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.
Not sure what you mean. It's not pseudoscience or shady. Still, that's the problem! It's probably physically possible, but we're not making much scientific progress towards making it happen.
When I mention cryonics people tend to respond very negatively without engaging rationally. More so than with most anything else. It's sad that it's something you can't say even here on hn.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Says who ? Just like it may be physically possible to create immortal humans, but it's extremely unlikely we find a way to make it happen anytime soon, and in the meantime your frozen body will be left to rot over time faster than science progresses in that field.
I'm not sure how you can call it "pseudoscience," unless they're making false guarantees about current technology, or if it can be proven that current freezing doesn't prevent information-theoretical death.
True. My point is that it's not pseudoscience unless they're claiming that an unfreezing process already exists (that's just lying), or if they're claiming an unfreezing process existing in the future is possible and you can show that it's not possible.
it's an industry that's based on a bet that the damage caused by current day cryogenics will be repairable in the future, compounded with the bet that the problem which instantiated the use of cryogenics for the individual in the first place will have also been solved.
I could also sell coal to people that would hope to use it in their 3D printers in the near future to construct their own diamonds, or flight goggles for our futures' flying cars.
It's not pseudo-science, but not because it's trust-worthy; it's not pseudo-science because Alcor is very careful with their image and wording so as to flank that issue entirely.
> Even more to the point, why would they revive you? You already paid them.
Agree, there's not much incentive. Plus let's say you wake up as an old man 100 years from now, who is going to take care of your daily needs ? Your immediate family will be long gone, your descendants probably won't care about you, and your skills from 100 years ago will be irrelevant. What a life!
And what if your brain can still feel stuff and you're in a state of extreme discomfort for the next 100 years and since you're frozen you can't make it stop.
That would be very creepy indeed. But I guess at frozen temperatures, your brain activity would be nothing like at 20C, so I'm not sure how large is that risk - people who have been found frozen in avalanches usually (if I remember correctly) did not report they an horrible experience of being frozen when they came back to life.
The brain has no electrical activity, so physically impossible (alternatively, if it's possible in a cryonics patient, it would happen in a normal corpse too, in which case people should stop burning/burying them).
If you go for neuropreservation, you get a new body (although it possibly means revival later than whole body patient preserved at the same time). As most Alcor patients will die while very old as dying young is generally due to accident or disease (Alcor do have some younger patients, who mostly had terminal illnesses, cancer, or conditions such as AIDS, but also one suicide and one murder victim), it makes sense. It's a common idea to go for whole body while still young, then switch to neuropreservation as you get old where your body would be useless/detrimental if preserved. This also negates the problem of inflation meaning you suddenly aren't insured for enough money for a whole-body preservation too.
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.
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.
Not sure... if you have a famous frozen person and the technology to unfreeze people ever comes to be, you could make money on "reviving a legend", kickstarter style, to recover the costs involved during the years.
Not only are they in a contract, but Alcor is only going to be staffed by people committed to advancing the cause of cryonics. They don't have some shady fly by night low bidder maintaining their patients.
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.
Alcor is specifically structured for longevity - their money is invested to provide long term (longer than human life) returns to ensure their operation. As it is, ongoing maintenance is cheap - they receive a delivery of liquid nitrogen every week IIRC, which is used to top up the dewars, but it is weeks to months between required top ups, with no power required.
Demanding a particular form of proof, and one which might be impossible to get even if we knew for sure that cryonics perfectly preserved the brain, is a logical fallacy. It's the same type of argument creationists make when they demand biologists give them video footage of monkeys evolving into humans. See eg. http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_....
I never did that - they just need to prove that reviving (which is the end goal I suppose) is possible. I really don't care how they prove it, I just suggested a pretty good way (IMHO).
Also, did anyone read Pet Cemetary? Yeah, it would be nice to be revived, but in what condition?
Because they are a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing the state of life extension via cryonics as their entire goal. They aren't some shady for-profit scheme.
If you don't know how to decompress data, you can't know that your compression is preserving all of the original information. If you backup a system but can't restore from it, you can't know that your backup has enough information to restore from. Same goes for this junk.
“Now, I can think of three really good reasons why you shouldn’t do something like that, George.”
1. The process to revive a person after freezing does not exist. Current speculations about how it would work are so mired and poisoned by wishful thinking that it is essentially impossible to know whether it will ever exist.
2. Even if the process will some day exist, it will be too late for you if you were not frozen correctly. It’s like writing a zip/compress program and speculating that someone in the future might one day invent unzip/uncompress – if unzip or uncompress eventually does appear, it is extremely likely to show bugs in the implementation and/or specification of the original zip or compress program, making all data previously thought to be “compressed” instead utterly corrupt and worthless.
