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I'm an Alcor member, and I don't really get how it's not a bigger operation yet. This place has people like Hal Finney and Ray Kurzweil as members and is the pr

by kvee 12y ago

I'm an Alcor member, and I don't really get how it's not a bigger operation yet. This place has people like Hal Finney and Ray Kurzweil as members and is the preeminent option in the field, but it feels like a tiny mom and pop shop. Seems to me like it should be funded with billions, and eventually I'd like to help make it much bigger. It's a pretty long, annoying process to become a member, but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die. I have a $300K policy that covers the $200K suspension and a $100K fund when I wake up. I'd recommend insurance even if you can afford to pay the $200K out of pocket because there's less legal risk that the funds might be tied up in litigation. I got my policy through the only Alcor member insurance agent, Rudi Hoffman, and if you're interested in cryonics, he's probably the best introduction you can get. His number is (386) 788-3773.

annnnd 12y ago
Every DBA knows that there is no point in doing backup if you can't do the restore. Have they revived anyone yet? Even more to the point, why would they revive you? You already paid them.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  > Even more to the point, why would they revive you? You already paid them. Agree, there's not much incentive. Plus let's say you wake up as an old man 100 years from now, who is going to take care of your daily needs ? Your immediate family will be long gone, your descendants probably won't care about you, and your skills from 100 years ago will be irrelevant. What a life!
  - superasn 12y ago
    And what if your brain can still feel stuff and you're in a state of extreme discomfort for the next 100 years and since you're frozen you can't make it stop.
    - ekianjo 12y ago
      That would be very creepy indeed. But I guess at frozen temperatures, your brain activity would be nothing like at 20C, so I'm not sure how large is that risk - people who have been found frozen in avalanches usually (if I remember correctly) did not report they an horrible experience of being frozen when they came back to life.
      - pedrosorio 12y ago
        I am not saying it is the case, but awareness does not imply memorization (which, if you think about it, is terrifying). See, for example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683150/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683150/
    - blueskin_ 12y ago
      The brain has no electrical activity, so physically impossible (alternatively, if it's possible in a cryonics patient, it would happen in a normal corpse too, in which case people should stop burning/burying them).
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    If you go for neuropreservation, you get a new body (although it possibly means revival later than whole body patient preserved at the same time). As most Alcor patients will die while very old as dying young is generally due to accident or disease (Alcor do have some younger patients, who mostly had terminal illnesses, cancer, or conditions such as AIDS, but also one suicide and one murder victim), it makes sense. It's a common idea to go for whole body while still young, then switch to neuropreservation as you get old where your body would be useless/detrimental if preserved. This also negates the problem of inflation meaning you suddenly aren't insured for enough money for a whole-body preservation too.
- kubiiii 12y ago
  Plus what companies from 50 years ago are still around?
  - onedev 12y ago
    No matter what happens, we can rest assured that IBM will be around.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    It's not because companies disappear that assets do. Buildings, machineries, lands, are passed on to new owners. Now I'm not sure in which category of assets "frozen dead body" falls into, though.
    - teddyh 12y ago
      A frozen body is a liability to owners – there is every incentive for them to lose it or otherwise facilitate its loss. There is also no drawback, as there is no one who would notice or complain if they do.
      - ekianjo 12y ago
        Not sure... if you have a famous frozen person and the technology to unfreeze people ever comes to be, you could make money on "reviving a legend", kickstarter style, to recover the costs involved during the years.
        teddyh 12y ago
        Fine – that frozen body is an asset. But any random frozen body is not.
        blueskin_ 12y ago
        Not only are they in a contract, but Alcor is only going to be staffed by people committed to advancing the cause of cryonics. They don't have some shady fly by night low bidder maintaining their patients.
