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Cryogenics. What do you think?

leila

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leila
Joined
Jul 7, 2004
Messages
546
I think it is a little creepy, but I also think that it could save a lot of lives.

Opinions?
 
The Patented "R.Feynman " approach.
Take a tomato (ripe) put it in the freezer, let it freeze. Remove the tomato, let it defrost. You tell me if it works ( liquid nitrogen and a warm bath or intermittent microwave exposure can be substituted, if you have them handy).
 
TillEulenspiegel said:
The Patented "R.Feynman " approach.
Take a tomato (ripe) put it in the freezer, let it freeze. Remove the tomato, let it defrost. You tell me if it works ( liquid nitrogen and a warm bath or intermittent microwave exposure can be substituted, if you have them handy).
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Well I guess the assumption is that, in the future, they will have the technology to reverse the process.

Unfortunately, the odds of that happening before the company goes bankrupt, loses electical power, or is destroyed in an earthquake aren't great.

Better to leave money to loved ones.
 
I think those who were filled with anti-freeze before the big chill have a good chance. As long as ice crystals don't cut your cells to bits then future nanotech should be able to fix you. They could also fix the body even if it was horribly destroyed by freezer burn. The problem is they couldn't build back the person who died in the latter case. Their neural connections would be shredded and unless you know exacly how their brain was(and as far as I know it's impossible to figure out after the fact), every single one of the billions of neurons then you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Their memories and personality(them) are gone forever.
 
There is that little problem involving the expansion of water when it freezes, which causes cells to burst like little water balloons. Embalming someone with anti-freeze won't replace the water inside the cells.

If you could do something to the cells to allow the membranes to expand however......
 
Snakeoil salesmen

IMHO they are just modern day snake oil salesmen promising not just a cure for baldness like in the days of the post American Civil War but actually a cure for that common affliction we all share called "mortality"
They don't tell us that the freezing is by far the easiest and cheapest bit, and that costs an extravagant sum as it is. Who is going to pay for the so called revitalization at the other end?

:crc:
 
Imagine.

Dead clients, who never complain, but go on paying.

What a business opportunity.
 
This is their hard sell to Xtians, presenting their case that God is on Alcor's side. What a lucrative market opportunity amongst those millions of potential customers.
Source
The Book of Job offers insight into the significance of life on Earth. Job opted for life even though he was mired in the deepest pit of human depravity and despair. His wife and friends pleaded with him to curse God and die, but Job chose instead to praise God and live, and live he did, for one of God's rewards for Job's faithfulness was long life.

Job is not the only biblical figure whose faith in God was rewarded with longevity. God promised the children of Israel, "And ye shall serve the Lord your God ...and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee...the number of thy days will I fulfill" (Exodus, 23:25,26). God is concerned with rectifying man's condition in soul, spirit, and body. The notion that God is not concerned with physical life on Earth is against the teachings of the Bible. In this context, modern medicine, including experimental procedures such as cryonics, is not only condoned by God, but even commanded by God.
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There's always the question as to why some future society would be willing to bring you back at all. They probably won't need the people, the way things are going now. Nothing you know or any skills you possess would be likely to be needed then. You would almost certainly be a drain on the resources of society because you would probably be unemployable. What exactly would induce them to want to bring you back?
 
SkepticJ said:
******snipThe problem is they couldn't build back the person who died in the latter case. Their neural connections would be shredded and unless you know exacly how their brain was(and as far as I know it's impossible to figure out after the fact), every single one of the billions of neurons then you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Their memories and personality(them) are gone forever.
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What I'm planning to get a REALLY BIG hard drive and back up my brain first :D
 
crocodile deathroll said:
This is their hard sell to Xtians, presenting their case that God is on Alcor's side. What a lucrative market opportunity amongst those millions of potential customers.
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I read a lot of information on these people, because I had to do a paper. And they say that it doesn't go against religion or anything.

That's like...sort of the same thing. And that's just a little odd.
 
Is the OP referring to cryonics which is the preservation of dead bodies (more about that in a moment), or cryogenics which is the use of extremely cold materials, such as burning warts off with liquid nitrogen?

Cyonics is utter claptrap. I especially like the people who preserve just their heads because now, not only do they need to wait for science to discover a cure for what killed them, as well as the damage the freezing incurs, they also need to wait for a cure for decapitation.

Personally I think one would have a more likely "rebirth" outcome by converting to Hinduism in the hopes of reincarnating.
 
IIRichard said:
What I'm planning to get a REALLY BIG hard drive and back up my brain first :D
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I've got a spare 1.44Mb floppy - that should cover it :D ;)
 
Get back to me when the guy in the commercial is "not only the president of Chill Sleep Co, but also a client."

I wanna see

walkin' & talkin'

frozen

walkin' & talkin' again.
 
