
Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopter Is Cryonically Freezing His Body to See the Future - akrymski
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/hal-finney/
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kvee
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
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.

~~~
kubiiii
Plus what companies from 50 years ago are still around?

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ekianjo
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
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.

~~~
blueskin_
If you put one in a storage unit, possibly yes, but not with a dedicated
nonprofit staffed by experts in the field.

~~~
teddyh
I am talking about what the _incentives_ are, and you are replying with,
essentially, “ _Surely they wouldn’t do such a thing!_ ”. Maybe not, but
that’s not the point. The _incentive_ is what I’m talking about. And the fact
is that a head or body and a contract is a straight liability, with nobody
(literally!) to complain if they don’t fulfill their part.

If you want to argue that they would stand to lose more PR and goodwill than
it would be worth, that would actually be a point you could make, but now I’m
just writing your argument for you.

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apsec112
For those interested in the science behind cryonics, or who are skeptical that
freezing preserves useful brain structure, I recommend reading Alcor's FAQ,
which addresses most of the questions commenters new to cryonics have raised:

[http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/index.html](http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/index.html)

~~~
teddyh
For a view slightly less likely to be biased, see the Cryonics FAQ:

[http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html](http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html)

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chroma
I thought the comments on some articles were bad, but apparently cryonics
takes the crown. It's sad that our community can't discuss this topic without
a flamewar.

Instead of going back-and-forth in comments, I think it would be much more
productive to link to some FAQs or well-written articles from both sides. The
current level of discussion is unworthy of us.

~~~
alexjeffrey
> The current level of discussion is unworthy of us.

I'm not usually one to be a buzzkill, but I should point out that Hacker News
is largely filled with startup coders and small business owners, not trained
academics - you can't set your standards too high for rational debate,
especially considering the level of religious wars coders start over
trivialities like text editor choice, operating system or programming
languages (check out any thread that mentions PHP for a great example of
group-think flaming).

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lotsofmangos
Whatever the eventual chance of being revived, you have to have some respect
for those who just refuse to give up.

~~~
pyrocat
Fear of death + rich == respect?

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lotsofmangos
No. Most folk fear death. If the reason that folk got froze was just because
they were rich people who feared death, then a lot more of the rich would be
doing it.

I think many folk who do this are showing a level of extreme bloody mindedness
combined with a completely ridiculous gambling streak, that I do sort of
respect.

I mean, even if it does work, or even worse, half works, you have no fucking
clue what madness awaits. The chances of ending up in some Cold Lazarus lab
experiment seem to be not completely discountable, seeing that is nearly what
you are paying for.

~~~
blueskin_
Nonzero but still infinitesimal, especially considering Alcor's mission
includes reviving its patients itself, and if humanity has the technology to
do so, it could easily clone people so wouldn't need to bring back cryonics
patients for malicious purposes

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liotier
To hell with seeing the future - build the future today !

~~~
thejosh
All innovators freeze themselves to see a better future, and who is left to
build that future? :)

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afafsd
Cryogenics is a bit like Pascal's Wager. A gamble with a low probability of
success multiplied by a supposedly-infinite payoff ought to be worth buying
into at any price, whether it's paying money to freeze your brain or just
worshipping whatever religion is promising to reward your faith with eternal
paradise.

It suffers from the same problem too. Just as the god of Christianity is in
competition with the god of Random-Other-Religion, both of these are in
competition with cryogenics. Maybe freezing your head will stop you going to
heaven, so now you've got a low-probability infinite cost to set against your
low-probability infinite prize.

~~~
scott777
I don't follow your logic. If cryonics works then you will be awoken from
death as certainly as people who are currently awoken from death via CPR and
defibrillators. The people awoken under those circumstances still eventually
die and either go to heaven he'll or nowhere but in the meantime they are
great full to be alive because of modern medicine. ..why would cryonics be any
different? And what criteria do you use to show that the chances are so slim ?

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kbart
Even if one day it will be possible to revive these bodies from the scientific
perspective, a huge legal problems would be involved. I mean, they are
officially _dead_. Risk is even bigger if cryogenics became popular - combined
with ever increasing population I doubt future politicians will be
enthusiastic about the idea of dead people coming back to life.

~~~
kvee
Good problem to have.

