Storing dead people at -196°C [video]

My first thought was <i>&quot;but are they superconductive at that temperature?&quot;</i>. Need to stay away from HN for a bit...

I hate that.<p>The whole stick behind placing the money to pay for the service, the energy and resource consumption, having people work to maintain that infra... That&#x27;s rich people carrying their dominance beyond their own death, having breathing people slaving out for them, there&#x27;s a revolting aspect to it.

Surprised to see all the negativity here.<p>If the argument is “selfish rich people consuming resources at the expense of everyone else”, there are much lower hanging fruits than this.<p>Adtech and all its supporting infrastructure not only uses orders of magnitude more resources than a few hundred bodies in LN2 but also generates infinite annoyance and wastes everyone&#x27;s time. Ditto for a lot of monopolized&#x2F;oligopolized&#x2F;lobbied industries (telecoms? Tax filing in the US?) that ultimately cause wealth (and thus resources) to accumulate in the hands of a select few at the expense of everyone else.

It would be interesting to experience. You&#x27;d die or maybe go to sleep and not wake up so in your mind you just went to bed as usual. And you wake up decades or centuries later in an instant.<p>Imagine someone from the 1800s trying to understand memes and Tik Tok. I think the Internet is within grasp as in telegraph but not the information on it. I can&#x27;t even imagine what will exist even 50 years form now.<p>And why is it -196C I mean I know that is the temperature of LN2 since it&#x27;s cheap. But why not store them like the global seed bank in glaciers or Antarctica where it&#x27;s currently -57C when it warm during the day. In summer it&#x27;s at most -20C.

The hubris involved with freezing yourself just blows me away. Like society that is technically advanced enough to unfreeze, reanimate, and fix whatever disease or damage killed you the first time would have any desire to add some ego manic that wanted to freeze themselves to the society of their current day.

Everything about this feels so foreign to me. I don&#x27;t understand who wants to work with it, nor do I understand who wants to sign up to be stored this way. I can understand a wish for extended life, but feels so surreal to believe this could possibly work. I think it will be more feasible to download consciousness to digital memory than to resurrect a dead, deep-frozen body.

&quot;After the Final Countdown somebody finds this storage of deep freezed meat and is very happy for a moment. This is what this project is worth.&quot;<p>-- Svante Pääbo (or some other Swedish Nobelwinner)

Akbar &#x27;n&#x27; Jeff&#x27;s Cryonics Hut!<p>&quot;Where the elite beat the heat and avoid having to meet St. Pete&quot;

The chance of a storage failure before recovery seems quite high, so I should start a company that does this but then launches you into deep space where it’s super cold anyway<p>If they can resurrect you they can retrieve you first.

Haiyoo, what kind of person are you when even in death you can&#x27;t give back to earth the body you borrowed.

Are we going to store our bodies to preserve our minds? Most of us wouldn&#x27;t really want our old bodies back after the tech appears to create new ones. It would make more sense to store our consciousness and then duplicate a body based on the stored DNA in which to imprint into a new mind.

After reading most comments here, few&#x2F;none mentions the real &quot;technical&quot; challenge with such idea : society.<p>Even if the tech would be able to &quot;revive&quot; them, they also need to bet that : - the company won&#x27;t go bankrupt (how many corporations last 10yearS?50?100?) - no technical issue happens (blackout, computer bug, ...) : this increases with each year added - society&#x27;s law&#x2F;structure will remain the same (democratic, not a chaos)<p>So unless it is government-backed I would not bet much on the success rate...

I feel cryogenic storage of people would work far better if it was driven by some cult-like or religious beliefs rather than monetary motivation, where dead bodies are managed as well as possible simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Is there remotely any reason to believe you could put their brain back together in a functioning way or that the connections are even still there cryopreserved like this? If not, this is all so silly. Just take a tiny piece of tissue and cryopreserve its DNA and you can have a clone made in the future. It won’t have your memories but that’s as close as we can get.<p>I cryopreserve cells all the time but they have to be single cells surrounded by fluid or it just makes a mess. As far as I know we don’t know how to cryopreserve the delicate structure and micro architecture of tissues. It may be physically impossible.

