[fendrak]

"Such rapid and direct application of biomedical advances to humans is now inconceivable, not only in the US, but virtually anywhere in the world."

This is true, but for one very simple reason: at the time of these inventions, there was no other option. If someone needed a heart operation that required stopping the heart, they would die. If someone needed dialysis after kidney failure, they died. Rapid applications come in the face of dire consequences. In these cases, almost anything was better than death.

[aoeuid]

The guy who wrote this post used to be president of Alcor (http://alcor.org), one of the two cryonics organizations in the US. Cryonics is in fact certainly a procedure where people will definitely die if they don't get it, particularly because it can only be done after 'legal death'.

Its efficacy can't be established conclusively right now, but it's certainly more likely you'll be revived if you undergo cryopreservation than if you are cremated or buried underground.

But because of various mostly psychosocial factors, practically nobody gets cryopreserved. I think this is the specific example he was trying to point out.

[philwelch]

There's a genuine plausibility difference between inventing new surgical techniques and freezing corpses in liquid nitrogen hoping that future generations will resurrect them. In terms of the high certain burden on the rest of society (in terms of expending resources, denying others the use of one's organs, denying the use of one's remains for medical research or education, etc.) and the very outside chance that one will be successfully and happily resurrected (which is itself the product of several probabilities, many small--the probability that even perfectly preserved corpses can even theoretically be resurrected, the probability that the tissue damage caused in the freezing process can be repaired, the probability that future generations will actually resurrect you rather than put your corpse in a museum or something, and the probability that upon resurrection you will, in fact, be the same person and not suffer extreme brain damage and lifelong mental retardation), cryonics doesn't sound like such a good idea anymore.

[nazgulnarsil]

only if you abuse the abstraction of language to impose restrictions on reality that don't exist. people who would have been declared dead 50 years ago are now resuscitated routinely.

[tptacek]

What does that have to do with his point? The resuscitations you're talking about are not part of a continuum of improving outcomes for people with massive total systemic cellular damage from freeze-thaw cycles.

[nazgulnarsil]

you're discussing damage that comes about from primitive forms of cryonic preservation that haven't been used in decades.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197

[tptacek]

Freeze-thaw cycles in LN2 also damage cells.

[philwelch]

I don't think anyone who's ever been declared "dead" has ever been "resuscitated" more than a year after the fact, at least not since we've been able to distinguish a comatose state from death.

Fine, there's a slim chance it's theoretically possible. I openly conceded that. Multiply that by all the other slim chances involved, though, and it gets even slimmer. It doesn't balance against the extreme costs unless your decision-making process is extraordinarily selfish.

[nazgulnarsil]

I choose not to pretend my decisions aren't selfish.

[philwelch]

Even from a selfish perspective, cryonics is basically the science fiction version of Pascal's Wager.

[dennisgorelik]

The main reason why practically nobody gets cryopreserved is that Cryonics is a form of scientific scam.

It sells people confidence that their mind can be preserved by freezing it.

http://aidevelopment.blogspot.com/2008/12/cryonics.html

That said, the author seems to be a true believer in Cryonics (however that does not make Cryonics legitimate).

The article has interesting points, but cannot really be trusted, because of multiple outrageous statements.

For example, the author states: "In hindsight, it seems clear that if humanity had decided in 1939 to colonize space, instead of ... war [WW2], we would have ... very likely self-sustaining outposts on the moon and Mars."

As of today, the humanity does not have self-sustaining outposts even in Antarctica. Self-sustaining outposts on Mars are totally unrealistic in the next 100 years. Not only because of technological impossibility, but mostly because of no need for that.

The bottom line: the author is unrealistic dreamer. His ideas might be unusual (which is good), but it's better to be very skeptical and not to trust these ideas by default.

[philwelch]

That WWII reference is especially ignorant. The vast majority of the West spent the entire 1930's trying to choose peace over war. They tried so hard to choose peace over war that when a handful of dictators chose otherwise, they stayed out of their way until the very last minute. It's very ignorant for someone today to accuse people of the pre-WWII era of not trying hard enough to avoid a war, when all of those people saw firsthand the horrors of WWI and for that very reason, tolerated military aggression against other countries as long as possible. In retrospect, the consensus seems to be that the Allies spent too much time avoiding the war, not too little[1].