- apsec112 12y ago
  Demanding a particular form of proof, and one which might be impossible to get even if we knew for sure that cryonics perfectly preserved the brain, is a logical fallacy. It's the same type of argument creationists make when they demand biologists give them video footage of monkeys evolving into humans. See eg. http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_not_that/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_....
  - annnnd 12y ago
    I never did that - they just need to prove that reviving (which is the end goal I suppose) is possible. I really don't care how they prove it, I just suggested a pretty good way (IMHO). Also, did anyone read Pet Cemetary? Yeah, it would be nice to be revived, but in what condition?
    - blueskin_ 12y ago
      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ tl;dr: A rabbit kidney was vitrified, then revived and successfully implanted into another rabbit which remained healthy.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Because they are a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing the state of life extension via cryonics as their entire goal. They aren't some shady for-profit scheme.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Every DBA knows that in its most basic form, a database is just a big text file. It's the same with a human's memory/personality. Just bits in a brain.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > It's the same with a human's memory/personality. Just bits in a brain. We barely know how memory works. It is fantastically simplistic to suggest that personality is "just bits in a brain".
  - krisdol 12y ago
    If you don't know how to decompress data, you can't know that your compression is preserving all of the original information. If you backup a system but can't restore from it, you can't know that your backup has enough information to restore from. Same goes for this junk.
nikcub 12y ago
> and I don't really get how it's not a bigger operation yet. Overpriced insurance policy based on pseudoscience implemented by a shady industry. What is not to like.
- kvee 12y ago
  Not sure what you mean. It's not pseudoscience or shady. Still, that's the problem! It's probably physically possible, but we're not making much scientific progress towards making it happen. When I mention cryonics people tend to respond very negatively without engaging rationally. More so than with most anything else. It's sad that it's something you can't say even here on hn. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    > It's probably physically possible Says who ? Just like it may be physically possible to create immortal humans, but it's extremely unlikely we find a way to make it happen anytime soon, and in the meantime your frozen body will be left to rot over time faster than science progresses in that field.
- baddox 12y ago
  I'm not sure how you can call it "pseudoscience," unless they're making false guarantees about current technology, or if it can be proven that current freezing doesn't prevent information-theoretical death.
  - lutusp 12y ago
    > I'm not sure how you can call it "pseudoscience," unless they're making false guarantees about current technology ... The term "pseudoscience" can be applied to a true result as well as a false one. The term refers, not to the result, but to how it was acquired. An astrologer may predict that you will have a nice day. If you then have a nice day, does that make astrology science?
    - 12y ago
gcb4 12y ago
you forgot some 12 "if"s on your comment.
easytiger 12y ago
Because there are better things to waste your money on?
teddyh 12y ago
“Now, I can think of three really good reasons why you shouldn’t do something like that, George.” 1. The process to revive a person after freezing does not exist. Current speculations about how it would work are so mired and poisoned by wishful thinking that it is essentially impossible to know whether it will ever exist. 2. Even if the process will some day exist, it will be too late for you if you were not frozen correctly. It’s like writing a zip/compress program and speculating that someone in the future might one day invent unzip/uncompress – if unzip or uncompress eventually does appear, it is extremely likely to show bugs in the implementation and/or specification of the original zip or compress program, making all data previously thought to be “compressed” instead utterly corrupt and worthless. 3. The incentives are all wrong for the actual truth to surface. The incentive for a company in this business is to imply that the science is (or will soon be) much farther along than it currently is, and a customer has the incentive to believe this, since the alternative is death. To paraphrase: It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their life depends upon them not understanding it.
