Aside from cost there's also the issue of law, requiring people die of natural causes beforehand means most people will turn to soup before their brain can have any hope of being preserved.
I have cynicism for lots of things involved here, but if I had the option from some shady person who seems like they are capable and vaguely aligned with me I'd probably take the chance especially if we could make some sort of a post-revival agreement. What a brain (put into a small machine and ideally alongside symbiotic systems) can do for the people who are still alive. Probably with my brain in a jar living in VR until the details are worked out.
TIL things still get hot in space under direct sunlight. I always assumed space would be cold even in sunlight but apparently not.
anyway, I would think you could still be in a sunlit orbit as long as you had a reflective shield for shading. You’ll probably still need power to maintain temps and monitor status, so solar energy would still be helpful.
Fun fact! During the Apollo flights to and from the Moon, the spacecraft would perform “Passive Thermal Control” or “barbecue roll” where it would rotate around its long axis about once per hour, to distribute the thermal load from the sun and keep one side from heating up too much
If anyone is actually interested in learning how this works, this is a great blog post, from author convinced like many that it’s a stupid thing for the rich, until… We’ll have a read: waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
The author tries to disprove that cryonics isn’t limited to rich people, while also pointing our the $200,000 upfront cost. Sure, a middle class American could probably swing the $300 annual fees, but most would be hard pressed for the $200k upfront cost.
So just to expand upon the article author’s one possible future of it being overwhelming which he briefly glosses over, please enjoy this animated reading of one of my favourite graphic novels: Transmetropolitan
Thanks for this. Quite gruesome, but not at all unexpected. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine a while back, where I made the argument that water expands when frozen and, since humans are mostly water, freezing a human would crack every vital organ. I’m actually upset to discover I was right.
there could be a way maybe, by freezing water while keeping it extremely pressurized (extremely), you can make “efficient ice” that occupies less space, called ice VII, I’m not kidding. It would cost literally billions of dollars so not yet feasible, but it keeps my sci-fi loving mind at ease.
Cryoprotectants also do this pretty efficiently – they prevent crystallization, which leads to “vitreous” ice, which has more or less the same structure as liquid water and so doesn’t expand much. I think they do use that when freezing people, but the problem is that even if you fill the blood vessels with pure ethylene glycol, it diffuses very slowly, and it takes hours to get into cells which are far from large blood vessels. They dont diffuse the cryoprotectant in that thoroughly, though, because that’d take so long the body would have started to decay too much.
Edit: oops, the article talks about vitrifying agents. They make it sound like they’re not effective, but as I said above, they’re very effective if you can get them in every nook and cranny of every cell, which is a losing battle.
This is true, which is why preservation does not involve freezing, except for the bad attempts in the 70s the article talks about, which could never work. The bodies are vitrified, not frozen.
Which still doesn’t mean it will work, the technology to revive them doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t have any freezing issue.
It’s fine, as long as the temperature stays stable and no further damage is done. We’re not going to revive their flesh. Instead we’re going to chop them off in large chunks. Suspend them in a kind of agar. Then laser off 2nanometer at a time. Scan the surface with 1nm resolution PiFM or better method. That’s going to yield many terabytes of image data that you can turms into a neural map of the entire nervous system. Even mapping this data to today’s LLM would get something roughly able to speak like the corpse. The better this data processing gets the more real the resurrected sentiences will be.
This sounds pretty amazing. Do you have any sources (or process names that I can search)? I would love to read more into the LLM part of your statement. Seriously sounds like scifi, and I’m loving it.
Visible human project for the 1993 first experiment 2013 slice culture modeling of central nervous system 2019 visible human body slice segmentation method 2022 scalable mapping of myelin and neuron density inthe human brain with micrometer resolution
In fiction We are legion, we are Bob Fun book but novice writer
Probably covered by futurist youtuber isaac arthur, probably part of the mind upload episode
I’m familiar with some of those, but they don’t digitally map thought and then read that map. At least not the last time I looked into them… Do they now?
Very interesting! Maybe once we understand the structure, we can recreate what’s behind the structure. Not sure if that’s a good thing, but it certainly is intriguing.
I don’t think we need to understand tge structure. Just create a fidel digital copy and run it according to electrochemical rules we have from physics and I believe a largely intact consciousness will emerge.
But wouldn’t understanding the structure assist is rebuilding a mechanical version and, thus, recreating the consciousness into an artificial mechanism (such as a Terminator-esque android)?
It depends what you mean by “understand”. If we have an intact digital connectome and we execute its circuitry in the right kind of simulator. A consciousness would ptobably emerge out of it. But I wouldn’t call this “understanding”. Trillion neurons and other structures are so complex and interwined, it strains the very idea of “understanding” how it works.
