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What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

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Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#411

Post by usrusr »

endtime wrote: post #403
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One shouldn't put money into "curing death by aging" without fixing society first; while birth rates exceed death rates, the world fills up and drains natural resources etc etc. There's a ton of problems that need resolving if living longer is to be a thing.

If aging is cured then the elderly could be fully productive.

At the cost of less elderly who'll miss out on being reproductive die to all the spots already being taken. Achieving immortality would be robbing from your descendants what your ancestors bestowed.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#412

Post by xg15 »

Assuming all of this doesn't just end with the bodies being dumped at some point, I wonder if future medicine will use the frozen bodies and brains more like a kind of reference to construct an AI from, instead of really trying to revive them.

Sort of how historians can read badly damaged ancient documents, but usually copy over their results to a new medium instead of trying to repair the original document.

A lot of the usual philosophical discussions following whether or not the AI is the same as the real person would probably follow...

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#413

Post by endtime »

jodrellblank wrote: post #336
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case it's insightful, I've correspondingly never understood the common contentment with death. The world is an incredible place, and there's so much to experience and do. If I had the time there's hundreds of careers I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery. I think I could live a thousand lives with the people I care about and not be done. I've had to choose one life, and it's a nice one, but if…

I've lived a modern day life of comfort, opportunities and experiences unimaginable compared to even my grandparents (all deceased now). I've been to places and had opportunities to try things which they never did. Compared to my grandma who cooked during food rationing and had to save sugar rations to make a cake, who lived a frugal life of 'make do and mend', I have the spare money and first world surroundings to i…

> Brute forcing through everything-there-is-to-experience is not an enticing vision for the future at all, it's a grind.

Speak for yourself, but please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective. (I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to.)

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#414

Post by jodrellblank »

mmustapic wrote: post #381
m4rtink wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Sun radiates about 400 trillion trillion Watts in all directions, and only a couple of billionths of it crosses Earth. There's a lot more radiant energy spreading out into the void waiting to be Dyson Swarmed.

There's no way we're going to rocket launch billions to Mars, and there isn't another planet worth living on without unreasonable amounts of energy for Terraforming. But we are capable of rebuilding the atoms of Earth into much larger living environments - there are so many atoms it wouldn't mean destroying the Earth to do it. A Space Elevator doesn't need diamond nanowire, it could be built with enough steel chain. An orbital ring around the Equator would be enormous and would take approximately nothing of the Earth's matter to construct.

Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel is full of speculation and plans for all kinds of possible or nearly-possible futures, as well as more distant dreams. e.g. the playlists:

- "The future of Energy, Industry and Agriculture" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

- "Earth v2.0" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6mRjsxQQJE&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

- "Outward Bound" - near-Earth space exploration and living - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

- "Visions of Earth" - arcologies, megacities, ecumenopolises, geoengineering, weather control - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

And somewhere in there, megastructures such as Dyson Spheres, ringworlds, etc.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#415

Post by scotty79 »

lovich wrote: post #398
scotty79 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe old people living longer would make us finally create some mechanisms of power rotation instead of just patiently waiting for old power to die. Mechanism that could be applied way earlier than old ossified out of touch rulers die now. And applied more merit based.

Why would we make such a mechanism instead of the currently entrenched powers just further solidifying their hold on society?

Out of necessity? I know we live in times when elites seem secure. But it wasn't always so and it won't be always so.

It is so right now only because of how good modern common people have. But it's going away now. And if security of elites depend of well being of others it's sort of self-regulating system albeit way too slowly.

There's also pressure from the other side. The longer living elites means it will get crowded at the top, so elites might be open to some means of culling their numbers.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#416

Post by usrusr »

yreg wrote: post #260
sangnoir wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging. Faced with their own mortality, a bunch of aging billionaires and multimillionaires tend to pour money into longevity research. I'd be very upset if governments increased spending on fighting senescence today, instead of lower-hanging fruit .

When Elon was asked why longetivity research didn't pick his interest as worthy of an investment, he said: >It is important for us to die because most of the time people don't change their mind, they just die. If you live forever, we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed.

Wonder how long he'll stick to that line. I can almost see that Twitter poll he'd currently use to rationalize the change of mind: "Should I try to not die? [ ] yes [ ] no"

But for the time being, nice to see him stating something I don't disagree with.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#417

Post by the__alchemist »

xg15 wrote: post #412

Assuming all of this doesn't just end with the bodies being dumped at some point, I wonder if future medicine will use the frozen bodies and brains more like a kind of reference to construct an AI from, instead of really trying to revive them. Sort of how historians can read badly damaged ancient documents, but usually copy over their results to a new medium instead of trying to repair the original document. A lot of…

The book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell dives into a related topic; both frozen bodies, and brain reconstruction, reasoning through its potential consequences, and the experiences of a brain without a physical reference. It's quite long though! Also explores some unrelated concepts like finding truth an an internet world, Paradise Lost, and a fantasy adventure.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#418

Post by dghughes »

epicureanideal wrote: post #195
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case it's insightful, I've correspondingly never understood the common contentment with death. The world is an incredible place, and there's so much to experience and do. If I had the time there's hundreds of careers I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery. I think I could live a thousand lives with the people I care about and not be done. I've had to choose one life, and it's a nice one, but if…

I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging. (Note that for those who discuss this semi-regularly, that's understood to be very different than seeking a cure for any particular age related disease, which usually we attempt to address when it's too late.). There are groups like https://www.levf.org/ doing some early work like Robust Mouse Rejuvenation (in mid-lif…

A recent article mentioned how leprosy can regenerate livers or maybe other organs, nerves, vessels etc. It does it so it can infect it again. Pretty close to human regeneration if the kinks are worked out.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63626239

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#419

Post by LordGrey »

mannykannot wrote: post #104
moloch-hai wrote: post #68

How could this be published without mentioning the Bide-a-Wee Scandal touched on in Larry Niven fiction?

I was going to say that Larry Niven wrote a novel (A World out of Time?) in which the cryogenically frozen were resurrected to perform menial or otherwise undesirable jobs, as a form of indentured servitude. IIRC, trust funds set up by the deceased to pay for their preservation and resurrection had been dissolved on the grounds that they were strangling the economy. If Bide-a-Wee was not from this novel, a reference…

Trust funds: Pierce the Checker (Peersa) said, "The dead cannot own money. The courts decided that long ago."

"Corsicles" had to pay The State back for storage and resurrection, as you mentioned, which was the reasoning behind the Bussard Ramjet training Corbell received.

Niven sidestepped the whole "how to correctly resurrect a frozen person" problem by claiming that Corbell's memory/personality were somehow extracted from his corpse (destroying the body completely), and then used to reanimate a convicted felon. If Corbell failed his training, the felon's mind would be wiped and another corpsicle's personality would be tried.

That book introduced so many big ideas to the young me. It was the first Niven book I'd read; Ringworld was the second.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#420

Post by Gatsky »

ShredKazoo wrote: post #379
Gatsky wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>nobody will ever bother working on how to salvage the crudely frozen/vitrified. I disagree, I think salvaging them will be of tremendous historical interest. Imagine if we could bring back a peasant from the 1400s. Medieval scholars would be all over that.

Perhaps, I guess it depends on how much of the data we generate (tweets, video, blogs, text messages etc) survives into the future.
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