- kvee 12y ago
  Alcor is a non-profit, and they're not implying anything other than the truth, which is that you're unlikely to get unfrozen, but it'd be cool if somehow you could be and maybe one day someone will figure it out. And this is exactly why more research should be done to figure it out. Human creativity when provided the right incentives and not over-regulated is a pretty powerful thing. Future generations may look back on us as unbelievably primitive and may have trouble believing that we suffered physical death and thought it an inescapable and acceptable part of life.
  - teddyh 12y ago
    > […] maybe one day someone will figure it out. So it’s like Pascal’s wager, except it is a real wager which costs money. > […] more research should be done […] Absolutely, but it is very hard to guard against wishful thinking, which absolutely everybody has an incentive to succumb to. > Future generations may […] have trouble believing that we suffered physical death […] …and there it is.
jgrahamc 12y ago
but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die. This appears to assume that your physical body will be enough for you to come back to 'life'.
- chroma 12y ago
  What else do you think will be necessary?
  - LyndsySimon 12y ago
    A soul, if one exists. Also, I understand that there is a school of thought that "you" are not only the physical body, but the ongoing electrical impulses in your mind. Reviving a brain that without its functional state might be akin to turning on a PC with no operating system installed.
    - ASneakyFox 12y ago
      Or a better anology. Your brain is (possibly) like ram and once you turn it off the data is whiped. So you'd need some thing like a hard drive to store the data on until the brain is powered up again and can be reloaded.
blueskin_ 12y ago
It's expensive to preserve people near-indefinitely, and they invest their money with that in mind. There are no billions because it doesn't cost that much (~$75,000 for neuropreservation and ~200,000 for whole body). As it is, I think they do very well with their resources - remember that cryonics is still such a small field, and Alcor are the largest company by a significant margin. Not an Alcor member yet, but will be when I can afford it.
tluyben2 12y ago
Let's assume they find a way to start waking you up, they will need to experiment for many years getting this process right. The first 100(0?) might wake up and remain in perpetual hell (no sensory input for instance or having some parts of the brain operational and others not) during that experimental time which might take years or might even never end. Exploration of dying & waking up was nicely penned down by dying writer Dennis Potter in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115230/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115230/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/ .
- Lost_BiomedE 12y ago
  It is assumed that it will be a last in first out type of process.
  - tluyben2 12y ago
    Is it? Anything to read up on that? I would have myself frozen if this was my only worry though; I think the problem of having these vats survive even 100 years is unlikely, let alone more if that would be needed. It feels somehow that people are too optimistic about the whole process. Maybe when I have a lot of money to spare and the doctor brings bad news I will do it. I think I have to move to the US for it though?
    - blueskin_ 12y ago
      Patients can be transferred between dewars if necessary. They are also very well designed, of a sturdy steel construction specifically built to last. they are regularly topped up with liquid nitrogen weekly, but can 3 months if not topped up[1]. You don't have to move to the US, there are organisations around the world who will perform the perfusion and handle shipping in an insulated box of dry ice to Alcor, but you should definitely budget extra. Many also rely on their members to help each other out a bit; you don't need medical training but might be trained by them and help in other ways with other patients; they also often offer a higher priced membership without this provision. An example: http://www.cryonics-uk.com/ http://www.cryonics-uk.com/ As for the cost of the preservation itself, the vast majority of people pay via life insurance rather than directly. [1]http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot
ASneakyFox 12y ago
