
If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout - otoolep
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160424-if-cryonics-suddenly-worked-wed-need-to-face-the-fallout
======
Smaug123
> "There’s no guarantee that this ‘being’ would be the same one who first
> entered into the cryogenic process, either. As de Grey says, the question
> remains of “whether scanning the brain and uploading it into a different
> substrate is revival at all, or if you’d be creating a new individual with
> the same characteristics.”

I think this is probably a bit misleading. I can't imagine de Grey being
anything other than reductionist in his views about the mind, so I can only
imagine his interpretation of this question to be as follows: "has the
scanning process captured all the relevant information about the person's
mind?" Have you created a new person (by missing out some information from the
original's physical instantiation), one who is perhaps very similar to the
original, but where some details are different because the scan was not of
high enough fidelity?

Of course, it's still unknown whether it's even possible to extract sufficient
detail from the brain; if by unhappy chance it turns out that some of the
quantum details of the brain's state are important to the mind, then it's
possible we may simply never be able to copy a person. Let us hope that is not
the case.

~~~
T-A
So if I manage to create a perfect copy of you, you have no objection to me
shooting you - the original one - in the head afterwards? After all, you - the
perfect copy - will still be alive and well.

If that prospect makes you a little uncomfortable, you are intuiting the
problem of "pattern identity" vs "continuity identity".

~~~
jobigoud
If you make a perfect copy, the identity has branched. There are now two
distinct entities (with continuity) that are starting to diverge, why would
any of them accept to be shot?

~~~
tfm
... not to mention, each of them might feel some small measure of empathy for
the other!

What if one did this regularly? Would battle-hardened cloners become
insensitive to "retirement" of their doppelgangers, or as the last survivor of
the series of slayings would they start to feel hunted?

Really feels at least a few centuries too early to even gauge whether it is
possible to substantially capture (let alone reproduce) the state of a brain.
Sure would be disappointing if it turned out you could get 90% of the
functionality with a ten-state DFA featuring frowning and pooping, but it
would make cryonics a whole lot easier. "Just leave me enough brainstem to get
home."

------
reasonattlm
Reversible vitrification is a serious field of research that actually appears
pretty close to realization for use in the fields of tissue engineering and
organ transplant. A number of independent research groups are working on a
variety of approaches. Some sample reading:

[http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34190/...](http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34190/title/Icing-Organs/)

[http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/2169002...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-
technology/21690025-after-decades-piecemeal-progress-science-cryogenically-
storing-human)

[http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/nov/discovery-
co...](http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/nov/discovery-could-open-
door-frozen-preservation-tissues-whole-organs)

It is also the case that a rabbit kidney has been vitrified, thawed,
transplanted, and it worked for a while. See:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/)

I think that progress towards reversible vitrification of organs is one of the
most important drivers of growing support and acceptance of cryonics among
those who write and opinionate. It is hard to throw out the evidence for
preservation of fine structure in the brain when there is earnest progress
towards preserving the similarly fine structure needed for organ function.

------
phasmantistes
_“You can’t have the technology to wake people up and not have the technology
to do a bunch of other great things, like provide abundance to the
population.”_

Sure you can. Just a couple paragraphs previously, you were making the point
that cryonics is "just medicine", and medicine and (for example) agronomy
advance at very different rates. I can easily imagine a future in which we
have the technology and medicine to revive all of the frozen cancer patients,
or all of the frozen ALS patients, but are still struggling with drought,
climate change, and widespread poverty.

------
Negative1
Funny to me that they call out the excellent Vanilla Sky (yes, I know Abre los
Ojos is better) and the horrible (but fun) Demolition Man, but don't mention
the much more likely Idiocracy.

In seriousness, people who will wake up will face a form of Future Shock that
will look tame by our standards. The Forever War touched on this incredibly
well.

~~~
ToastyMallows
What about Futurama? The whole show is about someone who gets woken up from
being cryogenically frozen. We could stand to learn a lot about Fry and his
adventures.

~~~
nradov
I love Futurama, but come on. The only thing you're going to learn by watching
that show is how to write a funny TV script.

~~~
surfaceTensi0n
Really? What about Jurassic Bark[0]? That episode is extremely sad and
precisely about the fallout of being cryogenically frozen.

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Bark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Bark)

~~~
msh
The saddest futurama episode ever.

Only seen it once, it made me feel too depressed.

------
xyzzyz
I feel like when we're able to put frozen brains in fresh bodies, refugees
coming back from a different era will be lesser concern than the whole
technological immortality thing. How do we ensure everyone has access to
immortality (because this obviously needs to be a human right)? How then do we
deal with population growth when people don't die of old age?