3. The incentives are all wrong for the actual truth to surface. The incentive for a company in this business is to imply that the science is (or will soon be) much farther along than it currently is, and a customer has the incentive to believe this, since the alternative is death. To paraphrase: It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their life depends upon them not understanding it.
Alcor is a non-profit, and they're not implying anything other than the truth, which is that you're unlikely to get unfrozen, but it'd be cool if somehow you could be and maybe one day someone will figure it out.
And this is exactly why more research should be done to figure it out. Human creativity when provided the right incentives and not over-regulated is a pretty powerful thing.
Future generations may look back on us as unbelievably primitive and may have trouble believing that we suffered physical death and thought it an inescapable and acceptable part of life.
>So it’s like Pascal’s wager, except it is a real wager which costs money.
Even if you have the money, it's recommended you don't pay directly as it can get caught up in legal battles, all the while your brain is rotting. the vast majority pay via life insurance, although if you were for whatever reason uninsurable and had sufficient cash on hand, I guess they might accept it while you are still alive as a donation.
Unlike pascal's wager, it's also the only game in town when it comes to avoiding death, unlike religion where if you picked the wrong one out of any of the millions that have existed in human history, you made a mistake that ruins your chances under the vast majority of them (AKA "What happens if you spend your life praying to Jesus in the hopes of getting a reward, then you end up facing Hel, Anubis, Hades/Pluto, Erebus, Allah, Mormon Space Kolob God, any of the native american myths, Flying Spaghetti Monster, or even Cthulhu instead?").
I'm not convinced that being a non-profit vs for-profit really changes the incentives for an organisation. No doubt the founder and CEO is paying himself a comfortable salary out of Alcor's money.
Making data "utterly corrupt and worthless" is actually really hard, even if you're deliberately trying to erase it. That's why we invented secure disk erase programs (eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method), because people keep inventing better ways to get back 'deleted' data you might not have wanted them to see.
This goes triple for the brain, which is analog and highly redundant. You can have large chunks of your brain physically ripped out (examples on request) and still live a pretty normal life afterwards, unlike modern computers where a single off bit can crash a program.
Just a side note: the Gutmann algorithms have nothing to do with defeating better methods of recovering data.
He created optimal patterns for each drive controller he had available. You would only ever use the full set if you didn't know what controller you had - otherwise using a single set would be fine.
Gutmann himself says that a few overwrites of random data is about as good as you can do.
Firstly, the Gutmann method is seriously outdated. Nowadays, for modern SAS/SATA drives, a normal overwrite of the data is perfectly sufficient for all cases – if I recall correctly, nobody has been able to restore any data thusly overwritten. (This is for magnetic drives. For SSD drives, “overwriting” does not actually overwrite, so anything and everything might be still accessible.)
Secondly, it has happened that people has suffered major brain damage and survived with ”only” personality changes and mobility impairments, but I posit that these cases are rare, and not nearly the normal case you make them out to be.
Thirdly, it is a rather large step to go from simply having your data all there and usable to having to hire, no, wait, invent, data recovery technology.
1. Nobody has been frozen since the 80s. The process is vitrification, which is designed to mitigate most of the damage and cracking that occurs. Vitrified animal organs (a rabbit's, iirc) have been successfully restored and implanted into an animal which stayed healthy. The main danger is in ischemia if you are not given cardiopulmonary support during the cool down process, which might cause brain damage.
2. That would be true if brains worked on all-or-nothing integrity, but they don't. The last people to be preserved will be the first to be brought back; as techniques get more advanced they will allow saving older patients. There are a few people that are likely nonviable due to extreme circumstances (one suicide and one murder victim where the body was autopsied and so left warm for a long time, as well as having the brain removed from the skull (it is normally preserved within the skill), for example) but as the brain is still intact in both cases, they are certainly still potentially recoverable with adequate medical technology. Remember when any random disease could kill someone simply because it wasn't treatable? We're at that stage with brain injury.
As it is, even if something went wrong and I died and wasn't preserved, I wouldn't even know as I would be dead.
3. Go and read Alcor's site some time. It's full of useful information including very detailed reports of procedures. Alcor admit that it will likely be a long time until many patients can be recovered, but the entire company is structured in a way to ensure that money is kept in long term investment. People's life does potentially literally depend on cryonics and Alcor at least would not wish to have a patient without an understanding of the process.
1. You ignored my point to instead attack my word choice. I actually took that word (“frozen”) from the article title. But we could call it “mummification” for all I care – it does not alter any point I was making.
2. (I have nothing to add to this beyond my other replies in this thread.)
3. I argued that any information from a company in this business is likely to be biased, and you suggest I read the company’s information because they would like to have informed customers? What? That does not follow.
