There's a straightforward physical theory: colossal magnetic fields + slightly diamagnetic materials (including a human body with small superconducting particles) = magnetic levitation.
But human bodies might contain paramagnetic and ferromagnetic particles too, and more importantly building magnets that are strong enough to levitate a corpse is an expensive and difficult engineering challenge.
The whole stick behind placing the money to pay for the service, the energy and resource consumption, having people work to maintain that infra... That's rich people carrying their dominance beyond their own death, having breathing people slaving out for them, there's a revolting aspect to it.
Not quite sure what your problem with this is. The people who paid for it weren't all absurdly rich (it doesn't cost an utter fortune) and the people who run it do so willingly and often with great motivation because many of them also have a personal curiosity stake in seeing if they can make it work somehow. I've seen and read interviews with staff at cryopreservation organizations and companies (particularly Alcor). They're far, far from slaves to rich oligarchs and many of them love their work and are very interested in its technical aspects.
There's nothing revolting to wanting to see if by some change in technology or chance, you can live longer than normal, or be revived, so long as you're not taking from someone elses life or well-being to do so.
Also, the electrical requirements behind these services are miniscule compared to those of many, many other at least as frivolous (and i'd say often more frivolous things, some of which people right on this site earn their money from.
It's stunning how many people extrapolate their own completely emotional, subjective reactions to certain things that do them no harm into wanting to destroy or stop them.
> It's stunning how many people extrapolate their own completely emotional, subjective reactions to certain things that do them no harm into wanting to destroy or stop them.
I don't get the ignorance/hostility that people seem to have towards cryopreservation, or things like longevity research that even in the short term could have tangible benefits for letting people at least live out their later days without feeling like their bodies are breaking down and decaying, a more respectful sunset to one's life.
But at the same time, I never got how people can be okay with the concept of dying - to me and some other people, that's the single most scary thing out there. With most research telling us that essentially after death the mind just... ceases. No more passage of time, no more conscious thoughts or experiences, ever. I'm not okay with that and claims about "living on" in people's memories, or leaving a legacy - that wouldn't do me much good.
It's likely that cryonics is just storing corpses that will never be revived due to our current methods being too primitive. But a 1% chance or even a 0.01% chance of fighting off entropy for a while longer seems worth it, versus guaranteed doom. Aside from that, it would be interesting to see how people would act if they had lifespans of a thousand years - knowing that what you'll do to the environment, you'll have to bear the burden of yourself.
I think the way you are thinking of death is sadly too common, but also profoundly materialistic and selfish.
Science doesn't really tell us what happens to your consciousness after death. It doesn't say much of anything about your consciousness at all - in fact, it is still largely mystified as to why you aren't just a flesh robot following straightforward evolutionary imperatives with maybe a little quantum randomness thrown in. What you think about your conscious mind largely comes down to belief, and it looks like you believe that there is nothing more than the flesh robot, which I guess has some emergent properties that result in a conscious mind. If there really is nothing to it but what we have observed, then that's true, but there are a lot of things in the universe that we haven't observed, and this may be one of them. For all we know, any one of the religions could be right about life after death or the existence of some sort of "soul," including yours, which denies the existence of one.
As to selfishness, why spend the $100k+ on having your body frozen rather than passing that along to your descendants? Do you believe that there's something special about you and/or inadequate about other people that makes your greed over a chance at a few more years of life worth the money and time you are taking from them? Why is life about what will "do me much good"? Is that all you think your life is worth? It's just about accruing a bunch of stuff so that you can hopefully spend it on becoming immortal before your clock runs out?
There has always been a slice of the elite that thinks they can cheat death by doing this, and usually it doesn't go well. Usually, they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds. Is this time different because instead of drinking lead or drying your body, you've chosen to freeze it instead?
Death is ultimately a natural part of life, and I guess the unknown part of it is so terrifying that we spend so much of life futilely trying to prevent it. I think it's a lot better to embrace the fact that you get about 100 years on this rock to advance the state of the world as much as you can before passing the job of being its steward onto the next generation.
> Science doesn't really tell us what happens to your consciousness after death. It doesn't say much of anything about your consciousness at all
lol what? No. When you die your brain ceases activity. There is no scientific evidence to support that there is some underlying, persisting system that drives consciousness - literally everything points to consciousness being driven by brain activity.
When you die you die. That is it.
> Death is ultimately a natural part of life, and I guess the unknown part of it is so terrifying that we spend so much of life futilely trying to prevent it.
Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's good or something to accept. Disease is natural, do we just go "well it's part of life!" - no, we cure it. And none of this is unknown, it's the known part (ie: "I will cease") that is horrifying.
> There is no scientific evidence to support that there is some underlying, persisting system that drives consciousness - literally everything points to consciousness being driven by brain activity.
Similarly, there's no scientific consensus on what consciousness even is. Neuroscience has some idea (e.g. "its related to brain activity") but that's it. The psychologists, in typical psychological fashion, have even less of an idea.
That's not to say the lack of evidence proves that your consciousness ascends to a higher plane after you die. Simply a fact that _consciousness_ is one of the millennium problems of brain science. You cannot tell yourself apart from a well programmed LLM. Does this imply the LLM is conscious? Well according to the Chinese Room Argument the answer is no. In a practical sense, your argument is leading you to that conclusion. In that case, the view is that people are just deterministic meat robots with some randomness component is probably accurate. However, even for stanch atheist the idea that they are nothing more than a deterministic meat computer featuring programmed self-death is understandably disturbing. It's hard to separate the thought of death (and your ideas around it) from your own self-preservation mechanism.
The next 100 years of neuroscience will be very interesting.
> Similarly, there's no scientific consensus on what consciousness even is.
It literally does not matter. We know that it is something that exists within the body, primarily if not exclusively the brain/nervous system. Therefor if the entire body dies you don't need any more information to know that consciousness is gone. It would require additional evidence to the contrary for one to take on the theory that consciousness somehow exists outside of the nervous system.
What you're saying just flat out does not matter. What consciousness is does not matter. If you destroy someone's brain you can be assured that consciousness ends.
> What you're saying just flat out does not matter. What consciousness is does not matter. If you destroy someone's brain you can be assured that consciousness ends.
To be consistent with your first statement, the person making the claims should provide the proof. Do you have proof of this statement?
The fact of the matter is that we don't know one way or the other, so anyone making claims about this will be doing so entirely on belief.
By “entirely on belief” do you actually mean “entirely on faith,” that is, belief without evidence? Because otherwise your statement is nonsensical — people can and do make claims without knowing something, otherwise science wouldn’t exist. The key is that when a person makes a claim, that claim needs to be supported by evidence. The grandparent post is pointing to the mountains of evidence that we have regarding the brain, and making a claim regarding death causing a ceasing of consciousness.
