the time-to-freeze. If you had a heart attack and it just wouldn't restart, that feels like a tractable problem in a world where we can do some crazy shit like 3d print you a new heart (making it up, please don't attack the 3d printing hearts idea, it's dumb). If you had some sort of trauma that put you into a coma, idk, I could imagine that some sort of futuristic stimulation could bring you back. Even now you can possibly live on your own without machinery, possibly even breathing on your own, your brain just isn't driving critical functions like feeding yourself. Today we have to let people die in that scenario, what if we could freeze them and in 100 years there's a way to trigger new brain activity? If you're shot in the head, obviously I'm going to be a lot more skeptical of the ability to bring you back.
• janalsncm 3y ago
  How about a dystopian future where all of the grunt work is performed by an army of enslaved people woken up after being cryo frozen at some indeterminate time in the past. The futuristic society can heal their ailments but given that they have no rights nor skills after waking up, they are forced to clean floors with toothbrushes and pick weeds by hand.
  • oakesm9 3y ago
    Quite close to the opening plot of "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)": Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty. The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad - very mad. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-we-are-bob https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-w...
    • janalsncm 3y ago
      Nice! It’s comforting to know I wasn’t the first to think of it.
      • inkcapmushroom 3y ago
        Then take comfort in the fact that every thought we have has likely been had many times before. :)
    • trollied 3y ago
• badcppdev 3y ago
  "Heads" by Greg Bear. "Set two hundred years in the future, a science fiction novel in which William Pearce is searching for the elusive absolute zero, and his wife has brought many cryogenically frozen heads in the hope of reading them for information, unaware of the danger of their actions" Maybe not his best book...
  • fodkodrasz 3y ago
    Also Ubik from PKD.
• mongol 3y ago
  Everything about this feels so foreign to me. I don't understand who wants to work with it, nor do I understand who wants to sign up to be stored this way. I can understand a wish for extended life, but feels so surreal to believe this could possibly work. I think it will be more feasible to download consciousness to digital memory than to resurrect a dead, deep-frozen body.
  • mdrzn 3y ago
    If the choice is between 0% chance of survival when dead and 0.000...1% chance of survival when "frozen", it seems pretty reasonable to choose the latter.
    • rwmj 3y ago
      It's zero vs zero, with the second choice consuming lots of resources.
      • insanitybit 3y ago
        Based on what? It seems like a mostly sound idea - preserve a body such that it can be recovered later.
        • rwmj 3y ago
          It's pretty gross, but the brains of people in persistent vegetative state break down after many years. The same thing will happen here, albeit more slowly because of the refrigeration, but we're talking hundreds of years. There's not going to be anything left to revive.
          • insanitybit 3y ago
            > albeit more slowly Yes, that is the entire point. > we're talking hundreds of years. So the idea here is that in hundreds of years we will still have developed no way of taking a frozen person and unfreezing them? And then curing whatever ailment killed them? I don't see that as a sure thing at all, one way or the other.
• kypro 3y ago
  Maybe a little off-topic, but something I'm terrified of is being simulated against my will. I fear AI primarily for this because I see it as an enabling technology for brain simulation, but I also see cryogenic preservation similarly in that it removes the time constraints from the rate of progress - at least from the individual's perspective. Who knows, some weirdo hyper-libertarian future civilisation could decide to take these "dead" people and simulate them to act as NPCs in their new horror game. The fact there is a non zero chance of being revived into some hellish existence like this makes me terrified of cryogenic preservation. When I die I want to be sure I'm dead. I want matter in my body to be brought to the highest state of entropy reasonably possible. I understand not wanting to die, but personally when I die I'd prefer to die knowing it will be over.
  • 4ggr0 3y ago
    If you like to game from time to time I can recommend SOMA. A game made by the studio which makes the Amnesia games, you might know them. SOMA kinda explores the topic of peoples conciousness being reused in the future, but I don't want to spoil too much :)
    • kypro 3y ago
      Not really a gamer (certainly not for horror games) but I might take a look at this. Thanks for the recommendation.
  • bauruine 3y ago
    I live near it and there is also a data center just next to the cryo facility [0] that was built around the same time. I sometimes jokingly say they are related and are training an AI with the frozen people. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/European+Biostasis+Foundation,+Industriestrasse,+Rafz/STACK+Infrastructure+Switzerland+(ZUR01),+Industriestrasse+16,+8197+Rafz/@47.60238,8.5442092,16z/data=!3m1!1e3!4m8!4m7!1m2!1m1!1s0x479079195bdaf161:0xd49a0dbae93b6391!1m2!1m1!1s0x4790778b16c871a3:0x998fb8d5455c6236!3e2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/European+Biostasis+Foundatio...