Also, I understand that there is a school of thought that "you" are not only the physical body, but the ongoing electrical impulses in your mind. Reviving a brain that without its functional state might be akin to turning on a PC with no operating system installed.
Or a better anology. Your brain is (possibly) like ram and once you turn it off the data is whiped. So you'd need some thing like a hard drive to store the data on until the brain is powered up again and can be reloaded.
It's expensive to preserve people near-indefinitely, and they invest their money with that in mind. There are no billions because it doesn't cost that much (~$75,000 for neuropreservation and ~200,000 for whole body). As it is, I think they do very well with their resources - remember that cryonics is still such a small field, and Alcor are the largest company by a significant margin.
Not an Alcor member yet, but will be when I can afford it.
Let's assume they find a way to start waking you up, they will need to experiment for many years getting this process right. The first 100(0?) might wake up and remain in perpetual hell (no sensory input for instance or having some parts of the brain operational and others not) during that experimental time which might take years or might even never end.
Is it? Anything to read up on that? I would have myself frozen if this was my only worry though; I think the problem of having these vats survive even 100 years is unlikely, let alone more if that would be needed. It feels somehow that people are too optimistic about the whole process. Maybe when I have a lot of money to spare and the doctor brings bad news I will do it. I think I have to move to the US for it though?
Patients can be transferred between dewars if necessary. They are also very well designed, of a sturdy steel construction specifically built to last. they are regularly topped up with liquid nitrogen weekly, but can 3 months if not topped up[1].
You don't have to move to the US, there are organisations around the world who will perform the perfusion and handle shipping in an insulated box of dry ice to Alcor, but you should definitely budget extra. Many also rely on their members to help each other out a bit; you don't need medical training but might be trained by them and help in other ways with other patients; they also often offer a higher priced membership without this provision.
Why not just do it like any other medical process, namely extensive animal trials before even considering human? Then why not a trial on a human volunteer who dies in the present day being preserved for a month and then revived, followed by increasing lengths to build confidence and a data base to ensure the process is perfect for the patients?
How do those numbers make sense? 300k to maintain a body indefinitely? Then pay for the operation to revive the body? I just don't see it. Not to mention there's nothing you can do to make sure that someone 1000 years from now will see the contract through in good faith.
Long term investment. When your timescale is longer than a human life, suddenly that becomes a lot easier to generate money. Remember that the longest term 'normal' investment funds (outside of banks and individual special cases like Nintendo's $10bn in the bank that is estimated to allow it to survive as a loss maker for 38 years) are probably pensions, which are generally a 50-70 year timeframe.
Besides the technical discussion in this thread I'd like to question this procedure from an other perspective:
Suppose that in, say, 1000 years humanity develops a technology that actually can heal and resurrect people who have been "suspended" that way. What is their incentive to actually do it?
I mean, it's hard to make hypotheses about the state of humanity so far into the future, but if we base ourselves on current humanity growth it's unlikely that we'll be in a population deficit any time soon. Especially if we develop technology that allows us to cure death...
So basically, imagine if we had a fridge somewhere with a bunch of people from 1000 AD that we could bring back to life if we wished to. It would probably be very interesting to do it for a bunch of them, the most potentially interesting and influential people of the time. But would we bother bringing, say, 100 000 people back? Those people wouldn't be able to function really well in our society and even the best educated of them would have vastly outdated knowledge about practically anything.
Alcor will undertake the process themselves, and large parts of their operating budget are earmarked for this.
Then there's the fact that if humanity survives long enough, it's more likely to resemble the Federation from Star Trek than corporate America where healthcare is only available to the rich.
> Then there's the fact that if humanity survives long enough, it's more likely to resemble the Federation from Star Trek than corporate America where healthcare is only available to the rich.
We already have that 'fridge' in the form of Pyramids of Giza or other ancient tombs. They even have their 'insurance' and incentives as the treasures and golden coins they are buried with. After thousands of years we are still unable to resurrect them and arguably we wouldn't even if we could.
-- and basically creating a simulacrum of a biological being. This is not to suggest that our present fascination with freezing is any less crude and unworkable.
> After thousands of years we are still unable to resurrect them and arguably we wouldn't even if we could.
That's because the mummies aren't remotely the people they once were, any more than a wax sculpture of Prince is Prince -- or the artist once known as Prince, if that's still going on.
But I would certainly like to reanimate some of those ancient figures, ask a few questions about ancient Egypt. Doesn't that sound interesting?
Mummification is for display, not preservation. The chemical structure of the body is changed, while all the organs (including the brain, which was removed through the nose) are placed in jars.
>It's a pretty long, annoying process to become a member, but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die.
The thing that always disappoints me whenever I read about cryogenic freezing is that people seem to have to already be dead before anyone is allowed to freeze them.