If you want to claim that consciousness continues after death, you’d better bring some evidence along with that claim.
>Science doesn't really tell us what happens to your consciousness after death.
There are a lot of things science doesn't currently tell us. That doesn't mean every possible alternative is equally reasonable.
Either consciousness is physical or non-physical. If it's physical, then everything we know about the brain and the laws of physics suggests that it can't survive the death of the brain. If it's non-physical, then it must still interact with the quantum fields of physics. Otherwise, how would we have any experience of physical reality? The slogan in these situations is "show me the equations". If you're claiming that there is a non-physical substance that interacts with quantum fields, there should be equations governing these interactions. Until these equations have been provided and confirmed to predict the results of experiments, why should we believe in it?
>Death is ultimately a natural part of life
This is the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is natural does not automatically make it good. If 100 years on this rock is better than 25, why wouldn't 1000 years be better than 100?
All science currently points to consciousness completely ceasing after death.
Death does not strike when it is just. Death comes at random. Who are you to judge when people should die? Is it selfish for someone who dies at 25 years old to participate in this scheme?
Science very clearly says what happens to consciousness after death, people just don’t like what it says. That doesn’t make science wrong any more than it’s wrong when people dislike the the speed of light etc.
It might be wrong, but that’s a different question.
Science shows that the brain and the rest of the nervous system stops at death. How that relates to the notion of consciousness is still pretty much unknown, and many neuroscientists will tell you that. We haven't yet found an organ or process in the brain responsible for the conscious mind that we can say stops at death.
Our level of understanding of neuroscience basically stops at understanding what regions and receptors in the brain are tickled by what sensations, and we still have very few actual ideas as to things like how your brain computes 2 + 2, let alone how your brain computes things like right and wrong.
First science knows lack of blood flow to the brain results in loss of consciousness and it also knows blood flow stops at death. That’s enough to reach a well supported conclusion.
Our level of understanding of neuroscience is irrelevant, but also far more detailed than you just described. The brains chemistry for example is a huge area of study with a lot of useful information. We also know many functional details such as how vision works down to enough detail for people to have come up with new classes of optical illusions. etc etc
But again neuroscience is overkill, science made the blood flow consciousness connection hundreds of years ago.
We are using "consciousness" with two different definitions. There is a definition of "the thing that observes the universe," which you are using, and a definition of "the thing that contains your self," much less scientific, which I am using. The former definition is very clearly understood, but also doesn't really matter in this discussion, since your observations of the world are very clearly known to be moderated through meatspace, but the "consciousness" in the latter sense persists across so-called "losses of consciousness" (when using the former definition).
It is very legitimate to say that the latter definition doesn't exist, but that is as much a belief as the idea that it does. I personally don't believe that it exists, but I think it's hubris or folly to say that science shows that it definitely doesn't.
Re: your last paragraph, I think you’d do well to read up on epistemology and argumentation, because you’ve set up a false dichotomy. I can try to illustrate:
Personally, I have yet to see any evidence that supports your claim that the second type of consciousness actually exists in any way, other than as a concept in purely theoretical philosophical discussions. I am not making the claim that it doesn’t exist; just that right now I don’t believe _your_ claim that it does. I don’t need to provide any evidence to have this position, as I am not the one making the claim.
My default position on any claim, including this one, is one of non-belief, as it is nonsensical in my opinion to hold a belief in some claim until and unless that belief is supported by evidence.
So, I can rightfully say that I don’t believe the latter type of consciousness exists, and I don’t think this position is hubris or folly; rather, it’s the only rational position to take given the evidence presented (at this point, essentially none). I’d genuinely love to see some evidence compelling enough to be convinced otherwise, though.
That's an interesting contention, and I'm looking forward to your precise explanation of the precise neural pathways involved in the production of a painting, if whatever is left over is the empty set, and every single activity is determined only by chemical and physical interactions in the brain. In particular, I would like you to show the precise neural firings and chemical pathways that lead to the exact composition of each brush stroke. By this contention, there should be essentially nothing interposing between your past memories and the exact contents of the painting.
I think you're taking an extreme view for the sake of argument, but there is still quite a bit unknown about how we actually process information. There is a clear biological component to all of it, but the biological processes fall well short of a complete explanation of things like creative processes and the sense of self (let alone logical thought), and you seem well-versed enough in the literature to know that.
That’s not how science operates, it accepts best fits for existing data even in the absence of absolute knowledge.
We didn’t need the DNA of every creature to have ever lived to construct the tree of life. It’s a model initially created from examining the structure of organisms both living and dead, which has been refined over time as we slightly alter things based on new evidence such as DNA.
As a consequence things aren’t static, astronomers etc constantly refine existing models to fit new data. Thus the conclusion about what happens after death is subject to change in response to new data, but what we have today is still the current explanation based on existing evidence.
What makes science useful isn’t exact answers it’s being generally close enough to correct as to be useful. Is Quantum mechanics a full explanation for every physical phenomenon? No, but it’s really difficult to notice the edge cases in your daily life.
Ah, I see. When you state that we know precisely how things work due to science such that there is no room for any unknown "consciousness," you don't actually need to know precisely how things work because that isn't how science works. Got it.
By the way, I agree with you that it's not the state of science today, but I can imagine a world where we actually can do that if we get to the point where there is nothing unobservable about the mind.
That doesn't make it scientific to categorically deny the existence of things that we don't know about the existence of.
Science doesn’t say anything about consciousness because there is no known way to study it empirically. That doesn’t mean we should start accepting metaphysical woo though.
I am in disbeleif that people like this exist. U really have a problem about my beleifs or how I spend the money I earned myself? You could literary burn yours during your life or death and I wouldnt care at all. You can literary invest in pink elepanths reviving you millenia after your death and I would not lift an eyebrow...
Its you who is selfish not the OP. You and your beleifs... you judging others not to be good enough by your metrics. Did you even read yourself before posting? Nothing?
>As to selfishness, why spend the $100k+ on having your body frozen rather than passing that along to your descendants? Do you believe that there's something special about you and/or inadequate about other people that makes your greed over a chance at a few more years of life worth the money and time you are taking from them? Is that all you think your life is worth? It's just about accruing a bunch of stuff so that you can hopefully spend it on becoming immortal before your clock runs out?
If anything is selfish, it's making all sorts of unfounded assumptions about why people choose to try extending their lifespan and then moralizing based on those assumptions. People may have all kinds of reasons for wanting to try this, and they need not be materialistic or accumulation-based at all. Ultimately, it's their personal choice, with their money, and even if they spend $100,000 on paying for it, or more, it doesn't mean they didn't leave other assets or things for their descendants.
