What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#381

Post by mmustapic » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:48 AM UTC

m4rtink wrote: post #334

jodrellblank wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cite "Stalin bad" but Stalin only killed about 40,000/week for 30 years. You're talking of personally paying to support the deaths of everyone at the current world-wide all-cause death rate of 1,000,000/week, forever . Surely in some way that makes your plans infinitely worse than Stalin's? Imagine all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, all the veil of mourning and tears, the darkness your plans will cloud the su…

Exactly - this obsession with planets it toxic, you see it all the time. People just consider Earth as the only available finite resource and thus take some problems as unsolvable and a lot of suffering as normal and unavoidable. All the while the are almost endless resources and options how to solve these issues waiting in the solar system! Its like hauling old people to the mountains to die because your village can…

The energy needed to move millions to a different planet is enormous with current physics. So, until you solve that, the obsession with Earth is not toxic, it's realistic.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#382

Post by comboy » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #360

wintorez wrote: post #168

Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.

> Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Except it doesn't. Death is the end of everything for you. It's ultimate loss of any game you might have participated in. And there's nothing else. When you die then there's no longer any you. And there will never be you in any shape or form. When you die it's as if your family home burnt to ashes along with your family inside and family busine…

> Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth.

> Death is the end of everything for you.

Both of you these are objective. You can think you are insignificant or you can think that you are part of the big bang which is still happening. It's just narration and if it makes no practical difference (as it would seem in these cases), everybody can choose whatever makes him feel better, there is no need to put down the other narration.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#383

Post by ShredKazoo » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:50 AM UTC

marricks wrote: post #136

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My understanding is that no one has been (intentionally, carefully) thawed after being vitrified using "modern" techniques, so we really don't know what condition a body would be in after unthawing using current technology. why haven't they tested this on animals or non-paying cadavers? It would seem unwise to pay to keep vitrified bodies frozen if one had no understanding of how the bodies would be when they were…

Because their clients are extremely rich people and if they’re not confident the experiments will work they won’t get money from those said rich people.

Cryonics is actually quite affordable -- within the means of most people reading this comment, I would guess: https://www.alcor.org/membership/

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#384

Post by brap » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:51 AM UTC

Gatsky wrote: post #357

kragen wrote: post #62

unfortunate that the author didn't bother to distinguish between the effects of state-of-the-art cryopreservation by vitrification and the older cryopreservation procedures that produced the massive fracture damages they mention an awful lot of the article seems to be about how weird it is for people to study things carefully and try to do things that are not known to be possible, with the implicit subtext that being…

So what I think is the most likely outcome is that we realise there are better ways to preserve the dead for reanimation, and nobody will ever bother working on how to salvage the crudely frozen/vitrified. I personally think the way forward is to derive the neural connectivity and transcriptional state map of the brain on a single cell level. This can be done today, albeit at great expense, on tissue that is chemical…

So is it really the same person you're reanimating, or is it someone/something that simulates that person perfectly to the outside world?

I mean, suppose you could do that while the person is still alive. Assuming the reanimated person even has consciousness, then surely(?) the two won't share the same experience, like some hive-mind with two bodies. I don't think the original person being dead makes any difference.

So it's less about preserving "yourself" (whatever that means), and more about assuring that a backup clone exists after you die. I can see why that might be useful (it's kind of like leaving a will), but your experience probably ends when you die.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#385

Post by winReInstall » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:52 AM UTC

wintorez wrote: post #168

Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.

The older i get, the more i get the clining to "immortal" structures, like cathedrals and monuments. They are the only thing constant in the sea of change.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#386

Post by Ialdaboth » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:53 AM UTC

wiz21c wrote: post #259

pavlov wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the pharaohs already discovered, an immortality plan that depends on generations of low-paid underlings to maintain the dead elite's physical bodies is fundamentally flawed.

Fortunately, this statement is true for many plans of the elite :-)

It's the reason why they switched from low-paid underlings to a little better paid caste of technocatric petty bourgeoisie for the XXIst century ;)

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#387

Post by ShredKazoo » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:53 AM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #328

chasil wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Alcor site presents evidence of a rabbit kidney that is vitrified, stored in a dewar for a month, then revived and put back into the donor rabbit. Or at least they did the last time I looked.

I'll be impressed once they do that with a human brain. Before that any cryogenic stuff is just a creative way of burning money and energy.

How about a rabbit brain?

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#388

Post by neuronic » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:55 AM UTC

spuz wrote: post #296

lynx23 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely hope you are wrong. Not being able to accept that things go, and new things come about, feels pathological to me.

Living 1000 years wouldn't necessarily imply resistance to change. I'm not sure why you think that it would.

I subjectively disagree from observation.

Change in viewpoints, lifestyle or behavior become exceedingly rare the older people get. Also, the youth is always incapable, stupid and wrong. It's so much of a phenomenon that I wouldn't dare blaming anyone for this. It almost seems to be part of normal development.

People just tend to become more mentally rigid with age and they have a perfect justification ready for you: experience. They have seen it all and can therefore judge everything and everyone (without considering changed circumstances of course which would require to adjust the mental frame that was rigidly formed across the ages).

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#389

Post by SapporoChris » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #98

harry8 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to use facts, logic, and this "science" stuff against me is futile as I have a perfectly good conspiracy theory! The silver suit couldn't insulate and keep the heat out?

> The silver suit couldn't insulate and keep the heat out? If you so wish to believe... The problem is that there is no air to carry away the heat so that whole setup becomes like a miniature greenhouse. Without some active way to cool it eventually you'd cook.

Heat can transfer via Conduction, Convection and Radiation. The vacuum of space may prevent the first two, but not loss of heat via Radiation. Infrared radiation to be precise. The heat loss is very slow, so yes at times it would be a miniature greenhouse.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#390

Post by ShredKazoo » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 11:03 AM UTC

hilbertseries wrote: post #210

Teever wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The state of the art in this field is removing a rabbit's kidney, vitrifying it, waiting a month or so, thawing it and implanting it. I haven't read this article but the abstract seems to confirm what I read a while ago.[0] Apparently the bottleneck is in thawing organs past a certain size, current thawing methods lead to uneven thawing in larger organs, however I read they were experimenting with using directed radi…

Sure, you can freeze and unfreeze an organ. But that doesn’t work with the brain the electricity and the connections between the neurons are you. Cryogenic freezing will never work, until the structure of the brain can be preserved. All current methods kill the brain. It’s expensive snake oil.

Even if the preserved brain is very different from its original state, it might be possible to reconstruct the original state using future technology.

Imagine if I made an origami animal, then unfolded the paper and handed you the paper plus an origami book with the animal I made. With enough time and care, you'd probably be able to observe the creases and refold the paper to reconstruct the original animal.

Supposing technology continues to advance at the rate it has been -- then by year 3000, the problem of cryonic revival is likely one of statistical inference on possible original brains, with the cryopreserved brain as evidence. Hard to predict the difficulty of that problem in advance.