At least not without major aids to break it down into smaller easier to understand chunks.
That’s fair. I do make a distinction between understanding how something works and why something works. Making it work the way you describe, to me at least, is understanding enough of how it works to be able to reproduce it, even if we don’t yet understand why it works. Until we understand this science, it’s magic.
Reminds me of the Egyptian aristocracy, they would be pissed off if they knew their 4000 yo mummy will end up getting shown at a museum or destroyed by a tomb raider. But what would happen if they managed to revive them today, probably a temporary experiment on a lab, the pharaoh just lived in a closed environment for a couple of months and for most of modern day people it would be just some science news they scrolled by on tiktok
Doing a quick read up on Wikipedia, my memoories on Egyptian mummies’ brains getting removed was correct. That alone would mean the best they could achieve is cloning, without any memory retention.
One of the more interesting aspects of history is the progression from the notion of a very limited and inaccessible resurrection of a body to the idea of a very accessible resurrection of the spirit/mind.
The latter is IMO probably best embodied (pun intended) in one of the early Christian apocrypha from a group that was known for rejecting the canonical focus on a physical resurrection of a body:
Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.
Gospel of Thomas saying 108
It’s such a wild march of progress from kings trying to preserve their bodies to a tradition rejecting the Eucharist of consumption of a body in favor of a Eucharistic consumption of words and ideas to resurrect the essence of the individual.
And looking back from an age where we are literally seeing patents granted to trillion dollar companies around resurrecting the dead digitally, the “resurrection of words and ideas” crowd was more on to a practical tract of thinking than the “resurrect my goop” crowd.
In fact, the Egyptians when embalming themselves discarded their brains thinking it was garbage filling of the skull. Not exactly the best strategy in hindsight.
A couple days ago my milk was all chunky when I tried to pour it in my cereal, because refrigerated air that was supposed to go to the fridge got blocked.
Milk wasn’t expired, just went bad due to a random mechanical issue over the course of the length of time the milk was being preserved.
You know I love the idea of cryostasis, and the idea of reanimating people after death is great.
But why the fuck would future humans bother bringing all these people back, even if they could? Even if they have a utopian society free of scarcity and inequality, they would be bringing back mostly rich people who lived in a super different and bad time and have literally nothing positive to contribute to the utopian future, since they were a large part of the problems of today in the first place. Plus the vast majority of them are almost certainly elitist assholes who nobody in a utopia would want to be around.
Maybe it would be a humanitarian thing, but if these people are dead and frozen there’s no real imperative to do this to end suffering or something. Or I guess maybe bringing them back to try and figure out what the hell their damage is that they felt ruining everything was a better option than working toward the betterment of all… but they’d only need a few brains in vats for that, no bodies, so sucks to suck, cryofolks.
If future humans don’t have a utopian society, the only real use for people from so long ago that I can come up with would be research subjects or slaves. And frankly there are easier ways to go about getting those…
So I see no possible future where people who cryopreserve get brought back en masse. Even if it’s entirely possible to surmount the technical hurdles.
Ever read Transmetropolitan? It has a whole sub-arc on just the absolute lack of concern that a future society would have for this resurrection obligation/burden imposed on them.
A friend of mine is so much a fan of Transmetropolitan that he has a spider tattoo on his head in the same place.
He kinda looks like the character to begin with, but with the ink and a bit of cosplay, combined with a shitty fake accent, it’s almost like he sprang from the pages lol
It is extremely unlikely that humanity can survive neoliberalism still long enough to birth that world. I think the sterile coming future will not view human life as a burdensome excess to be disposed of like so much effluvia.
He actually appeared again in a later episode in a couple TNG novelizations.
He managed to adapt and fit in to Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, but eventually was called on to use his 1900s business prowess in negotiations becoming Earth’s Ambassador to Ferenginar, and then eventually was named the Secretary of Commerce for at least two different Earth Presidents.
*edit, I lied. I’m sorry for misleading you all, you gave me your trust and I squandered it.
But why the fuck would future humans bother bringing all these people back, even if they could?
Because they don’t have rights, so no one will care when we upload their brains into street sweeping robots. If you’re lucky, you’ll get uploaded into an interstellar probe.
Lucky? From some of the other comments it sounds like you may be referencing something, but just taking the comment at face value, there is no way that is not the most horrific fate I can possibly imagine.
