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What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

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Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case it's insightful, I've correspondingly never understood the common contentment with death. The world is an incredible place, and there's so much to experience and do. If I had the time there's hundreds of careers I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery. I think I could live a thousand lives with the people I care about and not be done. I've had to choose one life, and it's a nice one, but if…

I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging. (Note that for those who discuss this semi-regularly, that's understood to be very different than seeking a cure for any particular age related disease, which usually we attempt to address when it's too late.). There are groups like https://www.levf.org/ doing some early work like Robust Mouse Rejuvenation (in mid-lif…

There's a decent amount of research but it's hard!

Most of it is on fruit flies and mice then takes a life time to test on humans!

What we do know is that being fit and exercising with some semblance of healthy eating helps people live a lot longer. But no one wants to do it.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#312
post #235
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infant mortality is quite different: we know that infants are supposed to live. Extending life is the opposite: death is the normal, even unavoidable end. The comparison is misplaced. > I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery No, you couldn't. You would still be your aged brain, not capable of learning hundreds of professions, and your frail body, not capable of replacing its cells any longer. It r…

A spider might have up to 1000 babies of which only a small percentage survive. Are the unlucky hundreds of spiderlings that perish supposed to live?

Sorry, I didn't know we were talking about spiders.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#313

According to Wikipedia, more than 9 million people in the US have reported Near Death Experience (NDE) [0]. Some common traits that were reported: - A sense/awareness of being dead. - A sense of peace, well-being, and painlessness. Positive emotions. A sense of removal from the world. - An out-of-body experience. - A perception of one's body from an outside position, sometimes observing medical professionals performi…

That’s hardly the only or even most common response. As mentioned in that Wikipedia link people often report:

  anguish
  distress
  a void
  devastation
  vast emptiness
  etc
Not mentioned but common is extreme pain. But, such responses are less comforting and therefore less often repeated. It’s the same sort of filtering that makes specific kinds of posts go viral. As mentioned in Parnia's study where 63 people with NDE and none of them had an out of body experience, the actual breakdown of experiences don’t line up with what is generally reported.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#314
post #303
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if they succeeded. Instant breakdown of society. So by induction, perhaps someone makes sure they don't. My comment comes across as semantic nitpicking, but I don't mean it that way; I just think I'm not understanding what you mean by reasoning "by induction" here. I am a mathematician, so am most familiar with induction in its technical mathematical sense, which I assume isn't what you mean. More generally…

If you replace "induction" with "implication" then the comment is probably closer to what the poster meant.

You are correct; I have ESL'd a malformed meaning, I admit.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#315
post #301
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infant mortality is quite different: we know that infants are supposed to live. Extending life is the opposite: death is the normal, even unavoidable end. The comparison is misplaced. > I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery No, you couldn't. You would still be your aged brain, not capable of learning hundreds of professions, and your frail body, not capable of replacing its cells any longer. It r…

I’m amazed that people who argue against immortality often assume it will come with a frail body and an aged brain. Why? To me, the most basic form of immortality is achieved by reversal of aging, including a brain. Your body is just a machine, it’s pretty obvious it can be repaired, even if we don’t know how yet.

> even if we don’t know how yet

How would you fix your brain? Its capacity is obviously limited, and tinkering with plasticity almost certainly will have unexpected and undesirable consequences. You simply won't be the same person.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#316
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is relatively little correlation between conformism and intelligence a world dominated by military power is not a nerd paradise consider the plight of the iranian nuclear scientists

Despite the tragedy in Ukraine, most people in most countries are living through an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Since 1950, the global population has more than tripled, while militaries have shrunk. Since 1960, military spending as a share of global GDP has gone down from over 6% to less than 3%. The world isn't perfect, but it has become a lot less warlike and more hospitable for nerds in recent decad…

>Since 1950, the global population has more than tripled

I don't see this as a grand thing tbh. Sure there's more nerds but I feel like they trive most when not having to deal with scarcities.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#317

Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.

I'm registered with a cryonics company to be frozen after death on a rare chance that it actually works. My reasoning is that I simply like living. I think that arguments against longevity often sound deep, but if you rephrase them in more straightforward terms, they'll seem completely devoid of substance. For example, what does "we're children of our times mean?" That once world changes too much, death is preferable…

I think about it this way, although i dont have the money to sign up yet.(and don't want to do a rate plan while being young).

Basically every religion has some hope of afterlife/reincarnation. So for non religious people this also kinda provides this hope. And if it doesnt work out it is just a expensive funeral. If your dead body is burned, frozen or buried doesnt really matter in this case.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#318
post #197
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we don’t die we don’t evolve. If we had many lives then each one would be less meaningful. I do feel the pull on my heartstrings in your comment (wouldn’t that be wonderful), but an engineer will expand to fit as much time as you give them. We’d at least need to put age limits on political participation.

> If we don’t die we don’t evolve. Sure we will, just not in the traditional natural-selection sense. In many ways humans have "beaten" evolution by finding medical means to allow "unfit" humans to live full lives, and often pass on their genes. Evolution in the future could be via technical means, either through advancements in medicine, or with cybernetic implants. If humans could ever become intellectually & ethic…

> "Once upon a time, humans lived much shorter lives, with many/most not making it out of their 30s."

Citation needed; because that's commonly believed to be average life expectancy - brought down by infant mortality. If you made it past ~5 years old, you had a good chance of living to 60-80.

"The days of our years are threescore years and ten" - Psalm 90:10, the King James Bible.

"A man will spend ten years as a child before he understands death and life. He spends another ten years acquiring the instruction by which he will be able to live. He spends another ten years earning and gaining possessions by which to live. He spends another ten years up to old age, when his heart becomes is counsellor. There remain sixty years of the whole life, which Thoth has assigned to be the man of god." - A passage from The Insinger Papyrus, in the Ptolemaic period"

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#319

Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.

I for one would like a bit more time. 200? Maybe 500? No one likely wants to be immortal but 80 or so seems criminally short for what our abilities are and how long it takes for us to find our calling.

Somewhere between 10,000 years and 100,000 years seems like the right amount to live as a human being and die with absolutely no regrets. Dying as a 257 years old you can still imagine feeling some resentment for the future beyond you: what will they discover, how will the music sound. But dying as a 84,751 years old, after an incomprehensible amount of sensory data, inner and outer experiences, concepts, technologies, maybe even a bit of interstellar exploration, feels just natural.

Therefore, no, we should not search for immortality, Terra will be unliveable for carbon-based organisms in 1 billion years [1], but we should look for mechanisms to preserve a somewhat trivial metabolism of ~50-90 kg of mass for 10,000 to 100,000 years.

[1] "1.2 billion years [from now], high estimate until all plant life dies out [...] rising temperatures will make any animal life unsustainable from this point on" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear...

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#320
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The DNA in the nucleus of a human cell has telomeres, which effectively function as a countdown timer for reproduction. Every cell division drops the timer by one, and when the timer hits zero, the cell enters senescence and stops working so hard. Killing off senescent cells improves quality of life in several aspects. Then there are transposons, elements of ancient retroviruses embedded in our DNA, that can awaken a…

No, fuck the older cell, replace everything with new, but slow enough.
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