Hal Finney being cryopreserved now • Hacker News Board

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#91

Post by meepmorp » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:28 PM UTC

tonysuper wrote: post #79

sliverstorm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would only do it while it remained novel, though. When two or three people are cryopreserved, novelty is enough, but what about when thousands or millions are?

Then you do it out of a sense of duty to the past. People spend ages carefully preserving forks and other trinkets from the 1700s. Surely an entire person would be worth equal care, and a group of people more so.

> People spend ages carefully preserving forks and other trinkets from the 1700s. Surely an entire person would be worth equal care, and a group of people more so.

Trinkets from a bygone era don't require medical care, housing, and feeding. Note, too, that historical preservation goes only so far - there's plenty of places where old buildings are torn down to make way for new ones. I have trouble seeing where frozen corpses are markedly more attractive to refurbish.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#92

Post by s_q_b » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:28 PM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #71

ef4 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who's to say that the choice to survive in the distant future is desirable? Each individual for themselves, obviously. > Everyone you know and love will have been long dead This obviously contradicts the original assumption that you might actually get revived. Because if you can, so can others. > may have undesirable objectives in mind, e.g. a life of slavery or military conscription I find it hard to believe that…

I would personally expect "everyone you know and love" to be the reason any of us schmucks have a hope of being revived. Even if there is no economic or scientific reason to revive a frozen, preserved person, there could still be sentimental reasons. If my grandfather were frozen and reviveable, and not dead and buried, I would want to revive him. If it were remotely within my financial means, I would save for decade…

> If my grandfather were frozen and reviveable, and not dead and buried, I would want to revive him. If it were remotely within my financial means, I would save for decades, mortgage or sell everything I own, take on any debt I could trick people into lending me, if it technologically possible to bring a parent back to life.

Of course you feel this way. Everyone does. And that's the problem. Imagine most of the world's productive output being redirected to the massive project of unfreezing generations of cryogenically preserved ancestors.

This is one of the cheerier possibilities. Most of the reasons that occur to me that an advanced society, lacking an intelligence cascade, would want to conjure a large number of functioning highly-educated consciousnesses are decidedly darker.

This possibility, and a thousand other unforeseen individual and societal implications of cryogenics, deserve debate.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#93

Post by dtech » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:28 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #69

eudox wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time we have the technology to revive cryopatients, that question will likely be "why not?".

Maybe reviving will be easy, but IMO the real hangup is power costs. Keeping someone in cryo has regular upkeep costs. That complicates matters a lot.

I think you pay for those upfront. Similar to how todays Nobel prize money is still payed from money grown from Nobel's assets at the time of his death.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#94

Post by jbarham » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:33 PM UTC

ericb wrote: post #4

I'm curious--in these cryopreservation arrangements, what is done to incentivize future people to resurrect you? Anyone know?

Well there is the old joke about the COBOL programmer who was cryogenically frozen: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/alex/cobol.html

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#95

Post by zanny » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:33 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #69

eudox wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time we have the technology to revive cryopatients, that question will likely be "why not?".

Maybe reviving will be easy, but IMO the real hangup is power costs. Keeping someone in cryo has regular upkeep costs. That complicates matters a lot.

They are poised to have tens of thousands of people on ice. The first few generations are recouping the R&D and opportunity costs, future customers can recoup the ongoing power demands of the facility and any expansion necessary to accommodate newer clients.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#96

Post by pron » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:33 PM UTC

FiloSottile wrote: post #39

It's fascinating, and personally a bit disturbing, to read about his death as an announcement of cryopreservation ("being cryopreserved now") instead of the sad news it is anyway ("died today"). Also the discussion here revolves around he coming back, not he leaving. Maybe it impresses me because he seemed so hopeful to be able to choose life in his post back then when he was diagnosed: "I may even still be able to w…

> I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope.

Not more so than in some other religions with their own versions of an afterlife. It all depends on your faith.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#97

Post by reasonattlm » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:33 PM UTC

3am wrote: post #81

aerovistae wrote: post #49

The thing I don't understand is how circulating cryoprotectant chemicals through the brain doesn't destroy the tissue. How could anything other than blood safely circulate through the brain?