I&#x27;m going to miss Tom&#x27;s videos.

How can the planet sustain nobody dying?

For me it still doesn&#x27;t make sense. Cryopreservation is legal and done only to dead people. Which means if they want to be alive again two problems need to be solved: 1) unfreeze with success, 2) resurrect. Both are non trivial for quite some years.

Looking at their website, they also do &quot;Brain-only Cryopreservation&quot; (which is €60k instead of €200k).<p>For those who think that normal cryopreservation is too easy.<p><i>[Insert Futurama reference here]</i>

On the other hand, what would it take to have a technology that could take a 3d map snapshot of the entire brain structure?

How about a dystopian future where all of the grunt work is performed by an army of enslaved people woken up after being cryo frozen at some indeterminate time in the past. The futuristic society can heal their ailments but given that they have no rights nor skills after waking up, they are forced to clean floors with toothbrushes and pick weeds by hand.

&quot;Heads&quot; by Greg Bear.<p>&quot;Set two hundred years in the future, a science fiction novel in which William Pearce is searching for the elusive absolute zero, and his wife has brought many cryogenically frozen heads in the hope of reading them for information, unaware of the danger of their actions&quot;<p>Maybe not his best book...

Maybe a little off-topic, but something I&#x27;m terrified of is being simulated against my will.<p>I fear AI primarily for this because I see it as an enabling technology for brain simulation, but I also see cryogenic preservation similarly in that it removes the time constraints from the rate of progress - at least from the individual&#x27;s perspective.<p>Who knows, some weirdo hyper-libertarian future civilisation could decide to take these &quot;dead&quot; people and simulate them to act as NPCs in their new horror game. The fact there is a non zero chance of being revived into some hellish existence like this makes me terrified of cryogenic preservation.<p>When I die I want to be sure I&#x27;m dead. I want matter in my body to be brought to the highest state of entropy reasonably possible. I understand not wanting to die, but personally when I die I&#x27;d prefer to die knowing it will be over.

Sounds like the prequel of Idiocracy

Someone said Elon Musk is the most important person on Earth right. Does that mean that we should urgently cryopreserve him?

Everyone will be resurrected at the end of the world when Christ returns. I think I&#x27;ll just wait for that. But it would still be cool if CRYO preservation could work. Medical technology exists today that would have been science fiction 100 years ago. It&#x27;s definitely possible it could work in the future.

You obviously can&#x27;t bring someone back once they&#x27;re dead. It&#x27;s like turning off a computer and then putting it in a freezer and saying in 5000 years they&#x27;ll be able to come up with a way to restore it to the exact same state it was in before you turned it off.<p>In theory you could find a way to copy the state while it is still on and then bring them back that way, but that depends on whether the system is actually a physical network that is you or whether there is a &quot;soul&quot; made up of the traces of old data floating around the network which you wouldn&#x27;t be able to capture.

A normal freezer would be cheaper and easier when you really want to store meat long-term.<p>To get dead people back to life much more is needed, and most attempts failed ridiculously, as the frozen water explodes all cells. The temperature is not the problem at all, but the process to dehydrate the meat and replace it with glycerine or such. Completely. Or all the shady cryo companies which go bankrupt after a while, and cannot pay the freezers anymore. There was a nice article from such a company from the late sixties here a while ago. It smelled.

I wish he mentioned the ethics behind this.<p>01 the freezing costs power, which damages our planet.<p>02 This is often paid for by life insurance policies. Instead of the money going to your family or donating to a humanitarian cause, it goes towards damaging the planet.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised in 100 years, the owners of these businesses cut a deal with the remaining family members, offering &quot;hey, we will pay you $500m (half of the account balance) to unthaw your great great great great great grandpa if you promise not to sue us.&quot;