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Perhaps I am a pessimist, but I don't see the future turning out well for those who have chosen to cryogenically preserve their bodies. That's not to say that

• toomuchtodo 13y ago
  As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science. And you're more than welcome to believe in it, just like any other faith, Science has a much better track record than organized religion: http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/DarkAges.gif http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/DarkAges.gif
  • quarterto 13y ago
    Unlabelled Y-axis, no sources mentioned. I sincerely doubt this graph is based on anything but some crap that popped into the author's head one day.
    • toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Ignore the graph. How many vaccines has organized religion developed?
      • VolatileVoid 13y ago
        Vaccines? I don't have an answer, but here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_cleric%E2%80%93scientists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_cleric%E... I'm not particularly religious (or Catholic), but let's not minimize the positive impact members of the clergy have had on science.
    • VLM 13y ago
      "Unlabelled Y-axis" Its a metagraph where the Y axis is the number of graphs produced by humanity with unlabeled Y axis.
  • huherto 13y ago
    This image seems to imply that Christianity caused the dark ages. If I remember correctly, a lot of of the ancient knowledge was kept on the monasteries after all the destruction caused by the plague and the fall of the roman empire. The image also seems to imply that the greek, the egyptians and the romans were not religious civilizations. BTW, I am not even a religious person. And I totally agree that science has a better track record than religion on curing disease.
    • VLM 13y ago
      "This image seems to imply that Christianity caused the dark ages." For those HN readers (not necessarily implying the poster) uneducated in liberal arts, the topics to google for are "edward gibbon" and "the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire". If you're going to talk about something complicated, at least throw the noobs a bone. Gibbon in the 1780s is pretty much the source of this argument, or at least its strongest promoter. Not to say its universally agreed with. I'm not even going to attempt to paraphrase Gibbon's couple hundred pages of reasoning here, but a bit of google will take care of it for you. As a life goal I finished reading Gibbon a couple years back. Its kind of long, like 3000 or so pages and took me about two seasons, reading about a half hour per night. Maybe a foot or so on a bookshelf, although I read the project gutenberg ebook version. And a bit repetitious in parts, probably because that's just how life was back then. It was worth the time, overall, and I'd recommend it.
  • krapp 13y ago
    You would have to prove that cryonics is, in fact, science first. >>http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/DarkAges.gif http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/DarkAges.gif Yeah, you know what, not so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV7CanyzhZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV7CanyzhZg
• MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  What does one do in the face of certain death? The desire to live is overwhelming in us humans. When you are told you are going to slowly fade away clinging to a hail mary pass is all you have to feed that desire to continue on.
  • eclipxe 13y ago
    We are all facing certain death. We are all slowly fading away.
• lignuist 13y ago
  If people today had the chance to revive a frozen person (or animal) from the past, they surely would not hesitate to give it a try.
  • VLM 13y ago
    Unwise. What if mr icecube is a smallpox carrier. (or equivalent... or worse...). Not as unlikely as you'd think. Going the opposite direction, poor icecube man might be revived only to die almost immediately due to measles or something similar. Assuming that "able to cure all diseases" must come before "defrost cycle" on the civilization tech tree is not a good assumption because there seems to be no obvious technological link other than both being kinda difficult. Being defrosted, assuming it actually works perfectly, probably means spending some time (maybe rest of life) in a biohazard lab. Or worse, yet maybe more likely, getting defrosted to live in a bioweapon lab.
• nova 13y ago
  > As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science. Current cryonics is perhaps too crude to work, or you can cast doubt on the long-term sustainability of the organizations, or whatever, but that doesn't make it an act of "faith", at least not any religious sense. It's an act of decision making under some very big uncertainties, but it's not unscientific. If you accept the physicalist tenet that the brain is a machine, that the mind is the result of information processing, that there is no unmaterial "ghost" an so on then trying to preserve the "state variables" of that meat computer with vitrification is perfectly reasonable, specially compared with the only current alternative, total annihilation.
  • DanBC 13y ago
    > but it's not unscientific. It's totally unscientific! It's pure pseudo-science. > If you accept the physicalist tenet that the brain is a machine ...okay... > that the mind is the result of information processing, that there is no unmaterial "ghost" an so on then trying to preserve the "state variables" of that meat computer with vitrification is perfectly reasonable, specially compared with the only current alternative, total annihilation. Well, no. We don't know what the mind is, nor how it works. We've only recently discovered that your unconscious self does stuff before your conscious self decides to do it. (http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-your-decisions-7-seconds-before-you-decide http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-...) {With interesting video clip}. Freezing your brain is as scientific as stitching corpse-body-parts together to create a living human.