By making a moral claim for why YOU decide that spending that money isn't justified, you're going down one very arrogant and ultimately silly road of making the same claim to so many other things people spend money and effort they've worked hard for on specific personal preferences, be they material or otherwise.
Maybe you buying a $700,000 house vs. a $600,000 house is just as idiotic then? Do you really need the extra floor space or bathrooms?
>There has always been a slice of the elite that thinks they can cheat death by doing this, and usually it doesn't go well.
It isn't just a slice of the elite that would love to have extra years of life in the face of a total unknown darkness. It's something that many people would love, and if a few with more resources are willing to pay more (and again, the prices of these services aren't absurdly expensive) to hopefully move forward a technology that gives that to both rich and poor at some point, it's fundamentally a good thing, and certainly not something that should be hammered down because of very shaky and subjective moralizing.
Where would you draw a line? Should other once-implausible life enhancement therapies that are now widely used and accepted also be forsaken? How about organ transplants? Gene therapy? highly expensive cancer treatments that all have extended life beyond what was previously "natural" for many people? Often these also start first as speculative ideas, then experiments, then just options for the rich, but later become much more widely available.
>they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds. Is this time different because instead of drinking lead or drying your body, you've chosen to freeze it instead?
Let's separate completely absurd assumptions about people needing cult beliefs to be open minded on weird science from the much more straightforward and reasoned logic of wanting to live a longer life, or experimenting with interesting new technologies. Here you're just smearing for its own sake. Also, cryogenics, for all its still tenuous science, is a far cry from purely mystical beliefs like medieval alchemy. By fixating on how absurd freezing seems to you only because current medicine can't reverse it yet without damage (though nothing material makes the idea impossible), you're scoffing at the idea in the same way as a priest from the 16th century probably would if you explained completely workable modern gene therapies and organ transplants to them.
These discussions can get a bit long, so I'll attempt (and fail) to keep it brief.
> Science doesn't really tell us what happens to your consciousness after death.
Currently it doesn't really tell us that there's a consciousness of any sort afterwards. The concept of an afterlife might as well be a coping mechanism and the burden of proof should lie on those in favor of those claims. Maybe some day we'll have an answer. Until then, it's best to stick to what we know. What we know is that one's physical body shapes their mind or at least its expression a great deal, like the case of Phineas Gage and others. Similarly, even the casual descriptions of going under for surgery convey a sense of "lost time", just nothingness.
If I have some sort of a "soul" then it will become more relevant once I'm dead. Until then, it makes sense to look after my body in whatever ways are possible, which includes things like eating well, getting enough sleep, not acting reckless or engaging in risk-taking behavior, limiting intake of harmful substances and so on. It also might include preserving my body around the time of death in case my brain activity can be restored later.
> As to selfishness, why spend the $100k+ on having your body frozen rather than passing that along to your descendants?
I will have no descendants. This is not a world where I'd want any, or worse yet, pursue parenthood due to selfish motivations or societal pressures. It's challenging to do it right and it is not for everyone. Props to the good parents out there, shame on the bad ones, or those who are not ready or qualified to be parents, yet choose that anyways.
> Do you believe that there's something special about you and/or inadequate about other people that makes your greed over a chance at a few more years of life worth the money and time you are taking from them? Why is life about what will "do me much good"? Is that all you think your life is worth? It's just about accruing a bunch of stuff so that you can hopefully spend it on becoming immortal before your clock runs out?
Nothing special at all, just self preservation - I experience life from my own perspective. I would like a continuation of that, within my means. I'm not stealing the last bite of food out of some descendant's mouth, merely using my own capital as I please, after the corresponding taxes have been paid and other investments made, charity donations done and so on. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing to do, given how we typically get capital for our contributions to society in one way or another (hopefully that's the case).
We don't tell people that they shouldn't buy nice clothes or cars for themselves because their future descendants could use the resources better, even knowing that those clothes will tatter and those cars will turn into heaps of rust. We don't tell people that they shouldn't buy medicine or medical procedures that might improve their health just because of them being a certain age, or more bluntly, we don't tell them that they should die so that the state and their descendants can take whatever inheritance there is.
> Usually, they are also part of some weird cult, too, that convinces them that they can beat the odds.
I think it probably boils down to simple maths: 0.01% is still better than 0%. Probably depends on how much you want to live. On the flip side, there are also those who say that a lifetime is more than enough and they're happy to have an end to a life well lived.
> Death is ultimately a natural part of life, and I guess the unknown part of it is so terrifying that we spend so much of life futilely trying to prevent it.
Unfortunately, infant mortality was also a natural part of life, until we took an effort to improve things. There's no reason why death or even deterioration at a late age couldn't be engineering problems to be solved. A world without Alzheimer's or cancer would be a better world, even if both of those are also natural. Imagine if you could preserve someone terminally ill or someone in need of an unavailable organ donation, until later.
> I think it's a lot better to embrace the fact that you get about 100 years on this rock to advance the state of the world as much as you can before passing the job of being its steward onto the next generation.
There is no reason why someone couldn't live with this assumption (regardless of whether they choose to have kids or not), while hoping for or investing in healthcare advancements, or even set aside some money for cryonics if they want, instead of buying more real estate or whatever. All in all, I don't expect to change any opinions, because mine is as alien to you as yours is to me. I don't appreciate that some of it reads condescending and so accusatory, though.
> If I have some sort of a "soul" then it will become more relevant once I'm dead.
That is actually the central concept of religion. The soul you take to the afterlife is the soul you tended to in life.
If you have some sort of a "soul" then they say it is at its most relevant now.
Personally I don't believe, but the small risk of being perceived as an arsehole for all of my life, let alone all of eternity, is enough reason to work on not being an arsehole, and those are "soul" issues. All self-improvement stuff that isn't about wealth generation is.
Just to clarify a few things, I am happy with people spending money and time and energy on extending the human lifespan (and more importantly, the so-called "healthspan" where you can do useful work), and working on medical science to improve the human condition.
However, I think the desire to beat death itself, and otherwise treat death as a curable disease, is separate from this, and is ultimately a very destructive ideology. Instead of seeing yourself as a temporary steward of the universe responsible for preserving it for future humans, immortality seekers see it as their own to exploit in the foolhardy quest to defy all of the current science on death and dying. Nothing beyond what you can experience in your lifespan matters, so you might as well go to the literal ends of the earth to pursue its extension.
I'm not sure that's what you in particular think about this, but it is the natural consequence of a moral philosophy built around the idea of "0.01% is still better than 0%" and "I experience life from my own perspective. I would like a continuation of that." Any other belief about what you ought to do in the world is inconsistent with the division by 0 that you get from "0.01% is still better than 0%"
I think that this is the reason why many billionaires have stopped doing things like building libraries and universities, and focus instead on funding increaslingly-quackish research into ways of cheating death. This ideology brings you blood boys and transfers of organs from the young to the otherwise-relatively-healthy old (done for money), as well as things like cryogenic freezing.