And even if you include the people of Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan into the mix, you're making a fallacy about how people actually behave. It would have taken prescience people didn't have, back in the 1920's, to prevent the rise of the dictators of the 1930's. That's how history works.

[1] The only dissenting viewpoint to this that I give any credence is the idea that appeasement was necessary as a delaying tactic so the allies could build up their militaries to match the Germans.

[adrianN]

I don't think (mostly) self sustaining outposts on the Moon and Mars are technologically infeasible. See for example the studies Robert Zubrin did for NASA.

Whether there are sufficient economic incentives to actually build them is unfortunately a different question.

[dennisgorelik]

It's technologically feasible to send a mission to Mars.

It's unfeasible to have self-sustaining colony on Mars.

Mars Direct proposal does not even try to cover self-sustaining part.

[adrianN]

Actually it does, at least as outlined in his book.

[jarek]

Hm... 100 years ago controlled heavier-than-air flight had barely been invented. Do you think it would have been accurate to think then that in 100 years, essentially permanent outposts crewed by several people in modules flying 350 kilometres above the Earth would be unrealistic? Not only because of technological impossibility, but mostly because of no need for that.

[dennisgorelik]

There was (and still is) an obvious need for fast transportation.

There is no real need to live on Mars.

To understand that try to understand first why Antarctica is still not inhabited.

[vorg]

Antarctica IS inhabited (for my definition of "inhabited").

Perhaps the first bases on the Moon and Mars will be small Antarctic-like ones, from every big country on Earth. Perhaps Mars will never be "terraformed", instead the enclosed bases will slowly expand to accommodate expanding populations. Some people on Earth already live totally indoors, and in the future, many Asian cities in polluted environments may have roofs outside, as well as inside, to keep the air clean.

[jarek]

Fast transportation, as needed by most humans, has very little to do with current space programs, most of which use extremely expensive and mostly single-use systems.

Again - there is no real need, right now, to live on Mars, absolutely. Neither is there a real need to live on ISS. Still we are doing it.

[lionhearted]

Eliezer Yudkowsky has written about cryonics extensively at LessWrong - if anyone you know is forward-minded about living forever and at risk of passing away soon, you should probably start reading those articles and arguments for cryonics and pass them along.

(Actually, everyone should read it, but I think the state of medicine makes it unlikely that you're preserved if you die from random trauma like a car accident - so it's of more use to someone who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or is getting on in years)

[Eliezer]

Posts we've had to Less Wrong on this topic: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics

[loup-vaillant]

A fatal disease will probably make the life insurance that pays for your cryopreservation much more costly. Signing up when you're still healthy and young may be more beneficial, even when the probability of eventually destroying your brain is higher.

[gwern]

Eliezer wasn't talking about how you sign up or pay for it (he himself is signed up with term insurance & is young and reasonably healthy); he was talking about what kinds of dead people having signed up would be most useful to. Predictable deaths are best because the stabilization teams can be there waiting.

(There are of course wrinkles to this. If you die of alzheimers or senile dementia, is there any 'you' left, recorded in the neurons?)

[loup-vaillant]

I wasn't replying to Eliezer… And I think I agree with you. And:

> so it's of more use to someone who has been diagnosed with a fatal disease, or is getting on in years

I read this as "Cryonics is more useful for you if you are ill or old". (1) I agree, and (2) at this point, insurance companies may make it less affordable, for you.

My point is, if you wait too long (typically until illness or senescence), then Cryonics could become so expensive that the utility/cost ratio decreases, despite the fact that utility itself greatly increased.

[philwelch]

The scarier question is, if you are resurrected from cryonics, whether they will preserve enough of your neurons to protect you from similar impairment.

[Avshalom]

Except cryonics is pretty much completely backwards of that situation. Heart and kidney machines were invented because we could fix the problem, but we couldn't keep people alive long enough to do it.

Cryonics, assuming the current techniques work, is founded on the fact that we CAN'T currently fix the underlying problem(s).

[watchandwait]

Actually, I think his point is that the U.S. legal system is a lot different now. You can't apply technology that quickly today-- there was no FDA in the 1950s, and no runaway trial bar.