~~~
bryanlarsen
1) countries in developed countries quite regularly spend $100K-$1M to treat
illnesses in poor people. I think a larger concern would be that they would
choose to spend $50K to freeze a severely ill poor person than $1M to treat
that same person.

2) as long as immortals don't have more children than mortals, then
immortality has a surprisingly small effect on population growth.

The effects I'd be worried about would be the effects of having the majority
of the world's wealth and power being held in the hands of immortals and
cryogenic trusts.

~~~
nine_k
Ever read 'Altered Carbon' by Richard Morgan? This SF novel (quite a page-
turner, btw) is set exactly in the world like that: changing bodies extends
life, and the powerful understandably have more access to that, accumulating
wealth.

~~~
siquick
Soon to be released as a series on Netflix

[http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/netflix-altered-carbon-
serie...](http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/netflix-altered-carbon-series-order-
sci-fi-1201683629/)

------
Kutta
If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the extremely serious question
of why we let almost everyone die before, i. e. how we could've made one of
the most catastrophic humanitarian and public health oversights ever.

~~~
gech
Uh, we didn't know better? I don't even understand how you could force guilt
on ignorance

~~~
xyzzyz
We can start freezing people now. The question would be, since cryo worked,
why we didn't start freezing people when we already knew it could work in
principle and had the technology.

~~~
sliverstorm
It isn't that simple. You can't just toss people in a freezer and figure out
how to revive them in a few centuries. We already know that the freezing
process damages and destroys tissues.

~~~
xyzzyz
I'd argue burying them or cremating damages and destroys tissues even worse.

------
nradov
Let us know when someone successfully revives a frozen rodent. Until then this
stuff is just idle speculation, on par with worrying about the "fallout" from
an alien invasion.

~~~
loader
If, in 20 years, they discover how to revive a frozen rodent, it would still
be worth it to freeze it today.

~~~
nradov
Why? I doubt we'll have a shortage of lab animals in 20 years.

~~~
FeepingCreature
I mean the argument for cryo basically goes "if, in 60 years, we discover how
to revive frozen people, we'll probably wish we could go back and tell the
people of 2016 to start freezing everybody who's dying right away. So since
the only ways to avoid this outcome are total stagnation and mass extinctions
that kill us _anyways_, we should probably allocate some money to doing that."

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Money is finite. Given the available evidence, I'd rather spend it on
universal health-care for the poor than on scientifically unsupported medical
treatments. Besides which, the largest boosts to life-expectancy have tended
to come from public health interventions that cross-cut the age spectrum
rather than end-of-life desperation measures _anyway_.

We'd all like to act as if each human life had infinite value, but
unfortunately, we don't have infinite resources to act with.

~~~
FeepingCreature
Eh, if you factor in economy of scale cryonics can arguably be competetive
with end-of-life desperation measures or actually save money.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Possibly, but my point was that the actually-effective measures come decades
_before_ end-of-life.

------
mrbill
There was a section about this in the _Transmetropolitan_ comic/graphic novel,
if my memory is correct.

Lady gets reanimated in some sort of assembly-line mass process, gets a few
days in a shelter, then gets kicked out into society at large. She then
basically has some sort of culture shock and ends up homeless again.

~~~
ivanca
One of the reasons may be that the future in transmetropolitan is a very
dystopian one. They already expected their close ones to be long dead, but
they didn't expect the world to be much worse and bizarre-looking.

------
facepalm
There is that joke about Cobol - just wondering what could motivate people in
the future to actually wake you up. Some skill only you have? Maybe Cobol
really isn't such a bad bet.

------
Kinnard
Check out EPR:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Res...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Resuscitation)

This I expect will converge with cryonics.

------
alpineidyll3
Proponents of cryonics completely misunderstand natural selection, and frankly
suffer from narcissism. If it were advantageous for organisms to live forever,
they would. Without any type of genetic recombination, undying things will not
outcompete dying things, period. I hate to break it to anyone, but you're not
the perfect human and we do not live in a world of unlimited free energy. The
only world in which "you" could live forever is a world where identity itself
doesn't exist.

This basic misconception is just the tip of an iceberg of delusional thinking.
Disease would have to already be conquered. There would be no economic
incentive for reanimation, etc. etc.

History's greatest cultures focused on what they could achieve, not longevity.
Remarkable people often die young, and there's more to that than coincidence.
This vapid quest to live forever is part of the banality of our time.

------
analognoise
If.