Assuming you’re not conscious the entire time and only ‘wake up’ when you enter a solar system to study, it’s still horrific. You wake up, completely alone. You have no body and cannot move, and your attention is directed toward gathering data on some distant points of light. When you understand what’s going on, sure, there’s a bit of a sense of wonder…but it quickly becomes tedium, maddening, isolated tedium, as you slowly drift through a star system, gathering data on each planet and its star, over the course of fifty years or so. There’s certainly bits of interesting stuff, but we are still talking insane levels of isolation and boredom. Assuming you’re somehow prevented from going insane by the software in order to keep you functional, you can’t even escape into madness.
…and then we imagine what happens if you aren’t shown the mercy of being conscious only during the few decades the probe is drifting through a solar system. What if you’re conscious the. entire. time. Once you’re in deep interstellar space, you’re alone. Able to think, perceive, experience, but in an unchanging, static existence. A year passes, and everything is so close to exactly the same that only with the precision of the measurements your tools can take can you determine there’s been any change. Ten years pass, then a hundred, a thousand. You drift, slowly, through interstellar space toward a destination impossibly far away, all while you wait, conscious, unable to die, unable to escape into madness, just…eternal…waiting. Until thankfully you finally enter a target solar system, get a few blessed decades of what, to your new perspective, seems like frantic activity. Something, finally, to do, to see, that actually changes. And then…you drift back out into interstellar space after a few gravity-assisted slingshots around this star system’s worlds, only to proceed on to your next destination, another several thousand year journey away.
This is, by far, the most horrific imaginable torture.
You have the entire wealth of human knowledge to consume in your journey, you can “frame jack” so the rate at which you experience time is variable, you have access to atomic 3D Printers, you were an engineer in your previous life, so after studying up on every science, you invent FTL communication. You also do a few things like cloning yourself, terraforming planets, saving the human race a few times, saving alien races once or twice.
That’s because you’re thinking in term of a society that views most people as a burdensome and undesirable liability. Something we wish we could get rid of faster if possible. It might be tgat in the future, human minds aren’t as poisoned by clubofrome population omb neoliberal billionaire thinking.
why would future humans bother bringing all these people back
i think it’s worth reminding why doctors treat people now, in this time and space. they do it mostly because they want to save people. maybe a few do it for money, but past a certain point, the money isn’t why you do it. i think it’s a safe bet that doctors of a future would see these corpses as patients, and act accordingly. an analogy - think how we see heart attack victims as patients, and not how our medieval ancestors would have seen them (as corpses)
…literally nothing positive to contribute to the utopian future…
true, but, a good chunk of patients in hopsital today have nothing to contribute to society, and cannot contribute any more, whatsoever. we treat them anyway, because that’s what we do. humans have consistently cared for others that are sick and have “nothing to contribute” throughout history, and that shows no sign of going away anytime soon
Soon as those hurdles are surmounted, armies will train then freeze conscripts. Only thawing when they need meat for the grinder, or when better weapons come out that need more training.
That’s the only way they get brought back en masse.
That sounds like slaves with extra steps, so that tracks with my thoughts.
Tho that seems like a massively dystopian waste of resources when they could just build robots, which surely they will be able to do if they can reanimate humans.
Humans are easier to indoctrinate than sapient robots, because human biases are predictable.
Fascist politician: the Jews are stealing your money to cause the downfall of your race! They’re even breeding your children with black people to destroy you!
Human reaction: yeah, that makes sense
Robot reaction: …why tho?
Robots may still have biases, but they probably won’t be exactly the same as a human’s. I doubt a robot would care for a “think of the children” argument
I’m for reaimmating them to have them stand trial for their crimes. I’m hopeful for a brighter future, but I’m also hopeful people won’t lose their unrelenting pettiness. It’s part of what makes us human.
A financial, legal, or even just a tit-for-tat incentive is realistically all it would take. You assume that some utopia that has shed those ideas is the only one capable of such technology.
In reality, it’s greed and self-preservation that is running this show, and this is all that is needed to produce awe-inspiring feats.
I don’t see a future utopia (or non-utopian) society a thousand years from now feeling at all compelled by a legal agreement between two independent parties a millennium ago. The law firms that set up the contracts will be long gone, the legal framework that established them will have evolved if not been replaced completely. I mean, compare where we are now with where “we” were in 1024, and then think about how much more quickly things change today. Any money is going to be more meaningless than 11th century money, but with no collector’s value since they’re just numbers in a database that probably won’t even exist in a thousand years.