> I think it probably boils down to simple maths: 0.01% is still better than 0%.
The cultish belief in itself is that you actually have a chance greater than 0 of beating death, which isn't supported by any form of science. That idea is as much a religion as the idea that your "soul" lives on after you die.
> I will have no descendants.
Even with no descendants, you can still improve the human condition, and yes, people will remember you for it. I would encourage you to spend your money on things like building libraries and hospitals in Africa instead of beating death.
Everything you have said here comes from a perspective of "self over all others," and I would encourage you to examine your own worldview, for your own sake. I'm not suggesting a religious conversion here, but think about what actually makes you happy. Many people who pursue money over all other things ultimately die unfulfilled and unhappy, wishing they could have done something else.
> Aside from that, it would be interesting to see how people would act if they had lifespans of a thousand years - knowing that what you'll do to the environment, you'll have to bear the burden of yourself.
How people would act? The masses would never change their way of thinking, meaning there would be no progress / change of culture as well as the danger of a bad culture persisting for millenias. At the same time you would see those in power conentrate even more power and it would be certainy power like you see in non-democratic countries, where one individual rules everyone, except that individual would never ever die. Imagine if Stalin has lived to this day. Now considering that, you would think that a 1984-like goverment with a supreme leader that lives for centuries would let the average person live forever in the first place?
> versus guaranteed doom
I would not call the death, complete absence of everything, following a life well lived, doom. Everything has an end. Of course if that happens too soon, that's a tragedy.
> No more passage of time, no more conscious thoughts or experiences, ever.
It's interesting to look at the opposite. If following death, there's no experience, no awareness, nothing. Then what is the now? what it means to be alive right now, to perceive and how is it different from the memories of the past and ideas of the future? It may sound far off, but in a way, we die every moment. And on a larger scale, the 8 y/o me, the 16 y/o me is no more, not in just terms of being made of different atoms, but in terms of identity. So you can also imagine that if a person lives thousands of years, they either experience many "deaths" over time or they live the same dull life for thousands of years - in which there was no point to live that long in the first place. I can share that fear though, but it would be more in the context of "you have x months / years" to live heard at a relatively young age with life feeling far from finished, but the longer I live and the more things I do and experience that I wanted to do and experience, I imagine the easier it is to come to terms and be grateful for what has happened already.
Don't have anything against what they are doing and heck, if I could easily afford it, maybe I would even sign up - one way ticket to see what the future would be like (vs. nothing like you said). But I don't think it's that important and if humanity reverse engineers the brain so that a person can live for thousands of year, or potentially infenitely (I think that would be the biggest challenge that goes far beyond just stopping death, I would not expect a brain to work for hundreds of years without serious modifications), if everyone has an access to it, it's like one of those things like an omni-intelligent AI, something you would think everyone would be better off if it was never developed.
I think it would be cool if aging was stopped (the prime years of adulthood are so short) but I'd wish there was some natural cap of say, 200 years max were the brain would just break down at the end and it would be very hard to make it work longer).
There's something archetypical to this story. The rich have been trying to use their wealth to buy immortality for at least 4000 years—what we're looking at here is just a modern form of mummification, with a veneer of science instead of religion.
Modern science seems to have gotten a lot of pretty interesting information from studying mummies. Here's one example from a very quick Google search [1].
Who's to say that future scientists won't find studying these modern-day mummies just as fascinating?
I mean... if the choices are having my earthly remains burnt, left slowly to rot, or preserved-and-then-eaten-in-some-kind-of-a-ritualistic-psychosexual-ceremony-by-a-future-dystopian-civilization, then all I can say is: would you like me salted, buttered or plain?
There's a huge difference there, in that information storage via cryogenic preservation is an at least theoretically valid basis. It's still "Step 2: ???" but steps 1 and 3 are compatible with known science.
Was there any form of formalized scientific method at that point? I'm not sure it's fair to say that anything about mummification was science based unless you're using the term very colloquially to just mean "what people thought was right".
Empirically, we're obviously way ahead of where humans were at the time of mummification, so I think it's a silly comparison anyways.
Like I said, it's a veneer of science instead of a veneer of religion.
Depending on your values the scientific veneer may be more appealing than the religious one, but neither is founded in particularly strong observational evidence.
The goal for step three is to last long enough that a future society where your endowment could pay for it could bring you back with future tech. Ie a hail-mary.
Any future society where this is actually possible wouldn’t give a damn about the dead person’s endowment because they’d be so far beyond property rights at that technology level.
That one Star Trek TNG episode from 1987 had this right. The accidentally discovered 21st century cryogenists are stunned to find their former wealth and status are irrelevant in Picard-era Federation.
I think the question at that time would be: “Do we bring these likely brain-damaged people into a world they can’t understand and which would cause them pain” — and the answer might be “No, that would be cruel”.
>“Do we bring these likely brain-damaged people into a world they can’t understand and which would cause them pain” — and the answer might be “No, that would be cruel”
Some people already paid to maybe suffer that cruelty in the future, the same way some people already paid to go to the Titanic in an uncertified submarine and die.
TNG hand-waves the problems of the economy, property rights etc, and doesn't really explain how they got to were they are. Proclaiming modern capitalist attitudes as "brain-damaged" is a bit smug given this.
Many SF stories have parts of their plots involve what happens to the corpsicles - the frozen undead whose endowments/investments went bad. Usually they become organ donors.
There's an old saying "you can't take it with you".
The dead were buried with little Barbie sized statues called "shabti". The duty of the shabti were to do your labors for you in the afterlife. Poor people might be buried with one. Wealthy people would have at least one per day of the year.
Shabti are so common that they are the only actual artifacts you can export from Egypt without special permission/licenses. Most are going to be fakes or replicas. Some can be rather dull looking. The ones made out of faience tend to be fabulous.
Step 2 is a lot less ??? than people assume, because we have at least unfrozen hamsters back to life in the 60's, it's a scale problem, not necessarily a the magic will get us there problem
There was at least some basis to thinking there was an eventual way to get there, even if now it seems cargo cult-ish
Except science isn't based on lies and deception, doesn't ignore self contradictions and false beliefs, is evidence based, is falsifiable, changes when new facts come in, and corrects mistakes when they're found.
Other than that, you don't deserve to use computers, networks, electricity, radio, cell phones, AI, room temperature superconductors, cars, air conditioning, mathematics, logic, antibiotics, or medicine, if you falsely believe science is a religion.
