91–100 of 123 posts
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Long life != immortality. Obviously nobody really wants to be immortal and one day outlast the solar-system and eventually be left floating around in space for trillions of years.
"one day outlast the solar-system and eventually be left floating around in space for trillions of years." Where can I sign up?
Wow. I'm surprised how many points this post has given the absurd premises that cryopreservation is based upon. There are far too many easily identifiable things that could go wrong in the process for me to even consider dumping money into such hokum. These are the same type of people that were insisting the world double up on alchemy research two thousand years ago.
To do away with death is to do away with evolution. Not a very good idea. We should work towards improving the quality of life rather than extend it. Would have been happier if the article was "as more people fall to chronically painful illnesses, isn't it time we act?"
It's a great idea. Evolution is about the dumbest possible optimization process which still works. I don't see Google throwing its hands up and saying 'screw engineering Bigtable or MapReduce with our silly minds, we'll just evolve those fuckers!'
Science: it works, bitches. (With apologies to http://www.xkcd.com/54/)
It's not the lack of cryo arrangements that's the problem. (I've considered cryo myself, but I'm not impressed with the likelyhood of success. Too many fracturing events, not to mention the likely extreme costs of recovery post-freezer. But if you're looking for more life, it's your only potential option.) The problem is that we haven't been focusing enough on the real issue: Death. Finding ways to extend human life…
I hadn't considered my greatest fear, but now I recognize it: Finding ways to extend human life indefinitely should be our generation's "Space Race." We already suffer from over-population and pollution. Death is a key piece of the demographic shift, and just about every other anthropological process related to the change and evolution of culture and society. Living longer would not increase our society's capability…
It's not the lack of cryo arrangements that's the problem. (I've considered cryo myself, but I'm not impressed with the likelyhood of success. Too many fracturing events, not to mention the likely extreme costs of recovery post-freezer. But if you're looking for more life, it's your only potential option.) The problem is that we haven't been focusing enough on the real issue: Death. Finding ways to extend human life…
I agree biological immortality is a lofty goal, but it is orders of magnitude harder than space race. At least with getting people into space, the basic techniques (launch rocket, orbit earth) and constraints were figured out. Devil was in the endless details. Humans still barely understand how aging works, much less how to theoretically stop it. Sure there's hypotheses here and there, but no unified description or s…
nonetheless I'm pretty optimistic about the possibilities of genetic reengineering. a lot of that research is really constrained by those ancient (aristotelean) laws concerning stem cell research.
As an analogy think about how we feel about people 2000 years ago - if we could have just a few comprehensive samples of something in their world, we would really like it. Even things like exhaustive lists of every word they said for a week would be incredibly useful for linguists, lists of everything they ate would be useful, etc.
We shouldn't rely on their choices of what is worth preserving - we should adopt a broad based approach and try to preserve the maximum amount of things, and hope it will be useful later on.
I think today we have even used graffiti preserved on the walls of Pompei to get an idea of what the ancient world was like - surely there would be valuable information stored in even an imperfectly-frozen brain?
Who knows what kind of crazy theories they may have in the future, that they just would need to have a few brains to test out with?
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not big on the stuff. But it's no Pascal's Wager either. This is way better than supernatural shit. This is a bad bet, not an impossible bet / illogical argument.
It is not "supernatural shit", but it is Pascal's Wager. It takes the same form and has the same flaws. It is an invalid argument. By paying $25k to be frozen, you also get a nonzero chance that you'll be revived and live through thousands of years of torture.
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You don't pay $50/month after you die (that would be a unworkable business model for obvious reasons), rather the $100k or so goes mostly into a trust which pays for your maintenance (more like $100/year, could be far lower on a larger scale) after you are gone. Alcor's funding minimums are higher than CI's partly because they are expecting reanimation to be costly. They also pay ongoing costs mostly from member dues…
Obviously you do not personally pay after death, but you set aside money for a trust before hand, which amounts to the same thing. I disagree with your assertion that you can get the company to live thousands of years. How many human organizations have lasted that long? Even the Catholic church has only been around for 2k (so they claim at least) and I can't think of anything else that approaches that longevity, not…
We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absence of much armed conflict, and other amenities of the modern world. Certain things (fashions, cultural memes) seem to get replaced quickly under such conditions, but that doesn't seem likely to extend to something like a trust fund.
Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not big on the stuff. But it's no Pascal's Wager either. This is way better than supernatural shit. This is a bad bet, not an impossible bet / illogical argument.
It is not "supernatural shit", but it is Pascal's Wager. It takes the same form and has the same flaws. It is an invalid argument. By paying $25k to be frozen, you also get a nonzero chance that you'll be revived and live through thousands of years of torture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously you do not personally pay after death, but you set aside money for a trust before hand, which amounts to the same thing. I disagree with your assertion that you can get the company to live thousands of years. How many human organizations have lasted that long? Even the Catholic church has only been around for 2k (so they claim at least) and I can't think of anything else that approaches that longevity, not…
We don't need the specific organization to survive thousands of years in its original form, we just need cryonics patients to be passed ahead peacefully to another organization in the event of failure. But yeah, religions are an example of something organized lasting thousands of years, under historical conditions. We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absen…
And how do you believe you'll accomplish this? The second, third, etc. companies are not going to sign up for this responsibility for free. Nor is there any guarantee that they won't also fail, or be merged into one conglomerate that fails.
> We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absence of much armed conflict, and other amenities of the modern world. Certain things (fashions, cultural memes) seem to get replaced quickly under such conditions, but that doesn't seem likely to extend to something like a trust fund.
I don't understand how this is at all relevant. I see no compelling reason to believe that the US will not experience natural disasters, wars, failed companies, or any number of other incidents that could cause cryo-failure. The fact that the population is fairly educated is almost completely irrelevant.
> Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.
Frozen people are not in a position to promote anything. And the people keeping them frozen don't have an incentive to do anything except collect paychecks.