The scientist's open letter on cryonics, signed by people such as Gregory Stock, Stanley Shostak, Ralph Merkle, Eric Drexler, Aubrey de Grey, Gregory Benford, and a range of researchers in the life sciences you're probably less familiar with, but who are household names in their fields.
The basic process is pretty similar between all modern cryonics organizations. Important to note is that freezing is out, vitrification is in. That makes a large difference to cellular structural integrity. See:
I was kind of horrified how bad the arguments against cryonics are[0]. As far as I can tell noone has ever gone to the trouble to seriously and in good faith argue against it, they just apply the absurdity heuristic and say its advocates are freaks/frauds etc. (And yet I have not made my contract of immortality with the cult of the severed head.)
What stops you signing up? If it's "cryocrastination", read this:
"I know more people who are planning to sign up for cryonics Real Soon Now than people who have actually signed up. I expect that more people have died while cryocrastinating than have actually been cryopreserved. If you've already decided this is a good idea, but you "haven't gotten around to it", sign up for cryonics NOW. I mean RIGHT NOW." - http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/
"You could not feel sadness if you've never tasted joy; that's the curse of humans - born in passion you destroy"
While I find the concept of cryonics fascinating, and feel the science should be researched more, I also feel death is important. Not only is it a natural part of life, but it's also the catalyst that enables enjoyment. I'd be extremely apathetic towards everything if I knew I'd live forever. And then, there comes the sociological problems associated with resurrecting the dead.
Edit: Some people seem to have misunderstood: My comments about living forever is in direct reference to what's stated in the article, not what's realistic.
There is no such thing as living forever. We may be able to extend our lives to thousands of years, but it will not be forever. Notice that even species that have lived for millions of years die off. Eventually something will kill you, either an accident, a malfunction on whatever is keeping you healthy, or another person with a hammer. Thrust me, death will always be with us.
As a side note, people cite overpopulation as one of the problems of people not dying. I don't think this will ever be a problem. We will naturally adjust. If you are going to live for hundreds or even thousands of years would you really have kids when you are only 25-30 years old? I imagine people will wait until they've reached 30 or 50% of their life span simply because there is just no rush.
>I imagine people will wait until they've reached 30 or 50% of their life span simply because there is just no rush.
The biggest problem here is that we would need a change in human sex characteristics.
We would have to change the way a female matures so that she would be able to (healthfully) breed at that age, otherwise should she desire children, she would have to have them at a (relative to long lifespan) very young age.
One other proposition would be the secure storage of her eggs.
You've bought into your mind's rationalization. Death is scary, so society and your own mind builds all sorts of weird rationalizations to make it less so.
I don't know how old you are, but your current life expectancy is likely much greater than the number of years you've already lived. So the difference between of life without cryonics and life with it is "I will probably live a long time" and "I will probably live a very long time."
There is still death in a world with cryonics. Traumatic accidents will still put people beyond recovery, the same with some diseases. Many people will be frozen but never reanimated.
In the first world in 2011, death occurs but is rare. Cryonics will increase the rarity but that's all.
I'm pretty young, yeah, and perhaps I'll see things differently when I'm older.
As for my comments about "living forever", I'm directly referencing what they stated in the article, rather than what's plausible. I'm fully aware of the differences. I'm just trying to illustrate that, at least psychologically, the worth of life is depreciated.
It still sounds like the mental bias of post-hoc justification.
The malnourished value food more and those who have an imminent terminal condition feel every moment more intensely, but that doesn't mean it is better to be so. None of sound mind should be forced to take life-saving treatment, but in my view it is a good to have the option.
IMO, the absurd part is, how do you bring a 93 year old dead person back to life? How long until we get this technology? Who's to say that there will be a consistent flow of money to keep this person frozen until that time? (it's not cheap)
I think that eventually we'll probably figure this stuff out, but that now is far too early to start freezing people.
I don't think most fans of cryonics think that they'll just be unfrozen and brought back in the same body. With advanced enough technology, the brain patterns can be scanned and either emulated in a virtual world, or they can be reproduced in a new body that won't age in the same way that our bodies do (because the diseases of aging happen in an evolutionary blind spot, after we reproduced).
IMO, the absurd part is, how do you bring a 93 year old dead person back to life?