As long as pressure, osmotic balance, pH, etc are in balance then it's not going to cause cellular trauma per se. Regardless of the fluid medium, a bigger problem is absence of oxygen is going to start the process of autolysis after cell death. Neurons are particularly vulnerable, which how people can become brain dead within 5-10 minutes under normal circumstances. The even bigger problem is cellular damage from the…

Remyelination cell therapies for ALS are very much a viable work in progress today. They will exist within the next decade.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.stemcr.2014.04.005

Some people are working on organ preservation by vitrification and restoration. Not there yet, but promising work. There is no reason to think that this is impossible:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15094092

As to technologies capable of restoring the cryopreserved, there are any number of works that propose very detailed descriptions of how it can be done with molecular nanotechnology.

http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/2009/09/10/revival-of-c...

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#98

Post by zanny » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:38 PM UTC

3am wrote: post #81

aerovistae wrote: post #49

The thing I don't understand is how circulating cryoprotectant chemicals through the brain doesn't destroy the tissue. How could anything other than blood safely circulate through the brain?

As long as pressure, osmotic balance, pH, etc are in balance then it's not going to cause cellular trauma per se. Regardless of the fluid medium, a bigger problem is absence of oxygen is going to start the process of autolysis after cell death. Neurons are particularly vulnerable, which how people can become brain dead within 5-10 minutes under normal circumstances. The even bigger problem is cellular damage from the…

What you do need to consider is that, most likely, by the time anyone can conceivably revive those cryopreserved, the technology of the era is likely to be capable of genetic engineering and cloning to the degree where they might feasibly be able to just generate a new body for a patient to transplant the brain to. Or just do a detailed imaging of the brain, and transplant the memories. Or replace any parts of the brain damaged by the freezing procedure in the same way.

I don't think anyone getting cryopreserved today expects to be woken up for at least a century. And a hundred years ago the idea of commercial airline flight was still a pipe dream, and anything resembling computers of any scale was complete science fiction.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#99

Post by zanny » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:44 PM UTC

s_q_b wrote: post #92

saalweachter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would personally expect "everyone you know and love" to be the reason any of us schmucks have a hope of being revived. Even if there is no economic or scientific reason to revive a frozen, preserved person, there could still be sentimental reasons. If my grandfather were frozen and reviveable, and not dead and buried, I would want to revive him. If it were remotely within my financial means, I would save for decade…

> If my grandfather were frozen and reviveable, and not dead and buried, I would want to revive him. If it were remotely within my financial means, I would save for decades, mortgage or sell everything I own, take on any debt I could trick people into lending me, if it technologically possible to bring a parent back to life. Of course you feel this way. Everyone does. And that's the problem. Imagine most of the world…

We are already on the cusp of rapid automation of our current economy. Traditional models of how labor is distributed or utilized will, and have been, going out the window for quite some time.

But I think you can approximate well enough that by the time the technology arises to resurrect the cryopreserved, it won't require the entire effort of humanity to revive their frozen forbearers, because most of humanity won't be putting out any effort to begin with. We are already 20 years away from half the working population being rendered obsolete by automation. If it is something machines cannot do, it just lets us utilize untapped human labor in the future. If it is something machines can do, we will rapidly deploy the necessary infrastructure to enable the automation of revival, and it won't be a problem of anyone "affording" revival, the machines will just revive all the people they can.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#100

Post by geoelectric » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 9:45 PM UTC

jdnier wrote: post #50

Ancillary to the sad news, for a fictional treatment of cryopreservation (circa 1993) -- one that I couldn't help think about as I read that email/release -- Gregory Benford's novel, Chiller, works through many of the thought-provoking implications. http://www.gregorybenford.com/product/chiller/

Halperin's The First Immortal is damned near a written infomercial for Alcor, but is still a pretty interesting book in its own right in terms of exploring various cryonics scenarios.

Edit: looks like it's available freely online: http://coins.ha.com/information/tfi.s