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

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#451

Post by wongarsu » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 1:26 PM UTC

recuter wrote: post #395

lovich wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might have done the world a service. Immortality combined with winner takes all capitalism will just lead to an entrenched race of god emperors that won’t be removed ever except by society wide violence, basically like medieval kingdoms or dynastic empires. Market economies have helped limit that a bit(wealth inheritances still have a problem), but one of the unstated backstops of that system is that eventually the r…

The ends justify the monkey wrenches, eh?

A guilloutine wouldn't have worked in this case

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#452

Post by BrotherBisquick » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 1:32 PM 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.

You say that, and I don't necessarily disagree, but I believe that everyone is gripped by panic when they know they're about to die. I don't care how enlightened you are, we all fear death above all else. That, I think, is the root of the desire for immortality.

The only really pleasant, anxiety-free way to die is to not see it coming. We should wish for that rather than wish for immortality.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#453

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #404

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere between 10,000 years and 100,000 years seems like the right amount to live as a human being and die with absolutely no regrets. Dying as a 257 years old you can still imagine feeling some resentment for the future beyond you: what will they discover, how will the music sound. But dying as a 84,751 years old, after an incomprehensible amount of sensory data, inner and outer experiences, concepts, technologie…

I’m just being reasonable here. It’s _possible_ I might find life that’s thousands of years long interesting, but it’s beyond my current imagination. I’ll be perfectly happy with doubling my lifetime (tripling my productive life?). as a biologist, that sounds more reasonable anyway.

Jeanne Louise Calment lived 122 years and 164 days [1]. Doubling the lifespan, 240+ years, is most certainly not possible, not reasonable, using diets, exercises, and so forth: if it were such a low hanging fruit, we would have already been there. Even if we could push the body using current technology, no one will want to live 100+ years (from age 70 to 160+) as an old person, being in pain constantly, fighting all kinds of cancers.

Therefore, the only way I can see a lifespan push, not only x2, but x10, or even x100 (10,000 years—once you get x3/x4, it probably scales trivially) is through 100% organ regeneration and 100% programmatic control over the morphospace. Broke an arm? Amputate the limb and grow another one back, your cells already did it before. Liver cancer? Regrow another liver. Heart issues? Make another heart. Spend all the years above 35 as a perpetual 35 year old, eventually in the bodyshape of Chris Hemsworth/Margot Robbie (to keep the examples in Australia). This scientific fancy is somehow grounded in the mind-expanding perspectives coming from Dr. Michael Levin's lab [2]. Personally, I'm compelled enough by their thesis, programmatic control over cells, that I started learning about their work, BETSE, Bio Electric Tissue Simulation Engine [3], and try to build on top a BioElectric Simulation Orchestrator, BESO [4]. Most probably, however, we won't see 100% human organ regeneration in our regular lifetimes, but never say never.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

[2] Speaking with Cells: the Electrical Future of Regenerative Medicine with Dr. Michael Levin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzGaakopAKU

[3] https://github.com/betsee/betse

[4] https://github.com/daysful/beso

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#454

Post by bombcar » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 1:42 PM UTC

picture wrote: post #182

bombcar wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s skip the freezer and just launch the popsicles into deep space orbit behind mars or something. Once we can successfully Futurama the bodies we will easily be able to retrieve the frozen capsules.

Won't they get pelted by microastroids, molecularly pulped with ionizing radiation, cooked by various sources of heat? Popsicles usually don't last very long outside a freezer

If you send them away from the sun or otherwise shield them (dark side of a planet, out past Pluto) they’ll be pretty cold and stable. You’d leave them in the rocket of course.

The baseline temperature of outer space, as set by the background radiation from the Big Bang, is 2.7 kelvins (−270 °C; −455 °F). Probably too cold.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#455

Post by Quarrelsome » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #281

Quarrelsome wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd figure if biology was capable then it would have found a solution by now. But as far as I'm aware immortality isn't a trait of any multi-cellular organism that has ever lived on this rock. I mean maybe we can stick some pipes in a corpse and get it to move around or make a digital echo of a dead personality and have that rattle around inside a robot. However, I feel like we're drifting into wishful thinking if…

>if biology was capable then it would have found a solution by now It did though.[0] There is likely very little evolutionary pressure for immortality, therefore this kind of thing isn't more widespread. If anything, at population level evolution might generally select for the population that produces a new generation and dies quicker. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii

Oh cool, thanks for that. I would argue that's not exactly the sort of immortality we have in mind when we discuss it though.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#456

Post by wongarsu » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 1:49 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #369

epicureanideal wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Basically all developed countries already have birth rates below the replacement rate. In the US each women on average gives birth to 1.64 children, in Germany there it's 1.5 per women, in Japan 1.33 and in Korea 0.84. To keep population constant without immigration, the average women would have to give birth to slightly above 2 children.

The only reason population numbers aren't collapsing is immigration, but that comes with its own issues. Extending live expectency and productive lifetime isn't that crazy (if we can get a handle on our rising living standards and resource consumption).

https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#457

Post by terminal_d » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 1:58 PM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #278

terminal_d wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 100 is quite enough -- life is meant to be lived with people one knows.

You’re always free to take the quick way out. Don’t be so quick to condemn 8 billion other humans to the same short lifetime just because you can’t imagine living longer.

That's very rude.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#458

Post by usrusr » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 1:59 PM UTC

endtime wrote: post #449

usrusr wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was responding to a specific point to which your response seems irrelevant. If my kids, or their kids, or their kids, etc. ever wanted me to die in order to "bestow" them with something...well, too bad. I wish my grandparents, and their parents, etc. were alive today.

Space on earth is finite. And even if add more hypotheticals like us becoming an interstellar species (actually I'd wager that's less unlikely than overcoming aging), in absence of aging exponential breeding would eventually outpace even the fastest space frontier colonization imaginable.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#459

Post by terminal_d » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

stanete wrote: post #286

terminal_d wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 100 is quite enough -- life is meant to be lived with people one knows.

It's all about perspective. From where you are, 100 seems enough. For a 7 year old, 42 seems enough. But if could die tomorrow and you'd be offered the chance to live another day, you'd probably take it. And then the next day, and then the next. And days will become months and months will become years and so on and so forth.

I'm a fourth of the way in. Your outlook is fully alien to me. We die when we die. This struggle for X more years of life is at best vain.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#460

Post by candlemas » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

UberFly wrote: post #234

I wanted to know the state of Ted William's head, so I did a search. This is what I found: In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams' head was abused at the facility. Johnson claims a technician took baseball-like swings at Williams' frozen head with a monkey wrench. What?

He's gonna be pissed off when he finds out about that.