  • Svenstaro 3y ago
• MagicMoonlight 3y ago
  You obviously can't bring someone back once they're dead. It's like turning off a computer and then putting it in a freezer and saying in 5000 years they'll be able to come up with a way to restore it to the exact same state it was in before you turned it off. In theory you could find a way to copy the state while it is still on and then bring them back that way, but that depends on whether the system is actually a physical network that is you or whether there is a "soul" made up of the traces of old data floating around the network which you wouldn't be able to capture.
• Nextgrid 3y ago
  Surprised to see all the negativity here. If the argument is “selfish rich people consuming resources at the expense of everyone else”, there are much lower hanging fruits than this. Adtech and all its supporting infrastructure not only uses orders of magnitude more resources than a few hundred bodies in LN2 but also generates infinite annoyance and wastes everyone's time. Ditto for a lot of monopolized/oligopolized/lobbied industries (telecoms? Tax filing in the US?) that ultimately cause wealth (and thus resources) to accumulate in the hands of a select few at the expense of everyone else.
  • yellow_lead 3y ago
    We can be displeased by both. The reason there's negativity here is because it was mentioned. I wouldn't realistically expect to see people say "oh yeah this doesn't really bother me because adtech exists."
  • snapplebobapple 3y ago
    by going to lower hanging fruits as the justification for why that argument is wrong, you have already lost the argument, imo. The correct response is they aren't consuming resources at the expense of everyone else, they are collecting a tiny fraction of the resources owed to them for foregoing consumption in the past in order to invest in capital that has made everybody's life dramatically better. The people that got rich through theft is pretty small just because so many people have turned good ideas into good companies over the last 100 years growing the economy by a staggering amount and drowning out the royalty and other thugs that got rich extremely unjustly.
• bombcar 3y ago
  The chance of a storage failure before recovery seems quite high, so I should start a company that does this but then launches you into deep space where it’s super cold anyway If they can resurrect you they can retrieve you first.
  • Qem 3y ago
    Cosmic radiation would slowly cook the bodies over centuries, erasing any recoverable consciousness information still present, unless they are heavily shielded (Earth atmosphere provides ~10 ton/m^2 shielding for free), say, buried in a moon pole crater. People planning for immortality also would balk at the several % risk of rocket failure. A compromise would be to create a facility in an Antarctic plateau, where even in total failure temperatures wouldn't go beyond -30C (or -50C in winter).
• arp242 3y ago
  Looking at their website, they also do "Brain-only Cryopreservation" (which is €60k instead of €200k). For those who think that normal cryopreservation is too easy. [Insert Futurama reference here]
• Namari 3y ago
  Sounds like the prequel of Idiocracy
• Mr_Modulo 3y ago
  Everyone will be resurrected at the end of the world when Christ returns. I think I'll just wait for that. But it would still be cool if CRYO preservation could work. Medical technology exists today that would have been science fiction 100 years ago. It's definitely possible it could work in the future.
  • programmer_dude 3y ago
    LOL.
  • MaxikCZ 3y ago
    You got it wrong, everyones atomic matrix gets analyzed and uploaded to quantum computer when aliens return.
• mckravchyk 3y ago
  On the other hand, what would it take to have a technology that could take a 3d map snapshot of the entire brain structure?
  • schemescape 3y ago
    Go play SOMA.
• RyanAdamas 3y ago
  Are we going to store our bodies to preserve our minds? Most of us wouldn't really want our old bodies back after the tech appears to create new ones. It would make more sense to store our consciousness and then duplicate a body based on the stored DNA in which to imprint into a new mind.
  • nroebab 3y ago
    >most of us Speak for yourself, I'll have me rather than let a clone live in some undetermined time
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• the_omegist 3y ago
  After reading most comments here, few/none mentions the real "technical" challenge with such idea : society. Even if the tech would be able to "revive" them, they also need to bet that : - the company won't go bankrupt (how many corporations last 10yearS?50?100?) - no technical issue happens (blackout, computer bug, ...) : this increases with each year added - society's law/structure will remain the same (democratic, not a chaos) So unless it is government-backed I would not bet much on the success rate...
  • majkinetor 3y ago
    All irrelevant. Chances are bigger then 0 that you have otherwise.