How do those numbers make sense? 300k to maintain a body indefinitely? Then pay for the operation to revive the body? I just don't see it. Not to mention there's nothing you can do to make sure that someone 1000 years from now will see the contract through in good faith.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Long term investment. When your timescale is longer than a human life, suddenly that becomes a lot easier to generate money. Remember that the longest term 'normal' investment funds (outside of banks and individual special cases like Nintendo's $10bn in the bank that is estimated to allow it to survive as a loss maker for 38 years) are probably pensions, which are generally a 50-70 year timeframe.
simias 12y ago
Besides the technical discussion in this thread I'd like to question this procedure from an other perspective: Suppose that in, say, 1000 years humanity develops a technology that actually can heal and resurrect people who have been "suspended" that way. What is their incentive to actually do it? I mean, it's hard to make hypotheses about the state of humanity so far into the future, but if we base ourselves on current humanity growth it's unlikely that we'll be in a population deficit any time soon. Especially if we develop technology that allows us to cure death... So basically, imagine if we had a fridge somewhere with a bunch of people from 1000 AD that we could bring back to life if we wished to. It would probably be very interesting to do it for a bunch of them, the most potentially interesting and influential people of the time. But would we bother bringing, say, 100 000 people back? Those people wouldn't be able to function really well in our society and even the best educated of them would have vastly outdated knowledge about practically anything.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Alcor will undertake the process themselves, and large parts of their operating budget are earmarked for this. Then there's the fact that if humanity survives long enough, it's more likely to resemble the Federation from Star Trek than corporate America where healthcare is only available to the rich.
  - LyndsySimon 12y ago
    > Then there's the fact that if humanity survives long enough, it's more likely to resemble the Federation from Star Trek than corporate America where healthcare is only available to the rich. Citation, please.
  - krisdol 12y ago
    nothing about the future is fact.
- ozgung 12y ago
  We already have that 'fridge' in the form of Pyramids of Giza or other ancient tombs. They even have their 'insurance' and incentives as the treasures and golden coins they are buried with. After thousands of years we are still unable to resurrect them and arguably we wouldn't even if we could.
MartinMcGirk 12y ago
>It's a pretty long, annoying process to become a member, but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die. The thing that always disappoints me whenever I read about cryogenic freezing is that people seem to have to already be dead before anyone is allowed to freeze them. From the article: >Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility... As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals... Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit. I always thought that the great selling point of cryo was that if you have some incurable-by-today's-science condition and you are shortly about to die, then you could be frozen instead, and then unfrozen and promptly cured many years later once someone has figured out a reliable treatment. Isn't waiting until you are already clinically dead before having yourself frozen missing the point?
- nshepperd 12y ago
  You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order. Which is the general plan. It's still a shame we have to wait though, because being vitrified while still legally alive would majorly reduce the chances of brain damage due to lack of oxygen (ischemia).
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order. That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have any reliable cites for that?
    - lutusp 12y ago
      There are cases where people who were apparently dead for minutes to hours, were then successfully revived. All the cases involved very low temperatures that presumably prevented brain damage. http://www.livescience.com/5060-science-refrigerated-baby-miracle-revival.html http://www.livescience.com/5060-science-refrigerated-baby-mi... Quote: "'There have been a number of well-documented case histories of adults and children who drowned in very cold water, even trapped under ice for hours, and were successfully revived many hours later,' Alistair Jan Gunn, a professor of physiology and pediatrics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told LiveScience. 'Of course, this is used routinely in modern cardiac bypass.'"