From the article:
>Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility... As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals... Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit.
I always thought that the great selling point of cryo was that if you have some incurable-by-today's-science condition and you are shortly about to die, then you could be frozen instead, and then unfrozen and promptly cured many years later once someone has figured out a reliable treatment.
Isn't waiting until you are already clinically dead before having yourself frozen missing the point?
You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order. Which is the general plan.
It's still a shame we have to wait though, because being vitrified while still legally alive would majorly reduce the chances of brain damage due to lack of oxygen (ischemia).
> You're not actually dead when you're legally dead, in that everything that makes you you is still there in your brain, and it could in theory be restored to working order.
That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have any reliable cites for that?
There are cases where people who were apparently dead for minutes to hours, were then successfully revived. All the cases involved very low temperatures that presumably prevented brain damage.
Quote: "'There have been a number of well-documented case histories of adults and children who drowned in very cold water, even trapped under ice for hours, and were successfully revived many hours later,' Alistair Jan Gunn, a professor of physiology and pediatrics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told LiveScience. 'Of course, this is used routinely in modern cardiac bypass.'"
Legal death is arbitrary as it's just a decision by a trained person. People have been revived after 10 minutes or so after 'drowning' in cold water. Even in cases of heart failure, pronouncement of death is when the doctor/nurse feels further efforts to revive would be futile. In the long past, someone who would today be revived in that case might have been pronounced dead earlier; the issue is that resuscitation efforts are stopped immediately after pronouncement of legal death - if they were not, it would be a more common occurrence.
Sadly no, because it would legally be considered killing them. As it is, when you're dying, you get what's called a standby where you have a team waiting by your bedside with a doctor, then they get to work as soon as death is pronounced. Generally, perfusion (replacement of blood with cryoprotectants) can be started in situ within 15 minutes or so, while cardiopulmonary support is provided via a machine from in many cases seconds after legal death. It isn't perfect, but it's the best that can be done in the current legal climate.
It might happen in the future in a decent state/country with good assisted suicide laws (if there was a Swiss cryonics organisation, they would probably be able to offer it). Perhaps in the US it will eventually become possible in Oregon/Washington (edit: also Montana, Vermont, and New Mexico), which allow assisted suicide. Alcor are based in Arizona, so they could have patients get themselves preserved in New Mexico, then be driven to Alcor.
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.
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
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.
> 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).
While my own view is self-evident, where it comes to to the anti- side, I have found a fairly even mix of uninformed, interested/well balanced critical, and uninformed/critical for the sake of it comments. It's less civil than most here, yes, but not exactly youtube-level.
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.
"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
There have been legal precedents in people declared dead in absentia for centuries (e.g. people who were lost at sea, or ran away, who later reappeared). An extension to a doctor declaring someone dead when they are not would be a clear logical step.
If humanity survives long enough for revival to be possible, it will have already solved overpopulation problems, as otherwise it would have become extinct in the not-too-distant future.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your argument applies equally well to experimental cancer treatments. And of course, it applies much much more to luxury goods like fancy cars, fancy houses, swimming pools, vacations, business-class plane tickets, cable TV, etc. The only way to avoid this criticsm is to live like a monk and donate all surplus income to the most effective charity.
your criticism is correct of the argument that you're countering, but that's not the argument I was making - see my reply to blueskin_ for a clarification/rebuttal.
[edit] just so you know, I upvoted your comment to counter a downvote from someone else. You make a strong case, regardless of the fact that it didn't address my original point.
I think the parent has a fair argument, and I don't think blueskin_ was really off either. Do you know -- actually know -- the current state of the science behind cryonics? If so, good on you, but if not (more likely), how do you know exactly what the probability of being revived later is?
People (even not-so-rich people) spend upwards of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars just to prolong their own life a couple months. How is the cost of that expense more justifiable than even a small probability of being revived in the future and becoming healthy and possibly immortal?
In the end, it's a judgment call as to what you do with your money. Unfortunately, fear of mortality and death is a very strong motivator for a lot of people, so we don't necessarily spend money related to death in a particularly optimal way. It's the height of arrogance to suggest that your way is better, or, even if it is objectively better, to impose your views on someone else's use of their money.
I'm a keen transhumanist, so yes I am familiar with the state of cryonics. I'm not a cryogenicist and couldn't put an actual number on the probability of success (neither could anyone else) but I'm aware of the serious challenges that face cryonics. For example, while the current chemical cocktail they're using as antifreeze is much more effective than the original solutions, the problem of cell deterioration due to cell membrane rupture still prevents the brain from being well preserved for the timescales cryonics is looking at. While we don't understand the brain that well yet, the extent of physical brain damage that would be seen over e.g. 100 years' freezing under current conditions would not be insignificant. That may not be a problem in the future, but noone can predict the future.