Or to put in another way, what is more likely: That the future can bring back a dead old and then frozen brain, or that they can reconstruct an individual just by brute force computer simulation, no need for anyone to be frozen?
If the later is as likely as the first, what exactly is the point of freezing?
Perhaps you might be better of trying to create interesting things which will make the distant future more likely to want to simulate you in high precision?
Or perhaps Aubrey DeGray would be much better off applying his impressive brains to getting an MD and going into basic research, instead of being a cheerleader for his ideas with only a Gerontology PhD.
Aubrey's foundation funds tons of lab research that wouldn't be otherwise done, as well as editing a very well regarded journal about human aging (Rejuvenation Research). The fact that he isn't in a lab doesn't make him any less of a scientist; sometimes having the ideas and doing the high-level synthesis work is more valuable than doing lab work that any number of people can do.
I suggest you read his book (amazon: Ending Aging) and then make up your mind about his ideas, rather than after having only heard the soundbites.
I have red his book, it's like nails on a chalkboard to my brain. My problem with it? I know too much. I am not an MD but I work with them, I write medical R&D software.
If you are passionate about the subject, step out of the Aubrey lake and dive into the huge ocean that is next to it. It's not nearly as optimistic, but is much more relevant.
You've basically said nothing. Could you add some specifics to your criticism of Aubrey's thesis? And please don't assume that I don't know any biology.
I can't get specific because De Gray's theories are either too general or so wrong as to not even be wrong.
So lets stick to fundamentals. His basic argument: ... the fundamental knowledge needed to develop effective anti-aging medicine mostly already exists, and that the science is ahead of the funding.
In other words, big pharma with all its money and all those huge profits coming form treating age related diseases, is just not interested in spending more to develop more such drugs? I mean the cure for agings is just sitting there, and all they have to do is put a few people to work on it, but nope, not interested.
All those scientists can't see the forest for the trees, but Aubrey does see it!
Does this give you any kind of a pause?
I mean, sure he might be the visionary of our age, but how likely is that?
Imagine this was about algorithms. And someone claimed the basic theory to solve NP-hard problems in polynomial time already exits, someone just needs to implement the algorithms. Would that person be taken seriously?
Does it not bother you at all that so many in the tech community are a buzz with his theories, but the life sciences community not so much? What's keeping Craig Venter from curing aging in a couple of weeks? Pro-aging and pro-death bias?
That is another one of Aubrey's claims, that a lot of his opponents are just hypnotized by our pro-aging and pro-death Stockholm syndrome culture.
Let me ask you this, can you provide me with specific evidence that Aubrey's main theories are NOT pure charlatanry?
Because the generic "We can like totally to do this, if we just try guys!" is not even wrong.
I don't believe you've read his book. This isn't his argument at all, not even close. I'm not sure who you're attacking here, but it's not Aubrey or SENS.
The purpose of cryonics is to save the lives of living people, not inter the bodies of dead people. Death is a neurological process that begins after the heart stops. A stopped heart only causes death if nothing is done when the heart stops. Cryonics proposes to do something. In the words of a mainstream critical care expert writing for the American College of Surgeons, "In this era of critical care, death is more a process than an event.... A prognosis of death...cannot serve as a diagnosis."
I don't feel that I understand this fully. Is there a point in this "process" from which we've already brought people back, or is this all just conjecture?
I've always felt, in a very non-disparaging way, that cryonics filled the need for secular humanists to believe in an afterlife.
An interesting point was brought up in the comments too, which is if we had a bunch of frozen folks from the 1600's and we could unfreeze them and bring them back to life, would that be the right choice?
That is the moral 'nub' which I find fascinating about this stuff (and yes it has been chewed fruitfully by writers before).
So imagine you could bring someone back from the 60's. What would they do today? The most brilliant computer designer would probably de-thaw believing that the IBM 360 with its channel architecture was the coolest thing. Show them the multi-issue pipeline of a modern microprocessor with register coloring, branch prediction, and early instruction retirement and their brain would explode.
When you are young the wonder of a new thing gives you the energy to read about how it works, when you're older (or just in a hurry) having to spend time reading the manual or 'fiddling with' a tool to understand it enough to use it is bothersome. Can you imagine waking up and everything you know is expected to be known by teens ? All your hard earned wisdom is worthless?
Since we're speculating there are things we can't really know but we can wonder about.
