Reasons why cryonics is dumb:<p>- First off, there's a close to zero chance of a successful revival. Pretty much all of the major problems with thawing (like, let's rebuild your severely damaged brain) are pushed off onto future generations to solve. Not to mention curing whatever killed you in the first place. But let's pretend the future is magic, and this can work...<p>- Who pays for this? And no, I'm not talking about the freezing. The article presumes we can just use life insurance to pay for cryonics (and not say, to support your presently alive loved ones). But who pays for your future miraculous revival? Even in the super advanced future, presumably a complex procedure like reconstructing a human brain won't exactly be a cheap one. Not to mention all the medical care you'd need for recovery (and don't forget about all those people who just froze their heads, they'll need whole new bodies!). Why exactly are the people of the future so eager to resurrect all these frozen corpses of people with no living family or friends to support them? Is the future such a utopia that not only have we solved overpopulation, but we're desperately looking to bring back long frozen bodies with severe medical problems?<p>- The part that really strikes me as idealistic and naive about the article though, is the idea that death is "not part of the plan". And I thought we were being unrealistic about the future when they could rebuild your brain. So now everyone lives forever? That doesn't seem very sustainable. Not to mention the fact that it is the very finiteness of life that makes it valuable in the first place.<p>Conclusion: The present is yours to do with what you like, and the future may or may not ever get here. Invest in today.
<i>Not signing up for cryonics - what does that say? That you've lost hope in the future. That you've lost your will to live. That you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value.</i><p>No, it's because I value my life so much that I don't believe in cryonics. If it is your belief that it is possible to live N number of lives, your current life loses some of its meaning. Maybe you don't strive for so much, because there's probably more time later. Maybe you don't try as hard because if you fail, you might get a do-over. Maybe you don't shoot for the whole "regret nothing" thing with as much tenacity.
I think cryonics is about as useful as all those old tombs in Egypt. We could probably clone some of those body's and reviving people from cryonics might be an interesting experiment for our decedents but in both cases much of that dead person will have been lost. And trading resources in this life so that some shadow of me might show up in the future is not worth much time. So yea it's the best hope we have now, like it was their best hope back then, but all they are talking about is imperfect copies.
OK, so maybe I read too many fantasy and sci-fi novels, but I'm less interested in the problems of coming back from the dead. What really interests me is the related problem of how to kill someone securely.<p>Take, for a prosaic example, vampires. Shooting a vampire will almost certainly NOT kill them -- sources differ but they might not die, might die but revive immediately, might die but revive the next night, etc. So how to kill a vampire definitively?<p>I think, based on the union of all the vampire lore I've heard, you have to:<p>* stake him<p>* stuff his mouth with holy wafers<p>* cut off his head<p>* burn the body (both parts, presumably, but better to keep them separate)<p>* bury the ashes on hallowed ground<p>* ... at high noon<p>* drop a nuclear bomb on top of the church<p>THERE. One vampire, securely disposed of.<p>I'm sorry if this digression into the fantastic was a waste of time for you. We now return you to your regularly scheduled intellectual discussion of cryogenics.
Maybe, I'm wrong, but I often get the impression that the person who writes this blog is in need of a good grief counselor, but may be too smart for most of them to help.
That's a pretty hopeless point of view. Why not assume that in the future they'll harness the universe's full computational capabilities and emulate every single being that has ever lived? If cryonics is possible, the simulation scenario is just as possible, since it uses the exact same assumptions. Plus, it is a lot cheaper to believe in:)
I'm not convinced that medical science is so far behind determining life. Once a person is pronounced dead, I'm convinced they're brain dead. So it's useless to preserve someone when nearly all of their information on the state of their mind has been lost.
Does the idea of quantum immortality suggest that you would be revived? In that case I guess you're already living in a universe where you WILL freeze yourself (or in one where the singularity gets here soon.)
Reasons why cryonics is dumb:<p>Life is suffering (Buddha, n B.C.)
Death is void.
Nothing > suffering.<p>But there's a wall of pain/fear/effort/risk with suicide that keeps people inside life. Once you're dead, you're forced past the wall and it's a simple choice:<p>more suffering or no suffering?<p>Immortality by not dieing isn't quite the same option - avoiding old age suffering or going to old age suffering? Easy, being alive and rejuvenated wins.
I find it interesting that there's a not-small class of atheists who, believing they face the horror of annihilation, are driven to believe in things that are just as irrational as traditional religion-- mind uploading, cryonics, singularity, etc.<p>I don't know if there's an existence after death, though I think there probably is one, and I consider myself lucky to believe this, for if I'm wrong, I'll never know. What's horrible about annihilation/nonexistence isn't any experience of it-- there is none, by definition-- but the rather hideous shadow the prospect, were it true, would cast over life.
"If you want to securely erase a hard drive, it's not as easy as writing it over with zeroes. Sure, an "erased" hard drive like this won't boot up your computer if you just plug it in again. But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between "this was a 0, overwritten by a 0" and "this was a 1, overwritten by a 0".<p>There are programs advertised to "securely erase" hard drives using many overwrites of 0s, 1s, and random data. But if you want to keep the secret on your hard drive secure against all possible future technologies that might ever be developed, then cover it with thermite and set it on fire. It's the only way to be sure."<p>There have been no cases of anyone ever restoring a zeroed hard drive. It's utter bullshit. Especially these days with our precision aligned platters and insane densities.