Also, to suggest I'm imposing my view on other people is asinine; this is a forum for voicing opinions, and I'm voicing mine. I understand that when I'm on my death bed I might well make the same decision to preserve my body - human beings are hypocrites by nature and I'm certainly no exception. However, if you're suggesting that raising an opinion/suggestion on the subject that is different to yours is arrogance then I'd take a moment to consider the idea that it might be _you_ that is being arrogant; reread my post and maybe you'll realise that my tone was more along the lines of highlighting an alternative use for this money, and with much more viable results in objective terms. If cryonics was known (or even generally considered) to be viable then I would likely hold a different opinion.
The difference is that you are telling people what they should do with their money (which is arrogant, or possibly holier-than-thou, but I'd certainly not a positive thing). I'm telling you to back off and let people decide for themselves. If you have some special dictionary that suggests I'm being arrogant there, I'd love to see it.
You can get a neuropreservation for ~$75,000[1]. It also might be preferable in many cases as if you're old, you don't really want to be brought back with an old and decrepit body even if future medical technology allows an improved quality of life, having a new body that is non-aged would be preferable. The technology to regrow the majority of the body isn't that far off in the timescale that cryonics thinks in.
[1] As it is, the vast majority of people pay via life insurance rather than directly, both because it's far cheaper, and because there are risks in paying directly as the money could get caught up in a legal battle, while the patent's brain is rotting all the while.
Neuropreservation also allows a better preservation in many cases as newer preservation methods and technologies are often only applied to neuropatients first, before becoming available for whole body patients later.
I'm personally interested in neuropreservation. The only thing I have to lose in my body is my tattoos (which I would be sad to lose, but it would be worth it to live again and be young again), and which I would reproduce on my new body anyway.
If you say "people shouldn't spend their money on things they want to because it could be spent on other people", I seriously hope you don't have a house, nice car, food over basic subsistence level, etc. at the risk of you coming off as a massive hypocrite.
if you'd like to re-read what I wrote, it's more along the lines of "when looking to spend a large amount of money on a very unlikely attempt to extend one's own life, after having lived a full life, maybe consider using that money to give a large number of other people a chance instead". You're arguing against a straw man.
The key points in my argument are that:
a. cryopreservation is a very expensive way to maybe save the life of one person who has already lived a full life (I don't direct my criticism at those who want to be cryopreserved due to a fatal illness at a younger age)
b. charity is an effective way to use the same amount of money to save many lives, often the lives of people would have died at a very young age and with a great deal of suffering
Even if I could force you to change your mind, I wouldn't, but I believe that the charitable option should be seriously considered by anyone looking at cryonics.
>maybe consider using that money to give a large number of other people a chance instead
What's to say that Alcor members don't donate to charity already?
People will always die. People will always give to charity. One person doesn't affect that.
Saying cryonics is bad because of that is the equivalent of saying that if someone was badly injured in (for example) a car crash in America, and received a big insurance payout to cover the hundreds of grand in hospital bills, they should donate it to charity and die instead.
For those Alcor members who do donate to charity, good on them! Charities could always use more money, however - pledging $10/month to water aid is a great start but pledging $100,000 or more from a life insurance payout would make a massive difference.
Your second argument doesn't make sense - if no one individual could make a difference then by summation, no difference could be made by any number of individuals. You can't seriously argue that a donation of e.g. $100,000 to a life-saving charity makes no difference to anyone.
Thirdly, let me clarify that I never claimed cryonics is bad, and I do not hold that opinion. I would encourage research into cryonics in the same way that I would encourage research into cancer drugs or AIDS mitigation. However, I contend that under my personal ethical position, it would be more ethical to save many young lives than to invest in a small probability of saving one old life. Abstracting away from the specific case of cryonics, I suppose I would generally state that I believe (at this early state in life extension research) that death of/at old age is inevitable. By accepting this, instead of trying to deny it using technology that is incredibly immature and does not yet have any proof of effectiveness, one frees up one's financial resources to take care of family and friends, and if one is a wealthy individual, to attempt to save the lives of others.
>You can't seriously argue that a donation of e.g. $100,000 to a life-saving charity makes no difference to anyone.
It also doesn't make such a massive, terrible, catastrophic difference if it isn't made as money is fungible.
I'm not actually sure on any particular foibles of life insurance payments to charity, but if it was easy/doable, it seems like something that many more altruistic people would do.
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.
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.
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.
Specious analogy - with cryonics, there aren't 500 other competing methods of escaping death where picking the wrong one would permanently ruin your chances.
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 ?
