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Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

#31

Post by doogieboo »

I see they left this part of the Ted Williams story out..

"PHOENIX -- A new book by a former employee of Alcor, the company that froze Ted Williams' remains, alleges the Baseball Hall of Famer's body was mistreated by the company.

Larry Johnson says in the book "Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death" that he watched an Alcor official swing a monkey wrench at Williams' frozen severed head to try to remove a tuna can stuck to it. The first swing accidentally struck the head, Johnson contends, and the second knocked the tuna can loose."

https://www.espn.com/boston/mlb/news/story?id=4524957

Re: Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

#32

Post by siffin »

unnamed76ri wrote: post #18
bitlax wrote: post #4

Final(?) resting place of FM-2030 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030

Never heard of him but it seems he was wrong on pretty much everything. At least everything covered in that Wikipedia article.

Wrong about this?

he wrote that the leadership in the Arab–Israeli conflict had failed, and that the warring sides were "acting like adolescents, refuse to resolve their wasteful 25-year-old brawl"

Re: Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

#33

Post by YakBizzarro »

doogieboo wrote: post #31

I see they left this part of the Ted Williams story out.. "PHOENIX -- A new book by a former employee of Alcor, the company that froze Ted Williams' remains, alleges the Baseball Hall of Famer's body was mistreated by the company. Larry Johnson says in the book "Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death" that he watched an Alcor official swing a monkey wrench at Williams' frozen severed head…

Sounds like an episode from Futurama...

Re: Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

#34

Post by KineticLensman »

petters wrote: post #14

I'm afraid they would just end up something like this: https://qntm.org/lena

For another take on life-after-upload, try Neal Stephenson's "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell".

[Edit]

Also, Niven's "A World out of Time" [1], where the reanimated ('corpsicles') are used for menial / dangerous tasks.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell

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

Re: Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

#35

Post by grishka »

> This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty science-fiction, and it’s naive

Being actually really dead, with your body physically no longer existing, is truly final. You won't be conscious ever again. No exceptions. This, on the other hand, gives you a chance to live again. The chance might be tiny, but it's still non-zero, so it's still worth pursuing.

Tim Urban has a cool article about it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html, I agree with most of his points, except "No one ever will ever ever want to live forever". Because everyone actually does want to live forever, they're just afraid to openly acknowledge it.

Re: Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

#36

Post by simiones »

grishka wrote: post #35

> This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty science-fiction, and it’s naive Being actually really dead, with your body physically no longer existing, is truly final. You won't be conscious ever again. No exceptions. This , on the other hand, gives you a chance to live again. The chance might be tiny, but it's still non-zero, so it's still worth pursuing. Tim Urban has a cool article about it: https:…

But all of these people are already actually truly dead, with their physical body not existing much more than the mummified remains you sometimes find in other places. The fact that they're frozen rather than dessicated is irrelevant - frozen mamallian bodies are completely dead.

That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.

Re: Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

#37

Post by grishka »

simiones wrote: post #36
grishka wrote: post #35

> This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty science-fiction, and it’s naive Being actually really dead, with your body physically no longer existing, is truly final. You won't be conscious ever again. No exceptions. This , on the other hand, gives you a chance to live again. The chance might be tiny, but it's still non-zero, so it's still worth pursuing. Tim Urban has a cool article about it: https:…

But all of these people are already actually truly dead, with their physical body not existing much more than the mummified remains you sometimes find in other places. The fact that they're frozen rather than dessicated is irrelevant - frozen mamallian bodies are completely dead. That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct…

> frozen mamallian bodies are completely dead.

According to what criteria?

The bodies are still relatively intact physically. The point of the freezing is to stop any possible chemical activity so that no decomposition or other harmful change happens and the information contained in the body stays intact.

> That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.

You're saying that like you know exactly what a consciousness is, what's its physical representation and what is enough to support it. Our best understanding is that the brain itself contains enough information to encode one's "self". It might be in the neuron connections or something else — that part we aren't sure about yet.

Re: Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

#38

Post by Swizec »

simiones wrote: post #36
grishka wrote: post #35

> This notion of freezing ourselves into the future is pretty science-fiction, and it’s naive Being actually really dead, with your body physically no longer existing, is truly final. You won't be conscious ever again. No exceptions. This , on the other hand, gives you a chance to live again. The chance might be tiny, but it's still non-zero, so it's still worth pursuing. Tim Urban has a cool article about it: https:…

But all of these people are already actually truly dead, with their physical body not existing much more than the mummified remains you sometimes find in other places. The fact that they're frozen rather than dessicated is irrelevant - frozen mamallian bodies are completely dead. That there could in principle be some way to restore them to life is not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct…

> frozen mamallian bodies are completely dead

So fun fact: In mountain rescue they have a saying that you aren't dead until you're warm and dead. People do come back from frozen.

Here's some science about this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24882104/

> Hypothermic cardiac arrest has high mortality and few known prognostic factors. We studied retrospectively 34 victims of accidental hypothermia with cardiac arrest admitted to The University Hospital of North Norway during 1985-2013 who were resuscitated and rewarmed by extracorporeal circulation. No patient survived prior to 1999, while nine out of 24 (37.5%) survived hypothermic cardiac arrest from 1999 to 2013. The lowest measured core temperature among survivors was 13.7°C; the longest time from cardiac arrest to return of spontaneous circulation was 6 h and 52 min. The only predictor of survival identified was lower blood potassium concentration in the nine survivors compared with the non-survivors. Submersion was not associated with reduced survival. Non-survivors consumed modest hospital resources. Most survivors had a favourable neurological outcome.

Can't find the very cool journalistic story where I learned the phrase a few years ago. I think it was one of those New York Times online features they used to do. Similar to the famous Avalanche story, but about a woman who froze to death and came back ... or maybe it was part of the Avalanche story even. Memory fuzzy

Re: Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

#40

Post by jonsen »

glimshe wrote: post #8
fulltimeloser wrote: post #3

Is reanimating these bodies even viable? What kind of energy waste are we talking about for this fools errand?

As far as I know you need to be dead already to be put in these facilities. So to get them back, we'd have to find a way to resuscitate them after "defrosting". The point of these facilities is exactly to wait for the technology to get them back to life. One more interesting variation, while illegal, would be to freeze people when they are nearing death. If we could bring them back later, the scheme would have a chan…

But the point is that you don't actually die then, isn't it? So how can it be illegal?
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