[nradov]

Well not really. Cooling the patient down will give you a few hours at most under ideal conditions. Metabolism isn't turned off, just slowed down. If you freeze the patient the ice crystals damage the cells so much that revival becomes impossible.

[the_pwner224]

Flash freezing (using liquid nitrogen to freeze something really quickly) is used successfully for smaller objects, such as frozen berries and frozen vegetables that you can buy at the grocery store. The Wikipedia page on flash freezing links to this [0] site with some more discussion. The Wiki page also says that flash freezing still can take a few hours, so there are still ice crystals created, but a lot less/smaller than if you just put it in the freezer.

Overall it seems it's just a matter of waiting for technology to advance to the point where we can very move a 150 pound 2-meter-tall 1-foot-deep object from 98 degrees to 30 degrees, and at that point the science fiction will become reality.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120111233417/http://www.biotec...

[simcop2387]

The size matters significantly for this. Much larger and it becomes difficult to remove the heat throughout fast enough to do a flash freeze.

[bduerst]

This is correct. Flash freezing an entire human body consistently would be incredibly difficult.

[ChrisRR]

Even speaking as a brit, your mixture of metric and imperial and metric fascinates me.

I personally would've written 150lb, 6'6 tall, 1ft deep, 37 to 0 degrees

[OJFord]

150lb? That always strikes me as distinctly American, as opposed to 10st 10lb.

[saalweachter]

I'm so glad America got away before y'all went stone-crazy.

Redefining the hundredweight, seriously?

[OJFord]

Hey, for a '1,000 pennyer' I'll advocate for your pound-as-largest-unit madness.

[saalweachter]

You had options! The London stone for wool was 12.5 lbs, which would give you the same 8 stone to the hundredweight without redefining a hundredweight as 112 lbs.

Or if you wanted to go the other way -- there were plenty of other definitions of the stone in use at the time, after all -- you could have gone with 16 pounds, to maintain parity with the dram and the ounce. Y'all still likely would have screwed up the hundredweight, as 128lb, but you might have at least fixed things by making the ton 16 hundredweight/2048 lb, which would at least have been some lovely binary fractions.

But 14 pounds? That's just madness.

[ChrisRR]

Oops yes, I would actually have said 10 stone 10. I just copied the comment text because I was focusing on the 2 meters

[Zenbit_UX]

Tell tale sign of a Canadian.

[garmaine]

Cryonics involves vitrification, not freezing. Ice crystals do no damage if they never form in the first place.

Now the method of achieving vitrification involves pumping the body full of toxic antifreeze. But in principle it's easier to flush the antifreeze out when warming than to reverse ice crystal damage, though the techniques have not yet been worked out.

Thankfully it's not necessary for the reversal procedure to exist now for cryonics to be successfully used in preservation for the future.

[nradov]

There is zero chance that a human pumped full of antifreeze today will ever be successfully revised. Cryonics is a total scam by hucksters preying on desperate idiots.

And don't bother telling me that it's worth doing if there's even a tiny chance. The chance is exactly 0, and those resources are better spent on the living.

[ekianjo]

You can basically say that anyone living 500 years ago would say "there is zero chance" that what we take for granted today exists at all. Look at the technological achievements of even the past 50 years, most of it could hardly be predicted.

[ohazi]

There's a pretty big difference between the statements:

"We are likely to have life extending and resuscitation technologies in 500 years that are better than what we have today."

and

"The dead rich people in these particular vats of antifreeze have any more than a snowball's chance in hell at being successfully resuscitated."

I think the parent's analysis is correct. Your statements, while also correct, don't really refute the issues pointed out by the parent.

[garmaine]

It didn't point out any issues... it just made the unsubstantiated claim that a cryonics patient has no chance of ever being revived.

It IS physically possible to revive cryonics patients--as in the laws of physics would permit it, even if we don't have anything near the technology required, yet. This isn't a bold claim but rather a statement of fact with respect to information preservation of the vitrification process, and long-term storage at cryogenic temperatures, both of which are well studied in the context of things like organ donor preservation.

So if you're claiming that cryonics has "a snowball's chance in hell" of working, then I presume that either you are (1) ignorant of the science, or (2) making some sort of statement about long-term storage prospects or the credibility of the organizations involved.

But neither you nor the grandparent actually made any specific claims.

[daeken]

> So if you're claiming that cryonics has "a snowball's chance in hell" of working, then I presume that either you are (1) ignorant of the science, or (2) making some sort of statement about long-term storage prospects or the credibility of the organizations involved.

I'm signed up to be a cryonics patient when I die, but yeah, the chances are pretty much nil. Personally, I'll take a slightly diminished bank account and a potentially non-zero percent chance of further life over a zero percent chance, but I won't delude myself into thinking that there's effectively any chance of success here.

[jfk13]

> a statement of fact with respect to information preservation of the vitrification process

That's not a statement of fact, it's a statement of belief. Personally, I think it's highly unlikely that any current vitrification process preserves sufficient information for the patient to be revived. We're nowhere near even understanding what "sufficient information" would be, let alone how to preserve it.

[hutzlibu]

The thing is .. it is more about biology than physics.

You can flush water pipes with whatever you want and clean and rewater it. A complex organism like the human body - and the brain, we still dont really understand?

Not likely. Maybe not 0 chance in SciFi future, but still not likely.

[nradov]

Actually it is physically impossible to revive cryonics patients because essential information has been irretrievably lost. I don't think you understand the physics (or biology) here.

[bduerst]

By this logic, we don't even need to freeze the body. Simply opt in to being resimulated later, since the technology will exist "some day".

[jerf]

A lot of "cryonically-frozen" people are only their heads, since it's been well-known for a while that there's no way to unfreeze the bodies. I suspect it may literally be easier to scan their brains than to unfreeze them, even if they were healthier to begin with. That's not a statement of my belief in the ease of scanning a brain; it's a statement of my belief in just how hard it is to "thaw" a body and get anything back. I'd say it's like getting handed a pile of slag and told to turn it back into a working engine, except that task is multiple orders of magnitude easier.

[bduerst]

But that's my point, why even bother freezing the brain, if simply waiting a few centuries more of tech progress will mean you don't even need the brain to be consciously brought back?

It's just replacing the faith in one omnipotent's afterlife with another.

[infinisil]

However, this won't bring you back, it will just bring back a clone that is exactly like you.

[ljm]

Suppose we get solid evidence that reincarnation is real. Or even just imagine that it is.

Being held in stasis for an unknown length of times seems like utter hell compared to moving on to your next life.

In that sense, a clone is preferable, but maybe not for the new consciousness inhabiting it.

[bduerst]

Of course it will bring me back. It's my consciousness, just sans the biological CPU.

[tim333]

A zero chance is your opinion. I'd estimate there is a high change some of them will come back in some form. I'm more a believer in extracting information to an AI simulation than reanimating the old bodies.

[garmaine]

You have perfect knowledge of future technologies?

[brokenkebab]

Doesn't it sound similar to "Prove that I cannot win a billion!" from someone who spends money in casino?

[Symmetry]

There's a big difference between telling someone they aren't going to win in the casino and telling them they have "zero chance" of winning. The later is false and is probably an ineffective argument because it's obviously false.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Yes, they should have said "roughly zero chance", which is true. They were just rounding down.

[nwatson]

Also, frozen oblivion is better than being brought back by those who will not honor your motivations for being frozen. If it's possible to be brought back, organ-harvesting, post-cryo-slavery, medical-experiment-subject are the likely outcomes.