I think we can legitimately view having your body/head frozen in the hopes of being woken up as a tech version of the Catholic last rites.
okay but how do you establish any of those incentives with people who simply don’t exist? eventually the agreements fall apart as all parties involved are either dead or cryostatic, and the agreements will have to compel someone who was never party to them to take some sort of action. Like, I guess you could put a reward in trust but even then you’d need some sort of legal entity to manage and distribute it that would, itself, need an incentive in trust in order to continue, and so on in an infinite regression.
Medical research from before whatever plague or virus infects everybody.
Don’t they have problems today studying effects of microplastics because they can’t find a control group of humans who don’t have microplastics in them?
Though that’s a pretty grim future for the rich frozen elite.
Probably by some deal of interest on a trust that is forfeit if the tech exists and they don’t get reanimated. Money and a protective cocoon of law and beaurocracy gets it done. I am sure they (or their lawyers) had already considered your argument.
I think they’re frozen before they’re dead, so the reason to bring them back would be to not do that murder thing, and also to fulfill contractual obligations, and as a business showcase to the world that you’re ready to receive more customers for a freeze and bring you back service instead of a freeze and kill you service.
Admittedly I don’t know much about cryopreservation (looked into it many years ago as a curiosity) but my understanding, and the article says the same, is that they clinically die first and then it’s a rush to preserve them before too much breakdown happens. Since it’s quite expensive, most people only preserve their brain or head, which is removed before being frozen. I’m not sure legally they would be able to do this pre-death, since the harvesting/preserving would directly cause death as we currently understand and classify it, and assisted euthanasia of any flavor is illegal in most places.
I once read a sci-fi story (I don’t recall the title) that posed the same question you are asking. The short answer is “Historians would want to revive at least some of the frozen”.
Also, assuming mass media entertainment still exists in the future, I can see a reality show being created where someone is revived and cameras follow him around as he tries to adapt to the future.
we’d do it cause it’d be funny even if they weren’t tortured or nothing. can you imagine a little asshole running around the utopia being like “no, no, I’m supposed to own things, where are my stocks, where are my numbers, no!”. probably it’d suck that all their friends are deade though. I’m sure you thaw a couple cause the have rare diseases or certain kinds of DNA though.
But why the fuck would future humans bother bringing all these people back, even if they could?
There are many valid issues to raise with this bring unlikely to work, but this point seems silly. Why would a road maintenance worker fix a pothole, he’s not from around and will never benefit from it? Because it’s his job he’s paid to do, and he’s not having a philosophical discussion about it. Whatever future lab technician will be just going to work in the morning as well, paid by their company, funded by the money the preserved people paid. There isn’t much to it.
But it’s interesting you said that future humans would kill these people because the preserved people are useless assholes. I’m not that sure you labeled the assholes right in your scenario. Your future humans seem ageist and elitist, thinking only they deserve to live.
There is at least one example I remember from the news of a 20-something girl with cancer being preserved, paid for by pooling money from the family and donations. Unlikely to work but she would have died anyway. So what did she do wrong that she doesn’t deserve to be woken up, in your future where the technology is there?
I remember conversations about this in 2008-ish maybe. I missed the start of the conversation so I laboured under the idea healthy living people were freezing themselves ala Futurama and not people who had just died or something. Still scammy probably but not as bonkers on the part of any party
I remember when i was a kid hearing about people being frozen like this. Even back then i figured the only thing the richies were buying was false hope. But though it gives me a bit of schadenfreude to see it fail (if i can’t be immortal too, feel me?), i get the urge to at least try to beat the odds. Even if it’s only a 0.000001% chance to beat death, who wouldn’t go all in if they had the means?
I have the urge to absolutely make sure I dont accidentally increase the odds of my survival.
Tho being turned into a fine smooth soup of heavy metal(s) and plastics sounds kind of a funny last request (but especially then I would have def ran out of fucks, you know, a compostable trash bag is fine).
Reminds me of the time when I was younger, scrolling rotten.com and came across that picture of the dude who died in the bath, but had this thing that kept the water warm, so he just turned into a giant human stew.
Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people — who may or may not have suffered thaw damage — into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a “puzzle.” After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.
… well, someone had a wind night & then in the morning when other people arrived urgently needed an excuse as to why the frozen corpses were paying twister, with party hats on & cocks drawn on their faces with markers.
Ever seen DMSO solidify upon cooling? I wouldn’t even call it vitrification, it obviously has macroscopically large crystalline domains. It would be like putting rocks in your veins. I mean it kind of works fine for single cells because the failures* can be treated as a statistic, but anything on the scale of organs will become damaged just too badly.
See e.g. what happens to frozen sperm cells: “chromatin disruption through protamine translocations, DNA fragmentation, and lesions to genes involved in fertilization capability and embryonic development […] are known consequences of the cryopreservation process.”
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