If somebody’s been pronounced dead and then you start CPR, you don’t want the
embarrassing situation where they start to wake up again. For older people that
are really far gone it’s not a concern, but sometimes life can start
to come back a bit so general anesthetic takes care of that.
That someone is coming back to life is considered "embarrassing", and ought to be stopped with a general anesthetic? That doesn't sound like someone I'd want in the emergency room by my bed...
The idea here is that you know you are in your final days, so coming back to life for a few more hours or days isn't ideal. What you want is to be frozen as close to the time as you are pronounced dead (and preferable pronounced dead as quickly as possible).
This person's purpose is to store the patient/client's brain in cold storage in the hope that future technology will allow the personality to be recovered. Their job starts after people are clinically dead. Struggling through reviving someone might cause more damage to the brain compared to the anesthetic approach.
That's exactly what I though! Holly cow......maybe I should take my name off the organ donors list. Have heard of people 'coming back to life' after being incorrectly pronounced dead (even young ones) and from memory there has been a few cases where people were buried alive, waking up in the coffin only to find out that they will come out of it alive again. If that is the common practice I think that medical practitioners should start questioning their suitability for this job!
>That's exactly what I though! Holly cow......maybe I should take my name off the organ donors list.
Heh, doctors have been known to be eager to "be done" with organ donors in some cases that look dead or dying enough. What's a seemingly dying person compared to all those that get to get new body parts, after all?
Combine it with stories of people coming back from comas or near-death, and it doesn't sound that good.
What I don't really get from the article is, why? The article seems to be a technical explanation of the procedure to freeze someone's brain. but it doesn't really explain why you'd do that in the first place (probably being revived in the future) and what the actual possibilities of this are.
Insurance. You're betting technology will come far enough to build you a replacement body. You have nothing to lose because your other option is irreversible death.
That presumes that one couldn't see the funding of cryonics organizations as itself a social good, aside from whatever small chance of self-preservation it comes with.
The cost of freezing yourself is on the order of tens of thousands of dollars, which is much less than most people spend over the course of their lives on things that don't directly improve the world.
It's last-chance life support. It probably won't work, but it's a hell of a lot more likely to help me survive than leaving my corpse to rot in a box underground. It's a long bet, and not very likely, but it's still better than all the alternatives, at least for me.
It's entirely possible that I might choose not to live forever someday if I have the choice, but I'd prefer for it to be my choice when I opt out of the rest of forever, rather than being left up to whenever my body happens to fall apart or be sufficiently damaged.
When you're rich, it's pretty hard to accept the fact that you're eventually going to die and you can't take any of it with you.
It would make an interesting theme for a novel, waking from a dreamless sleep only to face again the pains, disappointments and inevitable deterioration of this life, and this time separated from the people who once gave some solace. Don't sign me up.
You don't need to be rich. It costs very little to fund a $30k life insurance policy, which will get your whole body suspended with Cryonics Institute. Alcor is more, $80k for just the head.
You can't, you're dead. Whomever you willed your estate to will lay claim to those accounts. Even if they're secret. What ever institution holding those accounts will claim them for themselves. There's no legal precedent for a person returning from the dead.
Yeah, the idea is to do it before you die. You could e.g. setup a foundation to operate after your death and have in its statue (article of incorporation?) that if you ever return you get them back.
Besides technical solutions, like using cryptocurrency or simply burrying your assets somewhere only you know about where they'd be safe. Or use this, if those announcing it got anywhere and weren't scamers:
The Reanimation Foundation will, it is said, be the "first cryonics
organization to enable individuals signed up for cryonics to take their
money with them. It will be able to offer this service because it will be incorporated in Liechtenstein, which has no rule against perpetuities."
>There's no legal precedent for a person returning from the dead.
How about people being declared legally dead after gone missing and then re-appearing a few decades later. There have been several such cases in the past (sometimes those people got married elsewhere and started a new life, etc).
I'm curious about the finances and the practical aspects of resuscitation. Do you stipulate when you want to be resuscitated and for how much money? Do some people volunteer to be early resuscitation subjects? Is there a discount for that?
Ideally, the process of cryonically preserving someone's brain would be like an extreme form of the stasis we hope to be able to put people in for long space voyages. You might be legally dead by today's standards, but just asleep in practice.
This is where things get incredibly weird for cryonics. Any competent practitioner is going to amass a large number of people who are legally dead today, but may be viewed as "just sleeping" in the future. Where is the boundary between these two states? At what point do these frozen brains transition from specimens with no rights to human beings?