Bruce wrote:

There is that little problem involving the expansion of water when it freezes, which causes cells to burst like little water balloons. Embalming someone with anti-freeze won't replace the water inside the cells.
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This is an old wives' tale. It's the cryobiological equivalent of saying rockets can't work in space because there's no air to push against... after the space age already began! Freezing doesn't make cells burst. It makes them contract due to osmotic effects of extracellular ice, and there are lots of ways to protect against this.

"Embalming" (technically called "perfusing") with penetrating cryoprotectants DOES replace water inside cells. Replace enough of it, and you get a state of vitrification (cryopreservation with no ice). I work in a lab that routinely recovers whole kidneys from temperatures of -45 degC by replacing more than half of the water inside them with organic chemicals. When the organ is rewarmed, chemicals removed, and the kindey is transplanted, it works just fine. Look Ma, no ice!

John Bentley wrote:

What exactly would induce them to want to bring you back?
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To clear space in the warehouse? Seriously, if a person is stored long enough to be able to be brought back, why would they still be stored unless someone cared enough to bring them back? History is full of examples of multi-generational enterprises retaining dedication to original purposes (especially religions). Cryonics has as much of a shot as any other long-term enterprise, with extra adrenalin from participants believing that their lives depend on it.

The oldest cryonics patient has been in the tank almost 40 years now, cared for by multiple organizations, and no one who knows him personally anymore. The failure of cryonics would require the failure of a multi-generational community of people, not just a single company.

UnrepetentSinner wrote:

Cyonics is utter claptrap.
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Do you understand what cryonics is? It isn't a claim that you can just freeze someone and bring them back. It's a claim that the best preservation technologies today (such as vitrification) may be able to preserve enough of the anatomy and chemistry of the brain so that future technologies capable of reworking life at the molecular level might be able to reconstruct something more than just an anmesiac clone. That's it. You can only call it claptrap by making a compelling case that vitrification erases a brain (hard to do with electron micrographs that barely differ from controls), or by arguing that mature nanotechnology will never exist.

UnrepententSinner also wrote:

I especially like the people who preserve just their heads because now, not only do they need to wait for science to discover a cure for what killed them, as well as the damage the freezing incurs, they also need to wait for a cure for decapitation.
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If you digest what I wrote above, you can see that cryonics is primarily a neurological archiving exercise. Preserving minds for posterity, as it were. That being the case, anything outside the brain is really optional.

Decapitation, by the way, was cured 30 years ago (Google "surgeon Robert White"), although the cure never caught on in part because more lives can be saved by distributing organs to multiple recipients rather than a single one.

I bring up Robert White for purely rhetorical purposes. Nothing so crude will ever be necessary once regerative medicine gets fully up to speed. Anything outside the brain can in principle be induced to regrow, and probably a lot easier than repairing it (like electronics today).

aerocontrols wrote:

Get back to me when the guy in the commercial is "not only the president of Chill Sleep Co, but also a client."
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They ALL are. The management of all major cryonics organizations are signed up for this themselves, and their tanks contain many predecessors. Cryonics companies and their members are more like mutual "true believers" than greedy scammers and defrauded public.

---BrianW
 
bgwowk said:
They ALL are. The management of all major cryonics organizations are signed up for this themselves, and their tanks contain many predecessors. Cryonics companies and their members are more like mutual "true believers" than greedy scammers and defrauded public.
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Ah, but the critical bit of Aerocontrols' question is:

I wanna see

walkin' & talkin'

frozen

walkin' & talkin' again.
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This has never been done. While I suppose it could be possible in the future, it all sounds highly speculative to me. It seems particularly unlikely that the guy who was frozen 40 years ago has a shot at recovery - surely techniques back then weren't up to scratch?

It's a claim that the best preservation technologies today (such as vitrification) may be able to preserve enough of the anatomy and chemistry of the brain so that future technologies capable of reworking life at the molecular level might be able to reconstruct something more than just an anmesiac clone
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I could be wrong, but I think that the majority of the people signing up for the freezers are expecting to be defrosted and resuscitated in the future. Having a few odds and sods of brain reassembled for research probably isn't what they're hoping for, but it's what you seem to be implying here.

It isn't a claim that you can just freeze someone and bring them back.
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Well, according to the Cryonics Institute that's
just what's being claimed

It involves cooling patients to the point where physical decay essentially stops, in the hope that future technologically advanced scientific procedures will be able to revive them and restore them to good health later on
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bgwowk said:

They ALL are. The management of all major cryonics organizations are signed up for this themselves, and their tanks contain many predecessors. Cryonics companies and their members are more like mutual "true believers" than greedy scammers and defrauded public.
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Yes, but you're missing my point, which richardm got nicely.

In the "I'm not just the president, I'm also a client" commercials, you see that the president-guy used to be bald but he has gone through the treatment he proposes to put you through.

That's what I want to see. That some spokesman for this industry has been frozen and then reawakened. I wouldn't be interested in this at all unless it can do that for me.

MattJ
 
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