So what will be the economic status of these people once thawed? It could be 'good' in a post singularity world where anything can be made for 'free', or it could be 'bad' where thawed people are treated like the property of the person who paid to thaw them.
I would hate to find myself waking up, fuzzily, and have an insistent voice saying, "you've been reanimated by xyzcorp, click 'yes' to agree to their terms for paying off your debt to them, or 'no thankyou' to be re-frozen."
In general I prefer being alive to being dead. It seems extremely likely that if we're capable of reanimating people who were dead we will be able to give them youthful bodies again. People don't seem to have huge problems with voluntarily supporting expensive invalids (children) for decades if it's a free choice. By analogy with asylum seekers immigrating to the first world I expect that people with radically lower human capital in their new environment normally adjust to their new lives and are relatively happy with them (otherwise they could go home or kill themselves)
So; assuming technology sufficient for reanimation allows for rejuvenation I expect that people would very slowly adjust to their new surroundings (unless the differences between societies are larger than between Hmong hill tribesmen who had never seen a tv and 1960's America) and be generally happy with their new surroundings. Given that rejuvenation implies the possibility of eternal youth and health I assert that people could eventually totally integrate with their new society, though not all would. Still, if you're back at peak mental and physical fitness and you have more than 10 years to adapt to the culture and acquire education/human capital/skills why couldn't it work?
"if we had a bunch of frozen folks from the 1600's and we could unfreeze them and bring them back to life, would that be the right choice?"
Kill someone just because they are a bit behind the times? Triage is fine, but we're talking about a chance to save someone healthy and alive when there are plenty of resources.
"So what will be the economic status of these people once thawed?"
Barring drastic economic changes, compound interest from the trust fund should put them in good shape.
I think that it would certainly be the right thing to do to bring back anyone, like Ben Franklin, who wanted to be preserved to see what the future would bring. I'd say that we should work to bring back anyone who want to be be brought back, but also not force various sort of life extension on people.
Show them the multi-issue pipeline of a modern microprocessor with register coloring, branch prediction, and early instruction retirement and their brain would explode.
Objection, asserting facts that are not in evidence :-)
Some folks will tell you that death is merely a transition to an alternate form of living. Some folks will tell you that if your cells are cryogenically frozen can get defrosted later. Both ideas are taken on faith, they may both be true, they may neither be true.
If someone reading this is pursuing a writing career in fiction I would be love to read a story about a bunch of souls, who have died, have had their mortal remains frozen, and now as dead people been able to see that there is an afterlife, but they can't go there because their mortal remains might be reanimated and they would go back, how they deal with it and what they do. Do they figure out a way to 'break' the cryonics system, allowing them to decay and move on? Do they go insane stuck between heaven and earth? Do they wander the planet vicariously living through other people's experiences. Maybe a TV series in there somewhere.
Some folks will tell you that death is merely a transition to an alternate form of living. Some folks will tell you that if your cells are cryogenically frozen can get defrosted later. Both ideas are taken on faith, they may both be true, they may neither be true.
I live in an apartment building, but I haven't seen behind my neighbor's door. It could actually be a portal to Mars. It could lead to a few rooms consistent with the geometry of the rest of the building.
True enough, but the unknowns 'is there an afterlife' and 'can I be reanimated from frozen tissue' are sufficiently unknowable at this time to appear equiprobable to this reader.
"Both ideas are taken on faith, they may both be true, they may neither be true."
They aren't equally true or untrue. There's more evidence cryonics will work than that afterlife-capable souls are real. The question is whether it's enough to be worth spending money on.
I like your idea about supernatural cryonics fiction though. I've considered writing stories like that myself. It doesn't have to be unpleasant for the souls; perhaps they are sitting in a camp outside the gates of heaven or hell, communicating with each other and sharing ideas. They could perhaps later carry messages back to the mortal world, granting empirical proof of the afterlife as soon as they are reanimated.
http://evidencebasedcryonics.org/scientists-open-letter-on-c...
A layman's introduction to cryonics:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2001/11/cryonics.php
Lots of deeper technical details can be found at Alcor (which maintains a better web presence than the Cryonics Institute):
http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm
The basic process is pretty similar between all modern cryonics organizations. Important to note is that freezing is out, vitrification is in. That makes a large difference to cellular structural integrity. See:
http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/vitrify.html