Cryonics

[ciphergoth]

I'm considering signing up with the Cryonics Institute. Are you signed up? I'd be interested to hear your reasons why or why not. It does of course sound crazy, but when you press past that initial reaction to find out why it's crazy, I haven't heard a really satisfactory argument yet, and I'm interested to hear what people think. There are many reasons it might not work, but are there reasons to think it's really unlikely to work? How likely does recovery need to be for it to be worth it?

Comments

This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[lolliepopp.livejournal.com]

modern medicine IMO *extends* life, the link you posted is for a procedure to take place after death, with the briefest chance you will come back, therefore "cheating" death

I do think you and I have very differing views about this though, as you are a logically driven vehicle and I am more emotionally charged.

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The procedure takes place after what we *currently call* death, but we used to call the heart stopping death, in which case you'd say that CPR took place "after death".

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[lolliepopp.livejournal.com]

CPR won't take years to work though will it and it's not something you book yourself in for when you are fit and healthy *just in case*. CPR will cause (hopefully) an almost instantenous reaction in your heart and your will be back with us with not more than a small gap of time.

Cryopresevation is a long drawn out process with (at the moment) little proof it works, you could be in there for a hundred years or more, when you wake up most of your friends, family, collegues etc will be dead and gone. Your life time may have been extended, but your quality of life? Who can say whether that would be improved or not.

It's all well and good saying that "Spritely life loving old people" will be brought back in "perfect health" but you can't be sure. Human anatomy is not designed to last hundreds of years, bones break, bodies degrade, brains change with time and there is no process to reverse this. Old people wouldn't come back as young people, they will still have all the mental and some of the physical time related problems attached to being old, just they'd be dealing with this in a world they no longer are a part of with no one to enjoy their new found "life" with.

It just makes me feel a bit, squicky TBH

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Lots of medical procedures make me feel incredibly squicky - I can barely read about most of them. But if it's that or death...

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[djm4]

What is it about death that worries you? (I ask that in a 'I want to know which of the many possibilities it is' tone rather than a 'why on Earth would you be worried by that?' tone.)

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I think you ask in good faith and I promise I'm trying to answer in the same spirit, but there's something about your question I don't get. I don't think it's anything that most people don't feel: I like being alive and if I was told it would end tomorrow I'd be upset.

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[djm4]

I think I get less upset about this sort of thing than many people. But even given that, I don't think either of us is the sort of person to say 'I get upset' without having a bit of a poke at 'why, logically, should it be upsetting?'

Incidentally, if I were told I had a choice between my life ending tomorrow, and my life ending in three years after a great deal of pain and suffering, I'd be very tempted to take the former. It wouldn't be a straightforward choice; ideally I'd want to know more about any upsides of staying alive for those three years. But simply 'not being dead' wouldn't be enough of an upside to swing it for me.

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[lolliepopp.livejournal.com]

It's not the procedure per se, it's the idea of extended my life while all those i care about around me die and then being woken up, still in the same body with the same body and mental issues years later to find I'm all alone and completely out of my depth but at least they fixed whatever killed me in the first place.

The chances of something or someone messing with my frozen self is also a worry. But I have watched a lot of sci-fi so think I might be skewed on that one.

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Imagine a science fiction film shown in the 70s that showed the London of today: people still travel on the Tube, but they swipe in with Oyster cards, walking past people in hijab and blue jeans talking into mobile phones. It would be futuristic, but for the most part much more prosaic than any portrayal of the future they'd seen.

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[lolliepopp.livejournal.com]

That was 35-40 years ago and the rate of technological evolution is speeding up, I'm not remotely experienced of clever enough to even guess what things are going to be like 150 years though. Or if I would want to be part of it.

Coincidentally I watched "Children of Men" last night and was very impressed with the image of futuristic London in 2027, it was by far one the best portrayals of the city that I've seen for a while.

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

There's a novel by Stephen Fry in which someone is falsely imprisoned in a mental institution for (I think) about 25 years, and comes back in the middle of the dotcom boom. When he went in the Internet wasn't even thought of, mobile phones barely existed and ATMs hadn't been invented. That's quite a lot of culture shock to deal with - it's only because a friend in the hospital has given him the details of a very large Swiss bank account that he's able to survive.

Actually, that's another concern - if you're frozen indefinitely, what do you do for money when you come out? Assume there'd be a welfare state? Put money in a bank account? Would banks allow it? What if they invested the money badly, or the bank went under? Again, this is 'fabric of society collapsing' stuff.

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I think it's fairly likely that any society that was reanimating the frozen dead would be willing to support them - after the first one, some sort of legislation would be inevitable.

I don't expect such a society. My main objection is that it seems fairly clear we are headed for a catastrophe as the wheels come off endless exponential growth; I don't expect corpsicles to survive such a crash.

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

As I say elsewhere, I think by far the strongest argument against cryonics is indeed the risk of global catastrophe.

[lovingboth]

Hmm, Michigan is presumably far enough inland to escape when half Grand Canaria (that was the one you were talking about a couple of years ago, wasn't it?) slides into the sea, but is it far enough away to survive Yellowstone erupting?

Re: This is going to get sticky isn't it?

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Is still. My last CPR recert teacher told us over and over that "the person is dead! anything you do to them is an improvement!"