"In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city
would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of
the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s
third-story windows." -Superfreakonomics

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Yardlink
He waited a day or two to be frozen after he died. Doesn't that mean his brain
will have already suffered massive damage from oxygen deprivation and be
unrecoverable? I thought you would have to freeze yourself before your brain
begins to destroy itself. However, that may mean doing it before you die,
which could be illegal (assisted suicide) in the US.

~~~
blueskin_
>Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was
flown to a facility of the cryonics firm known as the Alcor Life Extension
Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Sounds like a fairly standard preservation; definitely not days in between. As
it is, even if a field perfusion is not performed, cardiopulmonary support
plus gradual cooling still massively reduce any chance of brain damage.

A standby is when they wait at your deathbed with a doctor, then get to work
as soon as you are pronounced dead, including using a machine to perform
cardiopulmonary support to circulate oxygen to the brain while cooling. They
then start perfusion (replacement of blood with cryoprotectant), normally in
the field.

Cryonics as assisted suicide would be preferable as an option, but a standby
is significantly better than nothing. As it is, several US states have
legalised assisted suicide, so it could potentially become an option in those
states, but I guess nobody wants the mess of the legal battle to set a
precedent. If there was a Swiss cryonics company, it would probably be
available as assisted suicide today.

See also my other comment on assisted suicide:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8241828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8241828)

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alexjeffrey
the thing I find most depressing about cryonics is that the hundreds of
thousands of dollars it costs for one rich person to desperately attempt to
cling to life, in spite of the odds that cryonics is not reversible, would
actually save hundreds, if not thousands of lives, today.

Maybe instead of having your body frozen in the off chance that you can wake
up 100 years old and with no friends, family, or prospects, you should give
that money to a charity who will use it to save real lives that are being
ended for ridiculous reasons like having no access to clean water or being
attacked by malaria-carrying mosquitoes that can be deterred with a $5 net.

~~~
kelnos
I fundamentally disagree with the concept of telling people what to do with
their earned post-tax, post-obligation wealth.

You could make the same argument for any number of things, probably things
_you_ even do. Let's play with your sentence a bit:

"The thing I find most depressing about televisions is that the trillions of
dollars collectively spend on hardware and programming would actually save
millions of lives."

You can apply that to pretty much anything people do in first world countries
that isn't available to people in the third world. Please get off your high
horse and don't get bent out of shape when people do something that's in their
own interest.

~~~
alexjeffrey
did you even bother to read the conversation I had with blueskin_ before
posting this? I clarified my position quite a lot, specifically against the
particular straw man you've just raised.

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spacefight
And once they go bankcrupt, all (or nothing, essentially) is lost.

~~~
blueskin_
Not going to happen. They invest for the long term, because when the goal of
your company is generations off, you can afford to pick safe yet rewarding
investments.

~~~
spacefight
"Not going to happen" is a bold statement. We haven't even solved the problem
of how to burry nuclear waste save (see Germany and their trials at Asse) yet
- how are we supposed to safely store human bodies and keep coorporations
alive for decades if not centuries?

~~~
blueskin_
Because there _really_ aren't any companies hundreds to 1500 years old, right?

Oh, wait.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies)

~~~
spacefight
Of course there are centuries old companies out there - but they didn't have
the technical burden of storing along conserved bodies in a near perfect
condition with them... Apple, meet Orange.

~~~
blueskin_
It isn't that hard. Maintaining a building, as well as receiving a weekly
delivery of liquid nitrogen and topping up a few dozen giant dewars and
monitoring their temperatures. They don't even _need_ weekly deliveries, as
they are good for three months without refilling if necessary.

[http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot](http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot)

Of course, they perform research too, but the core of their existence is the
preservation of their patients.

~~~
spacefight
I would say even getting constant liquid nitrogen resupplies is not trivial.
Think of the unthinkable: a war around the compound for years, cutting of the
supply. There's many other scenaries which makes the problem hard.

~~~
blueskin_
A war in Scottsdale, Arizona?

Interesting. As it is, I would seriously doubt they don't have contingency
plans for moving, which would likely be enacted pre-emptively if the area
became unstable.

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fideloper
Kaaahhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnn!

~~~
skippednote
back from larakaaaaaaaaaan?