It's like saying why opt for CPR when you could simply die and go for heaven if you choose the correct religion. OR as you put it you can't know which God to choose so to heck with religion and CPR as well. That makes no sense and is a misinterpreted version of a pascal's wager.
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:
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.
>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.
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[ 24.5 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadIt'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.
Overpriced insurance policy based on pseudoscience implemented by a shady industry. What is not to like.
When I mention cryonics people tend to respond very negatively without engaging rationally. More so than with most anything else. It's sad that it's something you can't say even here on hn. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Says who ? Just like it may be physically possible to create immortal humans, but it's extremely unlikely we find a way to make it happen anytime soon, and in the meantime your frozen body will be left to rot over time faster than science progresses in that field.
The term "pseudoscience" can be applied to a true result as well as a false one. The term refers, not to the result, but to how it was acquired.
An astrologer may predict that you will have a nice day. If you then have a nice day, does that make astrology science?
I could also sell coal to people that would hope to use it in their 3D printers in the near future to construct their own diamonds, or flight goggles for our futures' flying cars.
It's not pseudo-science, but not because it's trust-worthy; it's not pseudo-science because Alcor is very careful with their image and wording so as to flank that issue entirely.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
Even more to the point, why would they revive you? You already paid them.
Agree, there's not much incentive. Plus let's say you wake up as an old man 100 years from now, who is going to take care of your daily needs ? Your immediate family will be long gone, your descendants probably won't care about you, and your skills from 100 years ago will be irrelevant. What a life!
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.
Also, did anyone read Pet Cemetary? Yeah, it would be nice to be revived, but in what condition?
tl;dr: A rabbit kidney was vitrified, then revived and successfully implanted into another rabbit which remained healthy.
It's the same with a human's memory/personality. Just bits in a brain.
We barely know how memory works. It is fantastically simplistic to suggest that personality is "just bits in a brain".
1. The process to revive a person after freezing does not exist. Current speculations about how it would work are so mired and poisoned by wishful thinking that it is essentially impossible to know whether it will ever exist.
2. Even if the process will some day exist, it will be too late for you if you were not frozen correctly. It’s like writing a zip/compress program and speculating that someone in the future might one day invent unzip/uncompress – if unzip or uncompress eventually does appear, it is extremely likely to show bugs in the implementation and/or specification of the original zip or compress program, making all data previously thought to be “compressed” instead utterly corrupt and worthless.
3. The incentives are all wrong for the actual truth to surface. The incentive for a company in this business is to imply that the science is (or will soon be) much farther along than it currently is, and a customer has the incentive to believe this, since the alternative is death. To paraphrase: It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their life depends upon them not understanding it.
And this is exactly why more research should be done to figure it out. Human creativity when provided the right incentives and not over-regulated is a pretty powerful thing.
Future generations may look back on us as unbelievably primitive and may have trouble believing that we suffered physical death and thought it an inescapable and acceptable part of life.
So it’s like Pascal’s wager, except it is a real wager which costs money.
> […] more research should be done […]
Absolutely, but it is very hard to guard against wishful thinking, which absolutely everybody has an incentive to succumb to.
> Future generations may […] have trouble believing that we suffered physical death […]
…and there it is.
Even if you have the money, it's recommended you don't pay directly as it can get caught up in legal battles, all the while your brain is rotting. the vast majority pay via life insurance, although if you were for whatever reason uninsurable and had sufficient cash on hand, I guess they might accept it while you are still alive as a donation.
Unlike pascal's wager, it's also the only game in town when it comes to avoiding death, unlike religion where if you picked the wrong one out of any of the millions that have existed in human history, you made a mistake that ruins your chances under the vast majority of them (AKA "What happens if you spend your life praying to Jesus in the hopes of getting a reward, then you end up facing Hel, Anubis, Hades/Pluto, Erebus, Allah, Mormon Space Kolob God, any of the native american myths, Flying Spaghetti Monster, or even Cthulhu instead?").
I'm not convinced that being a non-profit vs for-profit really changes the incentives for an organisation. No doubt the founder and CEO is paying himself a comfortable salary out of Alcor's money.
Actually, they are still better than that as they don't blow millions worth of donations on long guilt-tripping TV adverts.
Honestly, if a few employees make a living, I'm fine with that; good for them for advancing the field of life extension.
Yes, the incentives in this case are the same.
This goes triple for the brain, which is analog and highly redundant. You can have large chunks of your brain physically ripped out (examples on request) and still live a pretty normal life afterwards, unlike modern computers where a single off bit can crash a program.
http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html
He created optimal patterns for each drive controller he had available. You would only ever use the full set if you didn't know what controller you had - otherwise using a single set would be fine.
Gutmann himself says that a few overwrites of random data is about as good as you can do.