Say that, in the not too distant future, the technology is invented to resurrect the frozen. At this point, the cryonics company will have something clearly different from medical specimens in their tanks. However, what if the resurrection tech is prohibitively expensive? Even at cryogenic temperatures there is atomic movement and, necessarily, slow and subtle degradation. Some frozen "sleepers" might not survive long enough for resurrection to become affordable enough for them, assuming the assets they set aside for resurrection weren't wiped out by bad investments. Do these doomed sleepers have any rights? Will the cryonics company be obligated to revive them at a loss? What if the company goes bankrupt? Could people be brought back as indentured "heads in jars" and expected to work off their debt? Will brains frozen today even have any skills or knowledge the future will want?
Cryonics raises a lot of questions for the present and, potentially, even more problems for the future to solve.
Perhaps I'm too cynical, but if I had to guess I'd say cryonics companies don't give a damn about future ethical and/or legal implications as long as it's a profitable business as it stands today. I very much doubt they have plan on what to do with the brains or bodies they preserve, though I'd love to be proven otherwise.
On the contrary, such concerns are of paramount importance to cryonics organizations. A good place to start is the Alcor Patient Care Trust [1]:
At Alcor, patient storage costs are paid from the Patient Care Trust. This conservative funding arrangement is designed to cover the cost of patient storage solely from the income from the Trust, thereby assuring that such funding will continue indefinitely into the future. The irrevocable Patient Care Trust is included under Alcor's tax-exempt status, but nevertheless is a separate legal entity that provides liability protection for these assets. This arrangement is one of the reasons our members have confidence in Alcor.
It doesn't do any good to use the most advanced techniques to get our members into cryopreservation unless we can keep them there, as well as build capital to eventually fund revival and reintegration. Ongoing care for cryopreservation patients is the number one element of our purpose in being cryonicists, and financial protection for the patients is a critical component of this. There is no use in starting this possibly centuries-long project, if we don't do centuries-long financial planning. Providing this kind of protection through a conservative, long-term view of storage costs is one of the main reasons why cryopreservation costs so much.
Do you have some reason for believing this, or are you just being cynical? (Not that I have any particular problem with cynicism, rather I'm honestly curious.) I know of some serious breaches of ethics early in the history of cryonics, however I know of nothing that would besmirch Alcor in particular at least. If there is something I'd like to know about it.
I feel like I have legitimate reasons, from everything I know about humanity and history, to start from a cynical standpoint, especially regarding certain areas.
E.g. mails that announce me that I won some lottery. Random people offering to sell me cheap "authentic" Rolex on the street. Attempts to bring down some government to bring "democracy" to a country. Cryonics.
How about you bring me the citations that show that they care about morality in such a line of work?
Or do you think assuming everybody is moral in every line of business is a baseline for how the universe is and everything more cynical is some sort of extra-ordinary claim? If yes, then you'd be surprised.
That's the corollary to what P. T. Barnum said, that "there's a sucker born every minute".
What they do, is sell hope to rich people, working at the inside edges of pseudo-science.
Did you even read the link already provided? I advise you to look into the history of the people on the Trust Board, and the people on Alcor's board of directors, and the people of Alcor's general staff. Note how many are members of Alcor, or who have family members already being preserved, and thus have a personal interest in the mission succeeding. How about you browse their library and see what things are being discussed and by whom? http://www.alcor.org/Library/index.html
Then consider you don't even have to be rich. As already noted on this very page (ed: I see you already noted that), it costs $80k to suspend your head with Alcor. Not $800k, which would still be pretty reasonable and not only for the rich, because someone in their 30s can pay only $60/mo for a 20-year life insurance policy paying out $1m.
Edit2: I'd also ask you to wonder if the company is evil, but trying to hide it so they can fool rich people, wouldn't they want to hide something like this which can be so easily used to characterize them as evil? http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/bringingdixieback.html
Have you ever had any 1 on 1 contact with anyone in the leadership of a company in the field? If so what sort of contact/relationship with them did you have to give you the insight into their beliefs?
Any respectable cryonics company is going to have to think about this and attempt to plan for the future, but there are just too many unknowns. Will there be major market disruptions that could impact even a conservatively managed fund? What will the costs of revival and integration be? What should be done with those who were imperfectly preserved?
We don't know. The actual freezing can potentially go extremely well even with current technology, but the problem is the unfreezing process. So far there's no good way to unfreeze someone and get all their cells going again.
This is why the cryonics legal trusts are all designed to be financially self-sufficient in perpetuity: it's a long shot, but if you can get somebody frozen, you can potentially keep them as a meatsicle for Long Enough for somebody to invent medical nanites or machine-brain upload interfaces or whatever.
> So far there's no good way to unfreeze someone and get all their cells going again.
Do we have any non-human examples of this process, or is it 100% hope that the "flying cars" future will have a working process and it will be sufficiently effective to resurrect a human brain?
