141–150 of 599 posts
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On the other hand, there are 150-year-old tortoises and 200-year-old whales out there. So it's not like there is some finite impossibility to living a long time, other animals have figured it out.
Even better, human species live indefinitely through human cells making new human fetal cells. At it's essence, it's still a chemical transformation process. Some compounds are being converted, old human to new human, which keeps life going indefinitely.
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> My understanding is that no one has been (intentionally, carefully) thawed after being vitrified using "modern" techniques, so we really don't know what condition a body would be in after unthawing using current technology. why haven't they tested this on animals or non-paying cadavers? It would seem unwise to pay to keep vitrified bodies frozen if one had no understanding of how the bodies would be when they were…
> It would seem unwise to pay to keep vitrified bodies frozen if one had no understanding of how the bodies would be when they were unfrozen. The people storing popsicles don't necessarily need to have anything to do with the people who dream of someday unthawing them. If some rich person wants to pay to keep an expensive freezer running for a specified amount of time after they die, that creates a sound business opp…
Generally speaking the thing they have in common is the funding required to do the cryonic enterprise.
> If some rich person wants to pay to keep an expensive freezer running for a specified amount of time after they die, that creates a sound business opportunity for someone who is willing and capable of running a freezer.
The question is "why would some rich person want to pay to keep a freezer running after they die?" in the case of cryonics the answer is usually because they have some expectation that they could be unfrozen and revived in the future.
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So the religious fanatics were right all along? I think the afterlife is actually the life after you realise there is no afterlife. Many never reach it.
It's pretty hard to dispute the thousands of NDE reports. Similar experiences, descriptions across different cultures and religions. Young children, even the blind since birth all fairly consistently report the same.
There's a comment somewhere in this thread about perpetual motion. This tech seems to be its mirror-image, equal in impossibility, but opposite in aim. To stop all motion and decay, forever. Sometimes, it's wise to be circumspect, and to admit the possibility of a future technology that will change everything.
In the case of cryogenic storage of viable humans, however, I think it is straight-up, bona-fide, no-exceptions, impossible.
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> It’s been a while, but if I could recall correctly, cells tended to have a finiteness in their very nature. This is known: https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hayflick_limit
If you look about it a certain way. At the species level, we've already reached biological immortality. The trick is to have some cells starting the process over. Sexual reproduction always started from pre-existing cells, rebuilding a full individual. Using this process to repair all the living cells does not seem impossible. Our understanding of DNA programming is far from sufficient to enable this kind of project,…
Then there are transposons, elements of ancient retroviruses embedded in our DNA, that can awaken and spray themselves thousands of times over the cell's genome. Usually, these new inserts don't hit anything important. Usually. Germline cells have mechanisms to suppress this, but most cells undergo this once a month.
You are talking about a lot of damage to repair in an older cell.
Cryonic preservation might or might not be possible, this is clearly a difficult process but we're never going to find out without trying. Dead people have no use for money, doing this kind of research is not a waste, in my opinion, even if it is very unlikely to work at this stage.
Umm, people still alive have use for money. The money could go towards helping the lives of the living, so it absolutely is a waste.
I find the whole concept hilarious. There's an implicit assumption that someone in the future will be bothered to resurrect a frozen body, then resurrect them from death (since they already died before being popsicle-ified). And even if they could be bothered, the thawed would be a lab experiment, owned by whatever corporation pulled off the magic. And if magically they came out of the ordeal functional and free, the…
> There's an implicit assumption that someone in the future will be bothered to resurrect a frozen body I imagine that mad scientists, in general, suffer from a lack of test subjects. I'm pretty sure the future will find something to do with frozen humans who signed up to be resurrected.
Unless things have gotten really bad, in which case they'll defrost and eat them.
One thing they won't bother to do, is defrost and re-animate them, because why?
I wonder what leads people to believe that anyone in the future will be interested in applying their staggering new re-animation technologies to centuries-old frozen corpses? There's a comment somewhere in this thread about perpetual motion. This tech seems to be its mirror-image, equal in impossibility, but opposite in aim. To stop all motion and decay, forever. Sometimes, it's wise to be circumspect, and to admit t…
I wonder what leads people to believe that anyone in the future will be interested in applying their staggering new re-animation technologies to centuries-old frozen corpses? There's a comment somewhere in this thread about perpetual motion. This tech seems to be its mirror-image, equal in impossibility, but opposite in aim. To stop all motion and decay, forever. Sometimes, it's wise to be circumspect, and to admit t…
Years ago when I was in medical school, I concluded to improve quality of life, no matter how finite, is a better endeavour than to prolong it. There's something tremendously philosophically satisfying to recognizing that death is just the recycling of life so that new life can happen.