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Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility

smithsonianmag.com

51–60 of 63 posts

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

#51

Imagine going through all the trouble to get yourself frozen, only to wake up 200 years later in some post-apocalyptic cannibal's stew pot. Boy would that be embarrassing.

And then you go all mad max beyond thunder done, finally reaching California and then realizing it was just a local apocalypse. Everyone else made it to utopia.

Seems more likely the local cannibals would be from Cali.

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

#52
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

Greg Egan's Permutation City also features the topic.

It's truly scary, but there is of course also the potential of eternal life in paradise.

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

#54
post #12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wait till the janitor switches off the power switch. /s

Read up on it and this or basically this has already happened a bunch of times.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/27/us/janitor-alarm-freezer-rens...

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

#55
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

“Pretty much everything”

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

#56
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Greg Egan's Permutation City also features the topic. It's truly scary, but there is of course also the potential of eternal life in paradise.

> also the potential of eternal life in paradise

Or hell, as in Ian M Banks ‘Surface Detail’. Chay's dilemma was really affecting (she is reincarnated as an angel of true death in hell, who is compelled to release a soul every day, by taking on some of their pain)

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

#57

Until it runs out of money, that is. Reanimation is nowhere near viable but this facility will have to do something to keep those bodies frozen...or else.

I thought the whole idea of Alcor was premised on their spending money from their clients not solely on equipment and technology, but also in long term investments designed to pay out the operating costs eventually; is that not the case?

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

#58
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…

Small animals can sometimes be revived after being frozen to death, see the Tom Scott video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

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

#59
post #53

Why not. The chance of them being reanimated is slim to none. But it'll still be neat to have a preserved 20th century body in the 22nd century or even beyond.

I thought it was only the head though

Freezing just the head and spinal cord is the cheaper option and you're banking on the future having a way to replace it. If you want to splurge, you can pay them to freeze your whole corpse and hope they have a way to thaw you out and fix whatever killed you sooner than re-homing your brain.

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

#60
post #8

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…

They already do that.
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