by kvee 12y ago

annnnd 12y ago

Every DBA knows that there is no point in doing backup if you can't do the restore. Have they revived anyone yet? Even more to the point, why would they revive you? You already paid them.

ekianjo 12y ago
> Even more to the point, why would they revive you? You already paid them. Agree, there's not much incentive. Plus let's say you wake up as an old man 100 years from now, who is going to take care of your daily needs ? Your immediate family will be long gone, your descendants probably won't care about you, and your skills from 100 years ago will be irrelevant. What a life!
- superasn 12y ago
  And what if your brain can still feel stuff and you're in a state of extreme discomfort for the next 100 years and since you're frozen you can't make it stop.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    That would be very creepy indeed. But I guess at frozen temperatures, your brain activity would be nothing like at 20C, so I'm not sure how large is that risk - people who have been found frozen in avalanches usually (if I remember correctly) did not report they an horrible experience of being frozen when they came back to life.
    - pedrosorio 12y ago
      I am not saying it is the case, but awareness does not imply memorization (which, if you think about it, is terrifying). See, for example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683150/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683150/
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    The brain has no electrical activity, so physically impossible (alternatively, if it's possible in a cryonics patient, it would happen in a normal corpse too, in which case people should stop burning/burying them).
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  If you go for neuropreservation, you get a new body (although it possibly means revival later than whole body patient preserved at the same time). As most Alcor patients will die while very old as dying young is generally due to accident or disease (Alcor do have some younger patients, who mostly had terminal illnesses, cancer, or conditions such as AIDS, but also one suicide and one murder victim), it makes sense. It's a common idea to go for whole body while still young, then switch to neuropreservation as you get old where your body would be useless/detrimental if preserved. This also negates the problem of inflation meaning you suddenly aren't insured for enough money for a whole-body preservation too.
kubiiii 12y ago
Plus what companies from 50 years ago are still around?
- onedev 12y ago
  No matter what happens, we can rest assured that IBM will be around.
- ekianjo 12y ago
  It's not because companies disappear that assets do. Buildings, machineries, lands, are passed on to new owners. Now I'm not sure in which category of assets "frozen dead body" falls into, though.
  - teddyh 12y ago
    A frozen body is a liability to owners – there is every incentive for them to lose it or otherwise facilitate its loss. There is also no drawback, as there is no one who would notice or complain if they do.
    - ekianjo 12y ago
      Not sure... if you have a famous frozen person and the technology to unfreeze people ever comes to be, you could make money on "reviving a legend", kickstarter style, to recover the costs involved during the years.
      - teddyh 12y ago
        Fine – that frozen body is an asset. But any random frozen body is not.
        blueskin_ 12y ago
        Not only are they in a contract, but Alcor is only going to be staffed by people committed to advancing the cause of cryonics. They don't have some shady fly by night low bidder maintaining their patients.
apsec112 12y ago
Demanding a particular form of proof, and one which might be impossible to get even if we knew for sure that cryonics perfectly preserved the brain, is a logical fallacy. It's the same type of argument creationists make when they demand biologists give them video footage of monkeys evolving into humans. See eg. http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_not_that/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_....
- annnnd 12y ago
  I never did that - they just need to prove that reviving (which is the end goal I suppose) is possible. I really don't care how they prove it, I just suggested a pretty good way (IMHO). Also, did anyone read Pet Cemetary? Yeah, it would be nice to be revived, but in what condition?
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ tl;dr: A rabbit kidney was vitrified, then revived and successfully implanted into another rabbit which remained healthy.
blueskin_ 12y ago
Because they are a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing the state of life extension via cryonics as their entire goal. They aren't some shady for-profit scheme.
blueskin_ 12y ago
Every DBA knows that in its most basic form, a database is just a big text file. It's the same with a human's memory/personality. Just bits in a brain.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > It's the same with a human's memory/personality. Just bits in a brain. We barely know how memory works. It is fantastically simplistic to suggest that personality is "just bits in a brain".
- krisdol 12y ago
  If you don't know how to decompress data, you can't know that your compression is preserving all of the original information. If you backup a system but can't restore from it, you can't know that your backup has enough information to restore from. Same goes for this junk.

nikcub 12y ago

> and I don't really get how it's not a bigger operation yet. Overpriced insurance policy based on pseudoscience implemented by a shady industry. What is not to like.

kvee 12y ago
Not sure what you mean. It's not pseudoscience or shady. Still, that's the problem! It's probably physically possible, but we're not making much scientific progress towards making it happen. When I mention cryonics people tend to respond very negatively without engaging rationally. More so than with most anything else. It's sad that it's something you can't say even here on hn. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- ekianjo 12y ago
  > It's probably physically possible Says who ? Just like it may be physically possible to create immortal humans, but it's extremely unlikely we find a way to make it happen anytime soon, and in the meantime your frozen body will be left to rot over time faster than science progresses in that field.
baddox 12y ago
I'm not sure how you can call it "pseudoscience," unless they're making false guarantees about current technology, or if it can be proven that current freezing doesn't prevent information-theoretical death.
- lutusp 12y ago
  > I'm not sure how you can call it "pseudoscience," unless they're making false guarantees about current technology ... The term "pseudoscience" can be applied to a true result as well as a false one. The term refers, not to the result, but to how it was acquired. An astrologer may predict that you will have a nice day. If you then have a nice day, does that make astrology science?
  - 12y ago

gcb4 12y ago

you forgot some 12 "if"s on your comment.