Also, do we even have a mental model of the steps and just not the technology or are we missing the mental steps, too?
No, the procedure has never been demonstrated to work. There is no empirical evidence. These companies can not give a single instance of them resuscitating a human after undergoing these procedures. Not one. You are paying to have yourself frozen and stored, and that's it. The entire process is based on a combination of cynical opportunists, PR agents and deluded religious faithful who believe in "the procedure" without a shred of scientific proof, and gullible desperate rubes ignorant of empirical science.
If your bar for evidence is that a human revival process has been shown to work, I don't think you'll see that for quite some time. But to say there's no evidence it can work is pretty out there... 10 years ago they vitrified a rabbit kidney, then warmed it up, and successfully transplanted it.
A kidney's a lot less complicated than the brain, and that was 10 years ago. The research has been pretty underfunded. If you'd actually like the field to progress and uncover evidence for or against the prospect of those who have been suspended up until now ever even having the slimmest chance of revival greater than that of cremation, maybe you should encourage legislation that lets them test on volunteering criminals heading for lethal injection or other end-of-life volunteers who don't want to be preserved but are happy to contribute to Science or large animals. Don't get squeamish over experiments like this: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/bringingdixieback.html
Fair enough. I will offer $10 million for a demonstration that this technology works and has a scientific basis, with the proof being the successful resuscitation and revivification into a whole functioning human from any human brain that is in cryogenic storage at this company. I'll even give you a generous whole year to demonstrate it, since you have stated the only problem is insufficient support and funding, well here it is, your big chance. And of course should the year pass and there is still no evidence, just like each of the last 40 years this has been claimed to be a viable technology without a shred of evidence, then you will pay $10 million, to be used for anti-cult deprogramming efforts. Looking forward to acceptance of this offer, followed by either your verifiable evidence or your payment.
I agree that the procedure has never been demonstrated to work, but that says nothing about the future.
For thousands of years people dreamed of powered aircraft that could fly like birds. Many people thought it would aways be impossible, right up until it wasn't.
I admit my biology is a little rusty, but does the current process of freezing people mean there will never be a future technology to revive them?
Our technology has progressed enormously in the last 300 years and most likely will continue for another 300 years. So to me cryonics seems to be a reasonable investment.
That interview reads like it's written by a character out of Gregory Benford's 1993 novel, Chiller -- only here we are in 2015; it's just like Benford wrote about then.
Would love to see some articles on statistics regarding the number of people who have been revived after this procedure.
Is it still at 0%, with no scientific basis at all other than the evidence-free religious devotion of the faithful devotees, constantly posting claims without a shred of solid evidence?
> the number of people who have been revived after this procedure
This is going to be zero by default even with perfect preservation, given that the whole point is to freeze people because current medical technology can't keep them reliably alive for whatever reason.
There's no reason to even think about trying to revive people (rather than simply preserving them as thoroughly as possible) until geriatrics, cancer medicine, or whatever have advanced considerably.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 83.0 ms ] threadhttp://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/256/t...
Heh, doctors have been known to be eager to "be done" with organ donors in some cases that look dead or dying enough. What's a seemingly dying person compared to all those that get to get new body parts, after all?
Combine it with stories of people coming back from comas or near-death, and it doesn't sound that good.
It's entirely possible that I might choose not to live forever someday if I have the choice, but I'd prefer for it to be my choice when I opt out of the rest of forever, rather than being left up to whenever my body happens to fall apart or be sufficiently damaged.
It would make an interesting theme for a novel, waking from a dreamless sleep only to face again the pains, disappointments and inevitable deterioration of this life, and this time separated from the people who once gave some solace. Don't sign me up.
No, but being rich helps with illusions of immortality and going with such a scheme.
Would you expect "substantive comments" to some post about the discovery of a perpetual motion machine or intelligent design?
Yeah, the idea is to do it before you die. You could e.g. setup a foundation to operate after your death and have in its statue (article of incorporation?) that if you ever return you get them back.
Besides technical solutions, like using cryptocurrency or simply burrying your assets somewhere only you know about where they'd be safe. Or use this, if those announcing it got anywhere and weren't scamers:
The Reanimation Foundation will, it is said, be the "first cryonics organization to enable individuals signed up for cryonics to take their money with them. It will be able to offer this service because it will be incorporated in Liechtenstein, which has no rule against perpetuities."
>There's no legal precedent for a person returning from the dead.
How about people being declared legally dead after gone missing and then re-appearing a few decades later. There have been several such cases in the past (sometimes those people got married elsewhere and started a new life, etc).