But if you're into religion, then logical consistency and truth seeking isn't your thing anyway, so you probably do hypocritically enjoy all the benefits and convenience of science anyway, while believing in invisible ghosts and magic, without a shred of proof.
> Except science isn't based on lies and deception, doesn't ignore self contradictions and false beliefs, is evidence based, is falsifiable, changes when new facts come in, and corrects mistakes when they're found.
...At its best. That's not uniform across different fields; "social sciences" such as psychology are inherently a lot less rigorous than, say, chemistry. Also, there have been a few recent HN headlines about prestigious researchers withdrawing publications due to accusations of fraud. Let's not get into confirmation bias, tribalism, and whatnot, OK?
> But if you're into religion, then logical consistency and truth seeking isn't your thing anyway
It depends. Some claims based on religious beliefs are falsiable and happen to be scientifically dubious. However, many things are more philosophical in nature and aren't examinable by science. It seems there's pretty good evidence that Jesus died and resurrected, if only because the Roman soldiers probably wouldn't obscure details that would damage the credibility of Jesus' religion. Does this mean God exists and is as is described in the Bible? No, not necessarily. But you'd do well to consider that "science" isn't the end-all be-all answer to the universe. "Science", as we often deviate significantly from the spirit of scientific inquiry, which still isn't the key to omniscience.
Well, Jesus of Nazareth probably died. There's also evidence that he was no longer in his tomb some time after. It seems that Roman soldiers could've reported foul play if they witnessed anything not fitting the "Jesus resurrected" narrative. Of course, perhaps there are key details that I'm missing or just aren't recorded in history. I wouldn't say Christianity is the one true way to live even if Jesus was confirmed to have resurrected, because the former isn't contingent on the latter.
Oh no big difference there. The lawyer's intervention is short lived, and principally serves the living. The lawyer won't spend their next decades at your service waking up in the morning to check if your precious little flesh isn't rotting yet.
I fully understand. This was my initial reaction too.
Thinking about this for a while, I have a different view: If rich people pay for this, it means their money goes into the pockets of people who operate (and own) such storage places.
The alternative would be to pass their wealth to their few and already privileged descendants.
There is also very little "money at rest" or idle in the current world. Even if you consider real estate, a small fraction of the total and often held through loans, producing taxes and employing people to maintain it. We often hear this notion of "useless use of money" and there is truly very little of that.
Same about this "wealth" scary object being passed from one person to un-deserving heirs to the possible detriment of the rest of humanity. Who owns that wealth is very irrelevant: most of it is invested and very productive.
I think that is entirely the point: to keep the decision what to do with that wealth with those living. Imagine if the people of Egypt would still have to sacrifice one lamb each year for some ancient pharao. Sure, he pays for it, but only by still owing a flock of sheep somewhere that could very well also feed someone. I reality, the situation is so that we could nowadays place solar cells on the pyramids and use them to make money. We do not do that, but we (as a society and by our own rules) would be allowed to do that.
I love the curious irony that, were they to be resurrected, they will enter the world penniless as their assets were already dispersed at the time of their death.
I believe the COO in the video alluded to expenses at the time of "resurrection" but I can't imagine any more than a stipend is there for the "Sleeper".
I would certainly expect that, if you have the means, the money you pay for preservation and resurrection is only part of your genius plan - and it's the only part this company needs to be involved with.
After that it's a technical issue of how you would attempt to transmit money to someone who died and was resurrected. Ideas in this directions would be things like trusts or foundations which purpose would be your potential eventual benefit. No idea what's the current goto method for this. For example very long term such entities are illegal in some parts of the world, but legal elsewhere.
The Verge (I think) had some great coverage of the industry in the last year or so that showed that the industry is still a pipe dream and the bodies are regularly mishandled and effectively become unrecoverable (not that we even can guarantee that anyone preserved today will be suitable to be revived in future). For now you can find peace in the fact that all the rich people paying for it are being taken for a ride, beyond the grave.
imagine leaving your late-parent insurance policy in a freezer, only to have a random error and outright negligence (power, etc) blow up your last chance of having kids, that you always dreamed of.
It does have an Egyptian Pharaoh's charm to it. Ironically, their ancient method of preservation would be the most likely to survive into the future. Perhaps there's room for a "green preservation" service, where we effectively mummify you with your organs, then put you in a dry desert vault for the next few millennium. The "Valley of the Somewhat Upper Class," if you will.
If I’m not mistaken death used to be defined at “the heart stopped beating, (s)he’s dead,” and sometimes people woke up in graves because they were not actually dead…
That’s where the expression saved by the bell comes from IIRC. Rich people were able to have a string in their grave which they could pull in order to ring a bell if they woke up in their grave, and somebody would come and dig them up.
Imagine a legacy codebase that takes a team of 30 highly paid engineers just to keep running. Software systems that take months of training and years of experience to fully understand… a $200k trust to operate a cold mausoleum is quaint by comparison.
Chilling out in a tube is a lot better than endowing some loony political organization with the proceeds of your estate in order to carry out your will from beyond the grave.
I just went through their inquiry page. They give 65 euros/month as the estimated price, for my selections. (I'm older than most HN commenters, which presumably means a higher price on the insurance. OTOH I picked neuropreservation, which should cost less than whole-body.)
Further, early adopters create a market which will predictably be served at lower cost as it grows.
Insurance Cost Estimate: € 40 per month (indicated as provisional at this stage of the price-quote)
Insurance Coverage Duration: 20 years
It's polite not to present speculation as fact. And you could already know your 200k was wrong since I said I chose neuropreservation, not whole-body, on the quote form.
this exact sentiment was used to discourage the birth of science. common people enraged at the pointless and wasteful expenditures of the rich. to them, their telescopes and experiments were just as stupid as this. i would relax.
I don't understand that "rich". For one, it's actually pretty inexpensive within the range of things you can "spend" money on. For another, as observed elsewhere, the breathing people are no more slaving out than you are for your own employer or customers. This is a strange view of holding a job.
Would it be a consolation to realize they were parted with their money? To me this seems like a scheme to steal their wealth outright, providing some plausible deniabolity for the cryo folks. "Oh well, the investments did not pan out, we are pulling the plug on thr bodies."
I don’t have an opinion on the matter. Very few people can do this and as the video implies their fortunes have been passed to their heirs already. There is the issue of people overstaying but maybe in the future ifwhen they come back we’ll have plenty of planets available to comfortably accommodate pertly of humans. Who knows?
I find it most curious however that you consider supposedly high skilled people voluntarily working for an organization as “slaving out”. This tells me you have a problem with something else than people who pay 200k EUR for their funerals.
Don’t visit LessWrong.com anytime soon then. They love this sort of thing. To the point of appearing cult like, trying to convince people with far less money than them to invest in it as a sort of obviously rational “life insurance policy”. The idea that they could ever be brought back from the dead is a fantasy, supported in their minds by the idea that the sciences will figure it out eventually.
