If these claims are rubbish, it's a shame no-one's spending any time debunking them.
Well...
If they're rubbish, a few relatively rich people get ripped off. After they're dead. I think Ben Goldacre has bigger fish to fry. What's more, you're telling people with a very strong fear of death that they can't avoid death in the way they hope they can. You're probably not going to get any thanks for that.
As I keep saying, it's hard to debunk something that says 'in the future, this technology may exist'. Which, I'm afraid, is what the really tricky bits in everything you've linked to, and all their references that I can read, come down to. The bits that quote actual science often debunk themselves (as I pointed out yesterday in my reply about scanning techniques), but often hide it by saying 'well, of course, this won't work, but if we add in a feature of this incompatible technology (which we can't do, on account of its being incompatible), it might.' And so a third, as yet uninvented, technology with the features of both is posited, but with no indication of how to make such a chimera. Might be possible. Might not. No way to debunk it; so you might as well believe it if you want to, and trying to debunk it would be a waste of time.
Note, also, that the key bit in that PDF reads:
"If there are plausible models for the repair and reanimation of cryopreserved cryonics subjects64,65 it seems reasonable to rely upon them when deciding upon human cryopreservation as a long-term treatment which may or may not succeed."
That's a big 'If'. Firstly, the two papers it links to - here and here - do not, to my mind, offer anything approaching a plausible model for the repair and reanimation of cryopreserved subjects. They talk in broad, speculative terms about Nanotechnology; even in the 2005 paper, the existing technology can't do anything approaching what would be needed, and the future technology is spoken of in 'this might be possible at some point' terms. There's nothing concrete enough to either agree with or debunk. And note that there's a 1981 paper, a 2005 paper, and both refer to an aspirational lecture Feynmann gave in 1959. This technology is maturing slowly, rather than racing ahead with revolutionary discoveries every month.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 12:09 pm (UTC)Well...
If they're rubbish, a few relatively rich people get ripped off. After they're dead. I think Ben Goldacre has bigger fish to fry. What's more, you're telling people with a very strong fear of death that they can't avoid death in the way they hope they can. You're probably not going to get any thanks for that.
As I keep saying, it's hard to debunk something that says 'in the future, this technology may exist'. Which, I'm afraid, is what the really tricky bits in everything you've linked to, and all their references that I can read, come down to. The bits that quote actual science often debunk themselves (as I pointed out yesterday in my reply about scanning techniques), but often hide it by saying 'well, of course, this won't work, but if we add in a feature of this incompatible technology (which we can't do, on account of its being incompatible), it might.' And so a third, as yet uninvented, technology with the features of both is posited, but with no indication of how to make such a chimera. Might be possible. Might not. No way to debunk it; so you might as well believe it if you want to, and trying to debunk it would be a waste of time.
Note, also, that the key bit in that PDF reads:
"If there are plausible models for the repair and reanimation of cryopreserved cryonics subjects64,65 it seems reasonable to rely upon them when deciding upon human cryopreservation as a long-term treatment which may or may not succeed."
That's a big 'If'. Firstly, the two papers it links to - here and here - do not, to my mind, offer anything approaching a plausible model for the repair and reanimation of cryopreserved subjects. They talk in broad, speculative terms about Nanotechnology; even in the 2005 paper, the existing technology can't do anything approaching what would be needed, and the future technology is spoken of in 'this might be possible at some point' terms. There's nothing concrete enough to either agree with or debunk. And note that there's a 1981 paper, a 2005 paper, and both refer to an aspirational lecture Feynmann gave in 1959. This technology is maturing slowly, rather than racing ahead with revolutionary discoveries every month.