Secondly, it has happened that people has suffered major brain damage and survived with ”only” personality changes and mobility impairments, but I posit that these cases are rare, and not nearly the normal case you make them out to be.
Thirdly, it is a rather large step to go from simply having your data all there and usable to having to hire, no, wait, invent, data recovery technology.
2. That would be true if brains worked on all-or-nothing integrity, but they don't. The last people to be preserved will be the first to be brought back; as techniques get more advanced they will allow saving older patients. There are a few people that are likely nonviable due to extreme circumstances (one suicide and one murder victim where the body was autopsied and so left warm for a long time, as well as having the brain removed from the skull (it is normally preserved within the skill), for example) but as the brain is still intact in both cases, they are certainly still potentially recoverable with adequate medical technology. Remember when any random disease could kill someone simply because it wasn't treatable? We're at that stage with brain injury.
As it is, even if something went wrong and I died and wasn't preserved, I wouldn't even know as I would be dead.
3. Go and read Alcor's site some time. It's full of useful information including very detailed reports of procedures. Alcor admit that it will likely be a long time until many patients can be recovered, but the entire company is structured in a way to ensure that money is kept in long term investment. People's life does potentially literally depend on cryonics and Alcor at least would not wish to have a patient without an understanding of the process.
2. (I have nothing to add to this beyond my other replies in this thread.)
3. I argued that any information from a company in this business is likely to be biased, and you suggest I read the company’s information because they would like to have informed customers? What? That does not follow.
This appears to assume that your physical body will be enough for you to come back to 'life'.
Also, I understand that there is a school of thought that "you" are not only the physical body, but the ongoing electrical impulses in your mind. Reviving a brain that without its functional state might be akin to turning on a PC with no operating system installed.
Not an Alcor member yet, but will be when I can afford it.
Exploration of dying & waking up was nicely penned down by dying writer Dennis Potter in http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115230/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/ .
You don't have to move to the US, there are organisations around the world who will perform the perfusion and handle shipping in an insulated box of dry ice to Alcor, but you should definitely budget extra. Many also rely on their members to help each other out a bit; you don't need medical training but might be trained by them and help in other ways with other patients; they also often offer a higher priced membership without this provision.
An example: http://www.cryonics-uk.com/
As for the cost of the preservation itself, the vast majority of people pay via life insurance rather than directly.
[1]http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot
Suppose that in, say, 1000 years humanity develops a technology that actually can heal and resurrect people who have been "suspended" that way. What is their incentive to actually do it?
I mean, it's hard to make hypotheses about the state of humanity so far into the future, but if we base ourselves on current humanity growth it's unlikely that we'll be in a population deficit any time soon. Especially if we develop technology that allows us to cure death...
So basically, imagine if we had a fridge somewhere with a bunch of people from 1000 AD that we could bring back to life if we wished to. It would probably be very interesting to do it for a bunch of them, the most potentially interesting and influential people of the time. But would we bother bringing, say, 100 000 people back? Those people wouldn't be able to function really well in our society and even the best educated of them would have vastly outdated knowledge about practically anything.
Then there's the fact that if humanity survives long enough, it's more likely to resemble the Federation from Star Trek than corporate America where healthcare is only available to the rich.
Citation, please.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natron
-- and basically creating a simulacrum of a biological being. This is not to suggest that our present fascination with freezing is any less crude and unworkable.
> After thousands of years we are still unable to resurrect them and arguably we wouldn't even if we could.
That's because the mummies aren't remotely the people they once were, any more than a wax sculpture of Prince is Prince -- or the artist once known as Prince, if that's still going on.
But I would certainly like to reanimate some of those ancient figures, ask a few questions about ancient Egypt. Doesn't that sound interesting?
The thing that always disappoints me whenever I read about cryogenic freezing is that people seem to have to already be dead before anyone is allowed to freeze them.
From the article:
>Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility... As of Thursday night, Finney’s blood and other fluids were being removed from his body and slowly replaced with a collection of chemicals... Over the next few days, the temperature of his body will be slowly lowered to -320 degrees Fahrenheit.
I always thought that the great selling point of cryo was that if you have some incurable-by-today's-science condition and you are shortly about to die, then you could be frozen instead, and then unfrozen and promptly cured many years later once someone has figured out a reliable treatment.
Isn't waiting until you are already clinically dead before having yourself frozen missing the point?
It's still a shame we have to wait though, because being vitrified while still legally alive would majorly reduce the chances of brain damage due to lack of oxygen (ischemia).
That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have any reliable cites for that?
http://www.livescience.com/5060-science-refrigerated-baby-mi...