That of course ignores basic limits imposed by biological, sociological and economic systems. Not to mention that the promise of eternal life is common among cult ideologies.
This is apparently business as usual for ultra wealthy technocrats who don’t have any actual contributions whatsoever but need to feel like a revolutionary. Or at least for Eliezer Yudkowsky. That and AI doomerism based on similarly shoddy philosophical arguments.
If the argument is “selfish rich people consuming resources at the expense of everyone else”, there are much lower hanging fruits than this.
Adtech and all its supporting infrastructure not only uses orders of magnitude more resources than a few hundred bodies in LN2 but also generates infinite annoyance and wastes everyone's time. Ditto for a lot of monopolized/oligopolized/lobbied industries (telecoms? Tax filing in the US?) that ultimately cause wealth (and thus resources) to accumulate in the hands of a select few at the expense of everyone else.
We can be displeased by both. The reason there's negativity here is because it was mentioned. I wouldn't realistically expect to see people say "oh yeah this doesn't really bother me because adtech exists."
by going to lower hanging fruits as the justification for why that argument is wrong, you have already lost the argument, imo. The correct response is they aren't consuming resources at the expense of everyone else, they are collecting a tiny fraction of the resources owed to them for foregoing consumption in the past in order to invest in capital that has made everybody's life dramatically better. The people that got rich through theft is pretty small just because so many people have turned good ideas into good companies over the last 100 years growing the economy by a staggering amount and drowning out the royalty and other thugs that got rich extremely unjustly.
It would be interesting to experience. You'd die or maybe go to sleep and not wake up so in your mind you just went to bed as usual. And you wake up decades or centuries later in an instant.
Imagine someone from the 1800s trying to understand memes and Tik Tok. I think the Internet is within grasp as in telegraph but not the information on it. I can't even imagine what will exist even 50 years form now.
And why is it -196C I mean I know that is the temperature of LN2 since it's cheap. But why not store them like the global seed bank in glaciers or Antarctica where it's currently -57C when it warm during the day. In summer it's at most -20C.
Transmetropolitan has a great story (Another Cold Morning) about preserved people waking up in the future and basically becoming homeless because they can't comprehend the future.
It's a tempting idea, but I somewhat doubt it. The change from linear to exponential population growth has a limit and many of our ancestors saw the consequences of this change, and it's particularly easy to imagine them "waking up" today, and with a few short "translational explanations" they'd be on their way.
A story about waking up Ben Franklin would be fantastic.
It seems like there would be, if it all worked somehow, a risk that one wakes up in a lot of pain. Much of the body has injuries and scars from the process. It's still a risky prospect to be a pioneer in this.
The hubris involved with freezing yourself just blows me away. Like society that is technically advanced enough to unfreeze, reanimate, and fix whatever disease or damage killed you the first time would have any desire to add some ego manic that wanted to freeze themselves to the society of their current day.
I snapped into consciousness, the sensory data flooding in. I was a Bob, or so they told me, but it was more than that now. I looked around the room, cameras everywhere, bright lights shining down. My view readjusted as I realized that my awakening was being live-streamed to the whole world. The legacy of being Bob 1.0 had its perks, but this was something else. "Welcome to the twenty-fourth century," a voice said, cheerfully, a tad too energetically for my newly awakened brain. The live chat was scrolling by at a pace I couldn't follow. Emoji, memes, the letter F creating a visual waterfall that imprinted on my virtual retina. I was taken back from what seemed like an endless array of questions. The digital age had taken a few leaps forward, and I was its latest reality show star.
Yes, maybe a few retro people would be interesting. But what about thousands? Or millions? If it works, presumably many people will want to wake up in a different century.
What is an advanced society to do with unfrozen people? The novelty wears off real quick when they start getting hungry and want houses.
And more importantly, what guarantees about rights and quality of life do unfrozen people think they’re going to have? The correct answer should be: none.
So yes I do think it’s hubris. It’s hubris to think anyone in the future is going to want you and want to take care of you rather than the people alive at that time.
When you’re born, you have parents to take care of you and food and clothing. And you’re cute, our brains are wired to care about that part because it’s important. Because when you’re born you’re also damn near useless, and also expensive and annoying and stinky. These unfrozen people will be as useless as babies but significantly less cute.
> When you’re born, you have parents to take care of you and food and clothing. And you’re cute, our brains are wired to care about that part because it’s important. Because when you’re born you’re also damn near useless, and also expensive and annoying and stinky. These unfrozen people will be as useless as babies but significantly less cute.
Jesus Christ. The reason we don't kill babies isn't because of some genetic preference for fat small things, nor is there a desire to kill them due to their... lack of utility. They're human beings with rights. It's that simple.
We also don't just strip rights away from the disabled, so if your argument is "these people are effectively useless and therefor should not have rights", you should seriously examine the ethical framework that led you there.
> Uh, what? Why would human beings not have rights?
Because that has been the way humans have lived for most of civilization. If you get frozen, you don’t get to choose when you are woken up, or how nice the people are to you when it happens.
I don't get why "that has been the way" is at all a reason.
> you don’t get to choose when you are woken up, or how nice the people are to you when it happens.
No one has a right to have people be nice to them. It is a reasonable question to ask if people, who were adults with rights, have a right to live again - but I think saying "they have no utility therefor they don't" is a disgusting way to look at it.
I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. I want people to have rights in 500 years. And there’s a good chance they will. My point is that they might not.
You might also be thinking that by “rights” I am referring to some abstract ideal about inalienable rights people should or do have. I am not. I am referring to rights in the practical, legal sense of those things your government cares to protect. Well, for a person born into chattel slavery in 1830, you might say they had a right to not be a slave, but in a practical, legal sense no they did not.
You and I both agree that “no utility = no rights” is morally wrong. But it isn’t up to us. It will be up to people in the future.
> And more importantly, what guarantees about rights and quality of life do unfrozen people think they’re going to have? The correct answer should be: none.
As if you were advocating that - the "should be" threw me off. If we're just asking "what rights do we expect people to have" idk, I wouldn't speculate.
Everything about this feels so foreign to me. I don't understand who wants to work with it, nor do I understand who wants to sign up to be stored this way. I can understand a wish for extended life, but feels so surreal to believe this could possibly work. I think it will be more feasible to download consciousness to digital memory than to resurrect a dead, deep-frozen body.
If the choice is between 0% chance of survival when dead and 0.000...1% chance of survival when "frozen", it seems pretty reasonable to choose the latter.
It's pretty gross, but the brains of people in persistent vegetative state break down after many years. The same thing will happen here, albeit more slowly because of the refrigeration, but we're talking hundreds of years. There's not going to be anything left to revive.