This is where things get incredibly weird for cryonics. Any competent practitioner is going to amass a large number of people who are legally dead today, but may be viewed as "just sleeping" in the future. Where is the boundary between these two states? At what point do these frozen brains transition from specimens with no rights to human beings?
Say that, in the not too distant future, the technology is invented to resurrect the frozen. At this point, the cryonics company will have something clearly different from medical specimens in their tanks. However, what if the resurrection tech is prohibitively expensive? Even at cryogenic temperatures there is atomic movement and, necessarily, slow and subtle degradation. Some frozen "sleepers" might not survive long enough for resurrection to become affordable enough for them, assuming the assets they set aside for resurrection weren't wiped out by bad investments. Do these doomed sleepers have any rights? Will the cryonics company be obligated to revive them at a loss? What if the company goes bankrupt? Could people be brought back as indentured "heads in jars" and expected to work off their debt? Will brains frozen today even have any skills or knowledge the future will want?
Cryonics raises a lot of questions for the present and, potentially, even more problems for the future to solve.
At Alcor, patient storage costs are paid from the Patient Care Trust. This conservative funding arrangement is designed to cover the cost of patient storage solely from the income from the Trust, thereby assuring that such funding will continue indefinitely into the future. The irrevocable Patient Care Trust is included under Alcor's tax-exempt status, but nevertheless is a separate legal entity that provides liability protection for these assets. This arrangement is one of the reasons our members have confidence in Alcor.
It doesn't do any good to use the most advanced techniques to get our members into cryopreservation unless we can keep them there, as well as build capital to eventually fund revival and reintegration. Ongoing care for cryopreservation patients is the number one element of our purpose in being cryonicists, and financial protection for the patients is a critical component of this. There is no use in starting this possibly centuries-long project, if we don't do centuries-long financial planning. Providing this kind of protection through a conservative, long-term view of storage costs is one of the main reasons why cryopreservation costs so much.
[1]: http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/patientcaretrustfund.html
Legally. Not ethically. Most business owners in this "industry" could not care less.
E.g. mails that announce me that I won some lottery. Random people offering to sell me cheap "authentic" Rolex on the street. Attempts to bring down some government to bring "democracy" to a country. Cryonics.
Or do you think assuming everybody is moral in every line of business is a baseline for how the universe is and everything more cynical is some sort of extra-ordinary claim? If yes, then you'd be surprised.
That's the corollary to what P. T. Barnum said, that "there's a sucker born every minute".
What they do, is sell hope to rich people, working at the inside edges of pseudo-science.
Then consider you don't even have to be rich. As already noted on this very page (ed: I see you already noted that), it costs $80k to suspend your head with Alcor. Not $800k, which would still be pretty reasonable and not only for the rich, because someone in their 30s can pay only $60/mo for a 20-year life insurance policy paying out $1m.
Edit2: I'd also ask you to wonder if the company is evil, but trying to hide it so they can fool rich people, wouldn't they want to hide something like this which can be so easily used to characterize them as evil? http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/bringingdixieback.html
This is why the cryonics legal trusts are all designed to be financially self-sufficient in perpetuity: it's a long shot, but if you can get somebody frozen, you can potentially keep them as a meatsicle for Long Enough for somebody to invent medical nanites or machine-brain upload interfaces or whatever.
Do we have any non-human examples of this process, or is it 100% hope that the "flying cars" future will have a working process and it will be sufficiently effective to resurrect a human brain?
Also, do we even have a mental model of the steps and just not the technology or are we missing the mental steps, too?
A kidney's a lot less complicated than the brain, and that was 10 years ago. The research has been pretty underfunded. If you'd actually like the field to progress and uncover evidence for or against the prospect of those who have been suspended up until now ever even having the slimmest chance of revival greater than that of cremation, maybe you should encourage legislation that lets them test on volunteering criminals heading for lethal injection or other end-of-life volunteers who don't want to be preserved but are happy to contribute to Science or large animals. Don't get squeamish over experiments like this: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/bringingdixieback.html
For thousands of years people dreamed of powered aircraft that could fly like birds. Many people thought it would aways be impossible, right up until it wasn't.
And even if you're that selfish, you could always throw some great parties with models and champagne, or pay to have your enemies killed...
Our technology has progressed enormously in the last 300 years and most likely will continue for another 300 years. So to me cryonics seems to be a reasonable investment.
Is it still at 0%, with no scientific basis at all other than the evidence-free religious devotion of the faithful devotees, constantly posting claims without a shred of solid evidence?
This is going to be zero by default even with perfect preservation, given that the whole point is to freeze people because current medical technology can't keep them reliably alive for whatever reason.
There's no reason to even think about trying to revive people (rather than simply preserving them as thoroughly as possible) until geriatrics, cancer medicine, or whatever have advanced considerably.