Quote: "'There have been a number of well-documented case histories of adults and children who drowned in very cold water, even trapped under ice for hours, and were successfully revived many hours later,' Alistair Jan Gunn, a professor of physiology and pediatrics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, told LiveScience. 'Of course, this is used routinely in modern cardiac bypass.'"
It might happen in the future in a decent state/country with good assisted suicide laws (if there was a Swiss cryonics organisation, they would probably be able to offer it). Perhaps in the US it will eventually become possible in Oregon/Washington (edit: also Montana, Vermont, and New Mexico), which allow assisted suicide. Alcor are based in Arizona, so they could have patients get themselves preserved in New Mexico, then be driven to Alcor.
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.
Many Alcor patients are middle class rather than rich.
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.
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).
"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
If humanity survives long enough for revival to be possible, it will have already solved overpopulation problems, as otherwise it would have become extinct in the not-too-distant future.
Oh, wait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
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.
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.
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.
[edit] just so you know, I upvoted your comment to counter a downvote from someone else. You make a strong case, regardless of the fact that it didn't address my original point.
People (even not-so-rich people) spend upwards of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars just to prolong their own life a couple months. How is the cost of that expense more justifiable than even a small probability of being revived in the future and becoming healthy and possibly immortal?
In the end, it's a judgment call as to what you do with your money. Unfortunately, fear of mortality and death is a very strong motivator for a lot of people, so we don't necessarily spend money related to death in a particularly optimal way. It's the height of arrogance to suggest that your way is better, or, even if it is objectively better, to impose your views on someone else's use of their money.
Also, to suggest I'm imposing my view on other people is asinine; this is a forum for voicing opinions, and I'm voicing mine. I understand that when I'm on my death bed I might well make the same decision to preserve my body - human beings are hypocrites by nature and I'm certainly no exception. However, if you're suggesting that raising an opinion/suggestion on the subject that is different to yours is arrogance then I'd take a moment to consider the idea that it might be _you_ that is being arrogant; reread my post and maybe you'll realise that my tone was more along the lines of highlighting an alternative use for this money, and with much more viable results in objective terms. If cryonics was known (or even generally considered) to be viable then I would likely hold a different opinion.
[1] As it is, the vast majority of people pay via life insurance rather than directly, both because it's far cheaper, and because there are risks in paying directly as the money could get caught up in a legal battle, while the patent's brain is rotting all the while.
Neuropreservation also allows a better preservation in many cases as newer preservation methods and technologies are often only applied to neuropatients first, before becoming available for whole body patients later.
I'm personally interested in neuropreservation. The only thing I have to lose in my body is my tattoos (which I would be sad to lose, but it would be worth it to live again and be young again), and which I would reproduce on my new body anyway.
If you say "people shouldn't spend their money on things they want to because it could be spent on other people", I seriously hope you don't have a house, nice car, food over basic subsistence level, etc. at the risk of you coming off as a massive hypocrite.
The key points in my argument are that:
a. cryopreservation is a very expensive way to maybe save the life of one person who has already lived a full life (I don't direct my criticism at those who want to be cryopreserved due to a fatal illness at a younger age)
b. charity is an effective way to use the same amount of money to save many lives, often the lives of people would have died at a very young age and with a great deal of suffering
Even if I could force you to change your mind, I wouldn't, but I believe that the charitable option should be seriously considered by anyone looking at cryonics.
What's to say that Alcor members don't donate to charity already?
People will always die. People will always give to charity. One person doesn't affect that.
Saying cryonics is bad because of that is the equivalent of saying that if someone was badly injured in (for example) a car crash in America, and received a big insurance payout to cover the hundreds of grand in hospital bills, they should donate it to charity and die instead.
Your second argument doesn't make sense - if no one individual could make a difference then by summation, no difference could be made by any number of individuals. You can't seriously argue that a donation of e.g. $100,000 to a life-saving charity makes no difference to anyone.
Thirdly, let me clarify that I never claimed cryonics is bad, and I do not hold that opinion. I would encourage research into cryonics in the same way that I would encourage research into cancer drugs or AIDS mitigation. However, I contend that under my personal ethical position, it would be more ethical to save many young lives than to invest in a small probability of saving one old life. Abstracting away from the specific case of cryonics, I suppose I would generally state that I believe (at this early state in life extension research) that death of/at old age is inevitable. By accepting this, instead of trying to deny it using technology that is incredibly immature and does not yet have any proof of effectiveness, one frees up one's financial resources to take care of family and friends, and if one is a wealthy individual, to attempt to save the lives of others.
It also doesn't make such a massive, terrible, catastrophic difference if it isn't made as money is fungible.
I'm not actually sure on any particular foibles of life insurance payments to charity, but if it was easy/doable, it seems like something that many more altruistic people would do.
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.
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.
http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/index.html
http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html
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