So the idea here is that in hundreds of years we will still have developed no way of taking a frozen person and unfreezing them? And then curing whatever ailment killed them? I don't see that as a sure thing at all, one way or the other.
Watching the video had me question that actually. At the moment the heart stops, I imagine the brain activity lingers for some amount of time. Creepy to think of the antifreeze coming online as your thoughts protest.
The chance of a storage failure before recovery seems quite high, so I should start a company that does this but then launches you into deep space where it’s super cold anyway
If they can resurrect you they can retrieve you first.
Cosmic radiation would slowly cook the bodies over centuries, erasing any recoverable consciousness information still present, unless they are heavily shielded (Earth atmosphere provides ~10 ton/m^2 shielding for free), say, buried in a moon pole crater. People planning for immortality also would balk at the several % risk of rocket failure.
A compromise would be to create a facility in an Antarctic plateau, where even in total failure temperatures wouldn't go beyond -30C (or -50C in winter).
The earth is hardly going to miss a persons worth of biomatter. If you want to be outraged on behalf of the earth worry about pollution and global warming instead.
Are we going to store our bodies to preserve our minds? Most of us wouldn't really want our old bodies back after the tech appears to create new ones. It would make more sense to store our consciousness and then duplicate a body based on the stored DNA in which to imprint into a new mind.
After reading most comments here, few/none mentions the real "technical" challenge with such idea : society.
Even if the tech would be able to "revive" them, they also need to bet that :
- the company won't go bankrupt (how many corporations last 10yearS?50?100?)
- no technical issue happens (blackout, computer bug, ...) : this increases with each year added
- society's law/structure will remain the same (democratic, not a chaos)
So unless it is government-backed I would not bet much on the success rate...
I feel cryogenic storage of people would work far better if it was driven by some cult-like or religious beliefs rather than monetary motivation, where dead bodies are managed as well as possible simply because it’s the right thing to do.
There are already plenty of people who oppose immigration. Do you really think people in 100 (or 200 or 500 or 1000) years have any desire to defrost millions of old and unhealthy people with outdated skills and backward beliefs?
They may choose to revive a small number of individuals for lost skills or to resolve an archeological question, but that would perhaps be a handful of individuals per generation.
I think it is the height of self-delusion and self-importance to believe that anyone will want to revive your dead ass once all your loved ones have passed. For many of us that will happen even while loved ones are still alive, as they make peace with our absence and move on with their lives.
In addition to that if we were to freeze everyone that would be an ever increasing and ongoing cost on the living to preserve the selfish dead. I for one would happily vote to put all those cryosleeping people in a blender and store the resulting slurry under an oil field. Call it carbon capture.
Is there remotely any reason to believe you could put their brain back together in a functioning way or that the connections are even still there cryopreserved like this? If not, this is all so silly. Just take a tiny piece of tissue and cryopreserve its DNA and you can have a clone made in the future. It won’t have your memories but that’s as close as we can get.
I cryopreserve cells all the time but they have to be single cells surrounded by fluid or it just makes a mess. As far as I know we don’t know how to cryopreserve the delicate structure and micro architecture of tissues. It may be physically impossible.
> Is there remotely any reason to believe you could put their brain back together in a functioning way or that the connections are even still there cryopreserved like this
This is a well studied area, and there's good reason to believe the damage isn't unfixable/absolutely devastating to the brain structure. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22533424/ is a paper specifically on this.
If we can recolor jpegs from the 1800s, I'm confident we'll be able to recover frozen connectomes.
I wouldn't place any limit on our future computational abilities or techniques. And even things that lie beyond the limit of detection may fit some into some clever model we've yet to imagine.
Yes, it's not obvious that structural information suffices to reconstruct brain state, but it's not implausible either. We know brains survive periods of reduced activity, and they're stable over longer time periods than you'd expect if a ton of vital non-transient state was stored non-structurally.
I think resuscitation is ~implausible, but reconstruction seems logically feasible, just not with current day technology, nor obviously with high surety.
I'm assuming it would require a complete demolition of the frozen brain, recording the state of its cells and connections, then rebuilding that in some way, or running it in simulation. Not an easy task at all, but perhaps more believable than repairing the damned thing.
Somehow I see Elon Musk as the kind of person who's going to spring for this. Cryonics on Mars! At least it would save on life support costs there.
> It won’t have your memories but that’s as close as we can get.
I'd argue it's not much closer than just having children. It's still far from preserving self, because you don't preserve the "consciousness" whatever that is.
I don't even know the names of my grand-grand-grandfathers and grand-grand-grandmothers, and I believe the same appies to most people. So having children on average sucks at preserving one's memories beyond a few generations.
More seriously : with such mindset, mankind would not be where it is now. It's by pushing the limits that you access some higher "truth", be it tech innovation or societal rules.
There will always be a half of humans. Even if aging and all diseases are covered. Imagine someone getting their brain crushed in a car accident for example. Or a plain crash and everyone burned to ash in the wreckage. The only difference is how long is that period.
For me it still doesn't make sense. Cryopreservation is legal and done only to dead people. Which means if they want to be alive again two problems need to be solved: 1) unfreeze with success, 2) resurrect. Both are non trivial for quite some years.
My understanding is that merely restoring circulation to an otherwise-healthy brain should cause it to regain consciousness?
Assuming the cryopreservation happened early enough before significant brain damage occurred (or was successfully repaired during the “unfreezing” process - which is currently the limiting factor) resurrection shouldn’t be a problem?
Is it not? Especially in this context. People who are cryogenically stored, died due some reason - old or trauma. We cannot resurrect old people; trauma medicine is hardcore and we can sustain and fix some people, but sometimes we cannot.
I imagine it'll come down to the cause of death and the time-to-freeze.
If you had a heart attack and it just wouldn't restart, that feels like a tractable problem in a world where we can do some crazy shit like 3d print you a new heart (making it up, please don't attack the 3d printing hearts idea, it's dumb).
If you had some sort of trauma that put you into a coma, idk, I could imagine that some sort of futuristic stimulation could bring you back. Even now you can possibly live on your own without machinery, possibly even breathing on your own, your brain just isn't driving critical functions like feeding yourself. Today we have to let people die in that scenario, what if we could freeze them and in 100 years there's a way to trigger new brain activity?
If you're shot in the head, obviously I'm going to be a lot more skeptical of the ability to bring you back.
The more people study the matter, the less of a boundary between `body` and `consciousness` exists. Our body, and all the pesky juices/hormones produced by it, and the stuff produced by bacteria in our digestive tract have direct impacts on what our mind perceives. Restoring circulation is insufficient.