    • nova 13y ago
      > We don't know what the mind is We're pretty sure the mind is what the brain does. > nor how it works. We don't need to, for this purpose. This is a low-level dump of all the information stored, to enable (much) later analysis. As I said, current cryonics is perhaps too crude. But the idea itself is not unsound. IF current procedures are not detailed enough to preserve the details then perhaps throwing a few millions into research to find better cryoprotectants or procedures could solve the problem. > We've only recently discovered that your unconscious self does stuff before your conscious self decides to do it I don't see the relevance. Your unconscious self is still made of neurons and other material stuff, not magic.
• ggreer 13y ago
  Perhaps I am a pessimist, but I don't see the future turning out well for those who have chosen to cryogenically preserve their bodies. Most cryonicists agree. It's often said that getting cryopreserved is the second-worst thing that can happen to you. How long does someone have to be dead before you say, "What value is there in reviving the dead and frozen rather than preserving the living?" Is it a valid argument after 5 minutes? A year? 100 years? If it were technologically possible to revive people from the 18th century without significantly taxing our own resources, some organization would probably be doing that right now. And the newly-revived 18th century people would probably try to revive their friends if they could. Of course cryonics organizations don't just toss heads in dewar flasks and forget about them. If revival becomes feasible, the organizations doing it will probably be the same organizations that have maintained frozen heads for decades. You say cryonics is an act of faith. Most people sign up not because they're convinced it will work, but because they think the expected value is positive. For someone moderately well-off, even a 3% chance at a much longer life is worth the $120/month that a typical life insurance policy and membership costs. Heck, many medical procedures are more expensive and less likely to benefit. If we were talking about an experimental cancer treatment that cost $80k and had a 5% chance of working, few would reject it due to the price. Those who sign up are usually convinced by evidence. Which brings me to the question: What evidence would convince you that cryonics is worthwhile? If scanning electron micrographs of cryopreserved mammal brain tissue showed intact nanostructure, would that convince you? How about reversibly-cryopreserved mammal organs? What if a team of scientists cryopreserved a bit of rat hippocampus, then warmed and re-fused it, and couldn't distinguish the cryopreserved cells from control cells? These have all been done in the past decade. Rabbit kidney: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ Rat hippocampus: http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science. And you're more than welcome to believe in it, just like any other faith... I don't think cryonics in its current form is likely to work, but I do think the probability of it working is high enough that it's worth signing up. Does this sound like a faith-based argument? If reasoning combined with scientific journal citations is faith, then call me a zealot.
• Cass 13y ago
  But consider this: what value is there in reviving the dead and frozen rather than preserving the living? There'd be lots of value in being able to revive people who died a long time ago, if only for their value as contemporary witnesses. Hell, a few years ago the scientific community went pretty crazy for some frozen dude we found in Austria, and that one was thoroughly dead. [1] We already don't have anyone left who remembers the First World War. In a few years, we'll lose the last Holocaust survivor. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to preserve some of that first-hand experience? And come on, how cool would it be to be able to unfreeze an Ancient Egyptian, or a bunch of people from the Middle Ages? I agree that the future probably won't have a use for a whole horde of our living dead, but I can see there being quite a bit of interest in reviving a few hundred or thousand people - and once you've gone to all the trouble to develop the technology, maybe it'll be cheap enough to go to the trouble of unfreezing everyone else. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi
  • randomchars 13y ago
    > And come on, how cool would it be to be able to unfreeze an Ancient Egyptian, or a bunch of people from the Middle Ages? WTF? How would you like to be revived 2000 years after you died, with everyone and everything you loved gone, in a place that looks nothing like home, only to be shown around like an animal in a zoo?
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• mistercow 13y ago
  >what value is there in reviving the dead and frozen rather than preserving the living? Counterpoint: if we had the technology to reanimate someone who died only 100 years ago (say, born in 1860), don't you think we'd find a hell of a lot of value in that from historical utility alone? >And unlike some other faiths, it's a very expensive option to partake in. If you're healthy and young, and you fund it with life insurance, the cost is on the order of $50/month. I'm not really willing to spend much time doing a rigorous comparison to "other faiths", since this line of thought is spurious, but according to one source[0], the average Protestant in the US gave about $1100 to their church in 2001. [0] http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/religious-people-donate-more-to-church-and-charity/ http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/religious-people-donate...