Hal Finney being cryopreserved now • Hacker News Board

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#121

Post by Udo » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:03 PM UTC

blake8086 wrote: post #31

ericb wrote: post #4

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

There is a post on the front page right now http://www.gentweb.co.uk/wirerecorder.htm about re-constructing some old wire recordings just to listen to the past. Imagine the opportunity to bring the person themselves back, instead of just audio. I think if technology advances sufficiently that it is "easy" and "cheap" enough, people will resurrect cryo-preserved patients just because it suits them to do so. If I had a…

The core assumption is that minds have an intrinsic value. Future civilizations who don't share that belief are unlikely to engage in resurrection. But as far as cost is concerned, there is no reason to think it'll be in any way costly, especially if it's in the form of whole-brain emulation.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#122

Post by raverbashing » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:03 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #104

raverbashing wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, you'll be living in the future, and probably unemployable since things will have evolved so much. Maybe everybody speaks something else other than English and even communicating is a pain (even with good translation resources) You'll know nobody. All the things that you know by "home" are gone. It'll probably be cool for the first weeks, then an absolute drag.

A huge portion of the workforce will be unemployable in our lifetimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU By the time the technology comes around the revive the cryopreserved, the rest of technological advancement will change the dynamic of human interaction so much we cannot estimate what the world will be like, but we can assume that with technology advanced enough to repair the damage from the freezing pr…

Yes, this video is great, I saw it too

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#123

Post by s_q_b » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:03 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #99

s_q_b wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The next step in your calculation is to ask, "What are the constraints on production in a society that has ultra-high automation but no artificial intelligence?"

There is only one: intelligence. I can see such a society going to great lengths to obtain that resource. The incentives to revive an individual for unfortunate purposes in such a society would be very large.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#124

Post by eudox » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:04 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #115

eudox wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquid Nitrogen is one of the cheapest fluids on the planet. Dewars are refilled every week. If the supply of LN was cut, the LN on each dewar would take months to evaporate -- And the patients are stored upside-down, so the head is the last thing to reach thermal equilibrium. There is no electricity involved.

A friend of mine who works for Alcor once converted somebody from full body to head only. They used a chain saw.

IIRC, that was in 1983, when three TransTime patients were transferred to Alcor thanks to donations. There's a very interesting article written about it: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/postmortemexamination.html

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#125

Post by tzs » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:05 PM UTC

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #36

ericb wrote: post #4

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

Once we've defeated death, reviving people who were preserved is the next logical step after saving everyone currently alive. Saving everyone who was not cryopreserved might not be possible, but will also be worth a shot.

> Once we've defeated death, reviving people who were preserved is the next logical step after saving everyone currently alive

...unless defeating death leads to a huge overpopulation problem and severe restrictions on producing new children. Then there will likely be a lot of popular opposition to reviving them.

A revived frozen person first will need to have the condition that killed them dealt with. Then they will need training to be able to function at a basic level in society [1]. If we haven't got to a guaranteed basic income system or some other system that gets rid of the need for people to have jobs or live off welfare, there will probably be very few jobs that the revived person can be trained for.

Other than exceptional circumstances, such as reviving someone who would have knowledge of historical interest, it is hard to see how reviving a frozen person would be better for the future people than letting someone have a child.

I think Larry Niven's stories have it right--a given frozen person is far more likely to be broken up for transplant material than be revived whole in most potential future societies.

[1] I'm assuming it will take us a fairly long time to get to the defeated death stage, and so it will be a very different world that the person is revived into.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#126

Post by pron » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:07 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #120

pron wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think religion (and I include cryonics in that category for the purpose of this discussion) is far from being a scam as it most certainly provides immediate benefits that cannot be dismissed. I'm sure it makes people happy to pay a high price for effectively convincing themselves that their death is merely temporary, thus hopefully alleviating what may be a very burdensome dread. That money would otherwise be spent…

A common element in scams is that they make promises they can't deliver on and relieve people of their funds.

But what if what you really need is not the promise to be delivered (which will be long in the future in any case) but it to be fully convincing. That is, you're paying for a convincing promise -- not for its fulfillment (then again, some would say that all scams work like that)

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#127

Post by 3am » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:08 PM UTC

reasonattlm wrote: post #97

3am wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 restori…

Upon a quick read, none those are not particularly cause for optimism. By far the most important one is the organ vitrification (for the impact it could have on viable transplants) and it wasn't very promising at all.

The ALS article was very far removed from an in vivo therapy and the premise was hypothetical. Looking at a collection of the links on the reanimation link, it might as well be molecular nanotechnology. None of them were anything more than science fiction.

As to the other response (zanny) ... that's your prerogative to believe those, but I believe they are impossible or outside of the intellectual capability of humankind (leaning towards the former). In my opinion it's as feasible as though you'd suggested FTL travel with wormholes.

Regardless, I wouldn't cryopreserve myself even if I could. I've made efforts to live a good life and accept my mortality.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#128

Post by meepmorp » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:10 PM UTC

eudox wrote: post #108

meepmorp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the time we have the technology to revive cryopatients, that question will likely be "why not?". It's a big leap of faith to think we'll ever be able to revive frozen dead people. Early applications of cryonics didn't take the tissue destruction of freezing into account. What other problems are being completely missed in the process? And that's to say nothing of the problems related to reviving a dead person and…

>Early applications of cryonics didn't take the tissue destruction of freezing into account. What other problems are being completely missed in the process? Literally everyone knows about ice formation. Robert Ettinger wrote about it in his cryonics book before it ever happened. Cryoprotectants have been used since the first real (ie non-cosmetic) cryopreservations. >reviving a dead person and fixing the causes of th…

> Literally everyone knows about ice formation. Robert > Ettinger wrote about it in his cryonics book before it ever happened. Cryoprotectants have been used since the first real (ie non-cosmetic) cryopreservations.

Note that the vitrification process didn't exist before the 90s, and so it's a bit of a stretch to think that it's been handled adequately. And even then, there's the fracturing problem, which despite Alcor's handwaving, is a serious problem.

> By the time you have the biological machinery to repair the kind of damage that thermal stress fractures, residual ice and cryoprotectant toxicity causes, cancer will be a curiosity in the bookshelves of history.

It's a very big assumption that we'll ever have the machinery to repair the damage caused by the freezing process. But apart from that, there's real and rapid decay of tissue in the brain when a person dies. Loss of even a small percentage of brain tissue has seriously traumatic effects on otherwise healthy people who haven't been frozen.

It's probably not gonna work.

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#129

Post by danielweber » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:11 PM UTC

meepmorp wrote: post #91

tonysuper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Trinkets also don't have agency. What if someone wouldn't want to be brought back to life?

Trying another way, let's say the technology is created to bring Finney back, but it would only keep him alive for 4 hours, and after that there would be no chance of him ever returning. Would it be violating his beliefs for future-folk to bring him back for those 4 hours just because they want to hear what he has to say?

Re: Hal Finney being cryopreserved now

#130

Post by saalweachter » Thu, Aug 28, 2014, 10:14 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…

It'd be fantastic if an industrialized nation devoted 5 or 10% of its GDP to revival. We've been suffering dearly from a lack of aggregate demand for nigh on a decade now. A massive medical bubble would hardly be worse than a housing bubble for backfilling demand.