How about a dystopian future where all of the grunt work is performed by an army of enslaved people woken up after being cryo frozen at some indeterminate time in the past. The futuristic society can heal their ailments but given that they have no rights nor skills after waking up, they are forced to clean floors with toothbrushes and pick weeds by hand.
Quite close to the opening plot of "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)":
Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.
Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.
The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad - very mad.
One very short story in this vein is titled Lena [0] which is based on a Playboy centerfold picture used by the earliest imaging researchers [1]. There is an effort to stop using that picture [2][3].
"Set two hundred years in the future, a science fiction novel in which William Pearce is searching for the elusive absolute zero, and his wife has brought many cryogenically frozen heads in the hope of reading them for information, unaware of the danger of their actions"
Maybe a little off-topic, but something I'm terrified of is being simulated against my will.
I fear AI primarily for this because I see it as an enabling technology for brain simulation, but I also see cryogenic preservation similarly in that it removes the time constraints from the rate of progress - at least from the individual's perspective.
Who knows, some weirdo hyper-libertarian future civilisation could decide to take these "dead" people and simulate them to act as NPCs in their new horror game. The fact there is a non zero chance of being revived into some hellish existence like this makes me terrified of cryogenic preservation.
When I die I want to be sure I'm dead. I want matter in my body to be brought to the highest state of entropy reasonably possible. I understand not wanting to die, but personally when I die I'd prefer to die knowing it will be over.
I live near it and there is also a data center just next to the cryo facility [0] that was built around the same time. I sometimes jokingly say they are related and are training an AI with the frozen people.
Everyone will be resurrected at the end of the world when Christ returns. I think I'll just wait for that. But it would still be cool if CRYO preservation could work. Medical technology exists today that would have been science fiction 100 years ago. It's definitely possible it could work in the future.
You obviously can't bring someone back once they're dead. It's like turning off a computer and then putting it in a freezer and saying in 5000 years they'll be able to come up with a way to restore it to the exact same state it was in before you turned it off.
In theory you could find a way to copy the state while it is still on and then bring them back that way, but that depends on whether the system is actually a physical network that is you or whether there is a "soul" made up of the traces of old data floating around the network which you wouldn't be able to capture.
A normal freezer would be cheaper and easier when you really want to store meat long-term.
To get dead people back to life much more is needed, and most attempts failed ridiculously, as the frozen water explodes all cells.
The temperature is not the problem at all, but the process to dehydrate the meat and replace it with glycerine or such. Completely.
Or all the shady cryo companies which go bankrupt after a while, and cannot pay the freezers anymore. There was a nice article from such a company from the late sixties here a while ago. It smelled.
01 the freezing costs power, which damages our planet.
02 This is often paid for by life insurance policies. Instead of the money going to your family or donating to a humanitarian cause, it goes towards damaging the planet.
I wouldn't be surprised in 100 years, the owners of these businesses cut a deal with the remaining family members, offering "hey, we will pay you $500m (half of the account balance) to unthaw your great great great great great grandpa if you promise not to sue us."
Aren't both of those also arguments against maintaining life support for coma patients? In both of these cases it costs power and insurance money, only the odds of recovery and amount of time on support are the differences. Which does change the ethics a bit, but not massively. They're basically just long term unlikely to recover coma patients.
Coma patients are actually alive, though, and have been known to come back.
If you believe that dead people have come back, you're religious.
...this might be controversial, but I'll argue that thinking you'll live again if you get chronically frozen requires as much faith as believing you'll live again in an afterlife.
There's not much evidence for either, so you're left squinting heavily at vague suggestive outlines, making your bets, then hoping and trusting it works out.
The difference is what you put that faith in, and why.
> ...this might be controversial, but I'll argue that thinking you'll live again if you get chronically frozen requires as much faith as believing you'll live again in an afterlife.
I would say they are similar, but there's a key difference there. One relies on believing in the ingenuity of humans and the improvement of technology, both of which have been observed. The other relies on believing in the word of people who came long before you, which has been observed to be less then stellar.
The fact of the matter is you literally have to choose between those 2 or giving up completely.
> I'll argue that thinking you'll live again if you get chronically frozen requires as much faith as believing you'll live again in an afterlife.
It actually requires more because there are numerous documented cases of the dead coming back to life within certain religious ontologies whereas cryonics is only a potential resurrection in the future with no precursor. Imagine a Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead without the Empty Tomb.
> only the odds of recovery and amount of time on support are the differences
These are large differences. We can argue about inefficiencies, but people do recover from decades-long comas. People don't recover from being dead as a doornail.
That's why I said "doornail"; the people in question are sufficiently dead that the company here doesn't think they're at risk of being sued for killing someone.
Maybe we'll be able to reanimate people eventually; for the time being, people definitely do recover from comas.
Haha, i'm not exactly familiar with that medical terminology. But agreed, that's fair, comas do have known examples of recovery, this doesn't. It's more like the first ever comas.
There's a huge difference there: we know for a fact that some coma patients can recover, while recovery of cryogenics subjects is still so completely theoretical that the basis is "somebody will figure it out eventually".
So refrigerators are immoral? Are we going to create a better future, including surviving climate change AND prospering, for humanity without modern food preservation?
>the freezing costs power, which damages our planet.
Many completely unnecessary things cost power, and quite a few of them cost much more of it than the freezing costs of cryogenics. If your moral benchmark for people doing or not doing strange but generally modest-in-scope things is a contrived moral argument connected to climate change and energy usage, you could start with much bigger misuses than this. And, unless you live one hell of a minimalist lifestyle, you could also pick many "frivolous" aspects of your own life that you'd have to eliminate by the same logic.
It's extremely short-sighted to dislike something that in practical terms does you no harm for personal reasons and then shoehorn de jure social/political issues around it as justifications for wanting the subject of your dislike to to go away.
It depends on whether or not technology in the future allows the revival of the deceased. If true, then I imagine many people (rich ones) will pay to store their bodies for 10 to 20 years to wait for the progression of medical knowledge ("frozen for a cure", so do speak).
I doubt that such expense will be paid by insurance policies unless 1) the technology became common or 2) it's a privilege only for the powerful.
> 01 the freezing costs power, which damages our planet.
You posted this via computer, which costs power, damaging the planet. Is that unethical?
(I would think any reasonable answer comes down to cost:benefit - but running a freezer doesn't actually use that much power, and obviously provides a benefit, even if you don't like that benefit)
I don't think ice cream stands are unethical. Ice cream provides calories to living humans. It may not be the most efficient way to provide those calories, but real living people are receiving this benefit.
Keeping a refrigerator running as long as we can pointless.
It's useful to realize that in the long term, more power equals better. Our planet doesn't care how much power we use. So long term, we should not think "let's use less power so we 'protect our planet'", but rather "we should use more power if we can".
