@Larry Johnson You made some good points and i am curious as to did u get your money back from Alcor? because i already paid and may want to try and get mine back from them and change to a different company or whatever though i am not positively sure as yet that i want to do that but seems more likely the longer i think about it similar to your posted items and more of my own. Your reasons now gives me even more to question about it.
that is the point. True one can say that it has even a 1 out of billion chance of working or even smaller. But no matter how small it is as long as it is not 0 and not an overwhelmingly large expense for one eg you can afford it then may be ok for the argument could go for example like the following. Would you pay $100 for 1/10 chance of winning 10 million+1000 dollars. I think most would say yes since it is a million to one in your favor. Eg roughly speaking your expected return is 10million/10=1 million dollars. So now u keep going like that and would u spend 100k(say roughly the amount Alcor charges for brain preservation) for a 1 out of a billion chance of u being successfully revived at some time in future. What is it worth to u ? One could say ok if instead u had a 1 out of a billion chance of receiving 10billion times $100k as it would then be about 10 to 1 in your favor as your expected return would be about 10 times $100k= a million dollars except you get to the point that money only has some maximum value no matter how much. So u now go into what is worth more than money . i think you now get the idea. How much is future everlasting very much more favorable than now life(or whatever u call it by that time) worth to you. And that would likely be essentially infinity times any amount of money or whatever. So as long as the chance is above zero regardless if it is even smaller like 1 out of a trillion or smaller it is worth it to you as long as that chance is not 0. That is assuming one can afford the $100k. Ofcourse there are many arguments against it. But if you reach a certain age you better choose some possible eternal option because you are likely to die before u have time to think about it anymore.
Nature beat us to the punch.
“Two wonderful cases of human hibernation by yogis”
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I think there should be a rule that that only renewable energy can be used to power the freezers.
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that is rather ridiculous . doesn’t take much power anyway if it is good insulation.
another main issue is doing so such that most all of ones memory is still intact for if not then it might as well be a new person for all the frozen and thawed one knows
Though cryonics has been practiced for forty years, its techniques have improved only slowly; its few customers can only induce a tiny research effort. The much larger brain research community, in contrast, has been rapidly improving their ways to do fast cheap detailed 3D brain scans, and to prepare samples for such scans. You see, brain researchers need ways to stop brain samples from changing, and to be strong against scanning disruptions, just so they can study brain samples at their leisure.
These brain research techniques have now reached two key milestones:
- They’ve found new ways to “fix” brain samples by filling them with plastic, ways that seem impressively reliable, resilient, and long lasting, and which work on large brain volumes (e.g., here). Such plastination techniques seem close to being able to save enough info in entire brains for centuries, without needing continual care. Just dumping a plastic brain in a box in a closet might work fine.
- Today, for a few tens of thousands of dollars, less than the price charged for one cryonics customer, it is feasible to have independent lab(s) take random samples from whole mouse or human brains preserved via either cryonics or plastination, and do high (5nm) resolution 3D scans to map out thousands of neighboring cells, their connections, and connection strengths, to test if either of these approaches clearly preserve such key brain info.
An anonymous donor has actually funded a $100K Brain Preservation Prize, paid to the first team(s) to pass this test on a human brain, with a quarter of the prize going to those that first pass the test on a mouse brain. Cryonics and plastination teams have already submitted whole mouse brains to be tested. The only hitch is that the prize organization needs money (~25-50K$) to actually do the tests!
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Cryonics-oriented people may like this presentation…
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Very short video on cryonics.
I for one find it super interesting and thanks for bringing it up. I’d want to try and talk my family members into it so I don’t wake up in 200 years with my whole family long dead
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New Cryonics startup announced: Startup Brings New Hope to the Pursuit of Reviving Frozen Bodies (Bloomberg)
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See also:
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The money that immortality-chasers pour into longevity trends, both as consumers and patrons, is furthering real-world scientific progress. Even cryogenic freezing is less “Star Trek” than it sounds: human embryos are already cryopreserved as part of in-vitro fertilization. In the future, cryogenic freezing could help store human organs, keeping them viable longer for transfers. It could also save and revive endangered species.
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Don’t forget about space travel. Interstellar travel is dangerous and not practical as of now, but with cryogenics we can send people on month, year or even century long missions to other moons, planets and star systems.
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I think working out hibernation (which looks to be an option for the human genome) is more practical.
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Think they both would be valuable, but for different things.
Hibernation can be key for trauma and critical care medicine and perhaps short space travel within our inner solar system as it will likely only work for a week, weeks or perhaps months.
That won’t be enough to fully transform organ transplantation, or for the “ambulance through time to better medicine” that might need years, or even decades, or for human kind to become a multi-solar system species (and have a chance to survive the expansion phase / death of our sun and many other existential risks) which might require hundreds, if not thousands of years of travel vast distances to other stars (if we don’t find ways to build warp drives). So for things like this we’d need indefinite stop of biological time that ice free, vitrification at cryogenic temperatures provides.
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