easytiger 12y ago

Because there are better things to waste your money on?

teddyh 12y ago

“Now, I can think of three really good reasons why you shouldn’t do something like that, George.” 1. The process to revive a person after freezing does not exist. Current speculations about how it would work are so mired and poisoned by wishful thinking that it is essentially impossible to know whether it will ever exist. 2. Even if the process will some day exist, it will be too late for you if you were not frozen correctly. It’s like writing a zip/compress program and speculating that someone in the future might one day invent unzip/uncompress – if unzip or uncompress eventually does appear, it is extremely likely to show bugs in the implementation and/or specification of the original zip or compress program, making all data previously thought to be “compressed” instead utterly corrupt and worthless. 3. The incentives are all wrong for the actual truth to surface. The incentive for a company in this business is to imply that the science is (or will soon be) much farther along than it currently is, and a customer has the incentive to believe this, since the alternative is death. To paraphrase: It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their life depends upon them not understanding it.

kvee 12y ago
Alcor is a non-profit, and they're not implying anything other than the truth, which is that you're unlikely to get unfrozen, but it'd be cool if somehow you could be and maybe one day someone will figure it out. And this is exactly why more research should be done to figure it out. Human creativity when provided the right incentives and not over-regulated is a pretty powerful thing. Future generations may look back on us as unbelievably primitive and may have trouble believing that we suffered physical death and thought it an inescapable and acceptable part of life.
- teddyh 12y ago
  > […] maybe one day someone will figure it out. So it’s like Pascal’s wager, except it is a real wager which costs money. > […] more research should be done […] Absolutely, but it is very hard to guard against wishful thinking, which absolutely everybody has an incentive to succumb to. > Future generations may […] have trouble believing that we suffered physical death […] …and there it is.

jgrahamc 12y ago

but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die. This appears to assume that your physical body will be enough for you to come back to 'life'.

chroma 12y ago
What else do you think will be necessary?
- LyndsySimon 12y ago
  A soul, if one exists. Also, I understand that there is a school of thought that "you" are not only the physical body, but the ongoing electrical impulses in your mind. Reviving a brain that without its functional state might be akin to turning on a PC with no operating system installed.
  - ASneakyFox 12y ago
    Or a better anology. Your brain is (possibly) like ram and once you turn it off the data is whiped. So you'd need some thing like a hard drive to store the data on until the brain is powered up again and can be reloaded.

blueskin_ 12y ago

It's expensive to preserve people near-indefinitely, and they invest their money with that in mind. There are no billions because it doesn't cost that much (~$75,000 for neuropreservation and ~200,000 for whole body). As it is, I think they do very well with their resources - remember that cryonics is still such a small field, and Alcor are the largest company by a significant margin. Not an Alcor member yet, but will be when I can afford it.

tluyben2 12y ago

Let's assume they find a way to start waking you up, they will need to experiment for many years getting this process right. The first 100(0?) might wake up and remain in perpetual hell (no sensory input for instance or having some parts of the brain operational and others not) during that experimental time which might take years or might even never end. Exploration of dying & waking up was nicely penned down by dying writer Dennis Potter in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115230/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115230/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/ .

Lost_BiomedE 12y ago
It is assumed that it will be a last in first out type of process.
- tluyben2 12y ago
  Is it? Anything to read up on that? I would have myself frozen if this was my only worry though; I think the problem of having these vats survive even 100 years is unlikely, let alone more if that would be needed. It feels somehow that people are too optimistic about the whole process. Maybe when I have a lot of money to spare and the doctor brings bad news I will do it. I think I have to move to the US for it though?
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    Patients can be transferred between dewars if necessary. They are also very well designed, of a sturdy steel construction specifically built to last. they are regularly topped up with liquid nitrogen weekly, but can 3 months if not topped up[1]. You don't have to move to the US, there are organisations around the world who will perform the perfusion and handle shipping in an insulated box of dry ice to Alcor, but you should definitely budget extra. Many also rely on their members to help each other out a bit; you don't need medical training but might be trained by them and help in other ways with other patients; they also often offer a higher priced membership without this provision. An example: http://www.cryonics-uk.com/ http://www.cryonics-uk.com/ As for the cost of the preservation itself, the vast majority of people pay via life insurance rather than directly. [1]http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot

ASneakyFox 12y ago

How do those numbers make sense? 300k to maintain a body indefinitely? Then pay for the operation to revive the body? I just don't see it. Not to mention there's nothing you can do to make sure that someone 1000 years from now will see the contract through in good faith.

blueskin_ 12y ago
Long term investment. When your timescale is longer than a human life, suddenly that becomes a lot easier to generate money. Remember that the longest term 'normal' investment funds (outside of banks and individual special cases like Nintendo's $10bn in the bank that is estimated to allow it to survive as a loss maker for 38 years) are probably pensions, which are generally a 50-70 year timeframe.

simias 12y ago

Besides the technical discussion in this thread I'd like to question this procedure from an other perspective: Suppose that in, say, 1000 years humanity develops a technology that actually can heal and resurrect people who have been "suspended" that way. What is their incentive to actually do it? I mean, it's hard to make hypotheses about the state of humanity so far into the future, but if we base ourselves on current humanity growth it's unlikely that we'll be in a population deficit any time soon. Especially if we develop technology that allows us to cure death... So basically, imagine if we had a fridge somewhere with a bunch of people from 1000 AD that we could bring back to life if we wished to. It would probably be very interesting to do it for a bunch of them, the most potentially interesting and influential people of the time. But would we bother bringing, say, 100 000 people back? Those people wouldn't be able to function really well in our society and even the best educated of them would have vastly outdated knowledge about practically anything.

blueskin_ 12y ago
Alcor will undertake the process themselves, and large parts of their operating budget are earmarked for this. Then there's the fact that if humanity survives long enough, it's more likely to resemble the Federation from Star Trek than corporate America where healthcare is only available to the rich.
- LyndsySimon 12y ago
  > Then there's the fact that if humanity survives long enough, it's more likely to resemble the Federation from Star Trek than corporate America where healthcare is only available to the rich. Citation, please.
- krisdol 12y ago
  nothing about the future is fact.
ozgung 12y ago
We already have that 'fridge' in the form of Pyramids of Giza or other ancient tombs. They even have their 'insurance' and incentives as the treasures and golden coins they are buried with. After thousands of years we are still unable to resurrect them and arguably we wouldn't even if we could.

MartinMcGirk 12y ago

>It's a pretty long, annoying process to become a member, but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die. The thing that always disappoints me whenever I read about cryogenic freezing is that people seem to have to already be dead before anyone is allowed to freeze them. From the article: >Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility... As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals... Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit. I always thought that the great selling point of cryo was that if you have some incurable-by-today's-science condition and you are shortly about to die, then you could be frozen instead, and then unfrozen and promptly cured many years later once someone has figured out a reliable treatment. Isn't waiting until you are already clinically dead before having yourself frozen missing the point?

nshepperd 12y ago
You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order. Which is the general plan. It's still a shame we have to wait though, because being vitrified while still legally alive would majorly reduce the chances of brain damage due to lack of oxygen (ischemia).
- DanBC 12y ago
  > You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order. That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have any reliable cites for that?
  - lutusp 12y ago
    There are cases where people who were apparently dead for minutes to hours, were then successfully revived. All the cases involved very low temperatures that presumably prevented brain damage. http://www.livescience.com/5060-science-refrigerated-baby-miracle-revival.html http://www.livescience.com/5060-science-refrigerated-baby-mi... Quote: "'There have been a number of well-documented case histories of adults and children who drowned in very cold water, even trapped under ice for hours, and were successfully revived many hours later,' Alistair Jan Gunn, a professor of physiology and pediatrics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told LiveScience. 'Of course, this is used routinely in modern cardiac bypass.'"