Frozen heads and bodies await revival at this Arizona cryonics facility • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by zamalek » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

fulltimeloser wrote: post #3

Is reanimating these bodies even viable? What kind of energy waste are we talking about for this fools errand?

The hard part is the freezing. You need to prevent water crystals from forming (which will rupture cells), and the freeze has to happen really quickly. This is why some insects can tolerate being frozen, they are small enough to freeze quickly.

Reanimation is the easy part (relatively speaking), even though we have no clue as to how to do it.

We don't have the technology to do this to humans yet, so chances are high that none of them are viable.

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

#42

Post by Qem » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

cyanydeez wrote: post #25

MengerSponge wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No part of our planet is going to stay close to 77K without a staggering amount of effort. Arizona is seismically stable, a low flood risk, and has abundant solar power. It's probably not a terrible choice. Mix in laxer regulations than you'd see in California, and an innate hucksterism? It's a great fit!

Yeah, id probably still think a artic locale like Iceland would make more thermal sense. But Arizona is definitely the kind of place where this type of scam is profitable. Until the maintenance bills come.

If the Moon could be used for it that it would be probably the closest to an ideal place. In some craters you would not even need energy for refrigeration. Just ambient temperature would be enough. I wonder how many years saving freezer electricity bills would be necessary to offset launch and descent fuel costs.

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

#43

Post by consilient » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

simiones wrote: post #36

grishka wrote: 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…

> not much more true than it is that you could in principle reconstruct a burned letter from the ashes, with enough information about the burning process.

Recovering text from charred fragments of paper is sometimes possible, but anything reduced to ash is lost forever. The information required to reconstruct it ends up dispersed across the whole state of the Earth, and from there leaks out into space at the speed of light: it can never be recovered, even in principle.

The same is true vis a vis corpsicles and corpses. Whether cryopreservation preserves enough structure to make resurrection possible is an open question, but once your synapses are gone they're gone for good.

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

#44

Post by Qem » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26

cyanydeez wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, id probably still think a artic locale like Iceland would make more thermal sense. But Arizona is definitely the kind of place where this type of scam is profitable. Until the maintenance bills come.

Why? It doesn't take exponential effort to cool a space. It's linear. The difference between Arizona and Iceland to get to cryo temperatures is a rounding error.

If it's estimated several centuries are necessary for technology to advance enough for reanimate them, this rounding off error adds up to quite significant.

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

#45

Post by kergonath » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:48 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26

cyanydeez wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, id probably still think a artic locale like Iceland would make more thermal sense. But Arizona is definitely the kind of place where this type of scam is profitable. Until the maintenance bills come.

Why? It doesn't take exponential effort to cool a space. It's linear. The difference between Arizona and Iceland to get to cryo temperatures is a rounding error.

> Why? It doesn't take exponential effort to cool a space. It's linear.

It’s not linear at all. Going from 300 K to 250 K is much easier than going from 100 K to 50 K. If it were linear, going all the way to 0 K would be trivial.

The reason why it does not matter much is that average temperatures are not that different (Arizona is 29°C; Iceland is 14°C); the difference is not going to matter when cooling something from 300 K to 80 K. Besides, atmospheric temperature does not matter too much for underground facilities, and there Iceland is more active (thus warmer) than Arizona.

That said, things like proximity of an ocean, something with a huge heat capacity and decent thermal conductivity that could be used to dump heat more efficiently than in the atmosphere would be a plus.

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

#46

Post by pnw » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:56 PM UTC

If you are interested in a somewhat gonzo story of early cryonics from an insider perspective, check out Bob Nelson’s book, Freezing People Is (Not) Easy. Fun read.

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

#47

Post by glimshe » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:58 PM UTC

jonsen wrote: post #40

glimshe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the point is that you don't actually die then, isn't it? So how can it be illegal?

Freezing someone is lethal to them. We have no way of bringing someone back from this state, so it can be seen as a form of assisted suicide.

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

#48

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:59 PM UTC

Qem wrote: post #44

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It doesn't take exponential effort to cool a space. It's linear. The difference between Arizona and Iceland to get to cryo temperatures is a rounding error.

If it's estimated several centuries are necessary for technology to advance enough for reanimate them, this rounding off error adds up to quite significant.

No - because the value of dollars centuries in the future is essentially zero today.

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

#49

Post by glimshe » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 3:02 PM UTC

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #21

glimshe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd do what you propose tbh.

I'd also consider it. But an interesting question would be: when should we do it?

Let's assume the doctor says that we have 1 year left but a reasonably good quality of life until death. Should we wait until we're a few days away from death, or go to freezing right after getting the "1 year left" news under the assumption that the disease isn't as advanced and thus wouldn't require as big of a technology leap for a cure?

If we wait, the chances of being cured after waking up are pretty low (we are almost dead already due to the disease), but we'd have lived an extra year.

If we don't wait, the chances of being cured are a lot higher (disease not as advanced) but we might not survive the whole freezing process at all, and thus waste a year of life.

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

#50

Post by MissTake » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 3:17 PM UTC

If they’re already having to deal with fractured organs[1], then I have to ask what’s the point given that an organ can probably handle far greater damage than the brain.

Whilst the dreamer in me would like to believe that all this is possible in the future, I’m not convinced that todays technology is enough to even “freeze” the body, thawing and reanimation be damned.

[1] https://www.alcor.org/library/postmortem-examination-of-thre...