When you've experienced a few minor illnesses and a bit of short-lived pain, such as a broken limb or two, living forever still sounds great.
I had a (thankfully temporary) condition that resulted in chronic pain for about a year. It wasn't terrible pain, but pain that never goes away wears you down in a way that horrible, but short-lived, pain simply doesn't. After a while you just want it to stop. Before this period in my life I was of the opinion that immortality was worth almost anything. Now I believe that quality of life is just as important, if not more so. I would not want to live forever if it involved even a small amount of chronic pain. I used to think a little pain would be a small price to pay. That was ignorance.
Jobs and Ritchie both died from diseases that probably gave them a good deal of chronic pain over the last years of their lives. I can completely understand why extending their lives was not desirable to them.
> I can completely understand why extending their lives was not desirable to them.
I think its presumed that life extension would also come with improved health. What kills you is decline due to chronic conditions. Target that and stop the declined and you gain both long-life, and healthy life.
There are a lot of things that can cause chronic pain without threatening your life. We would have to learn how fix all of these non-life-threatening things in addition to what causes death, or everlasting life will lead to everlasting pain with absolute certainty.
You seem to be omitting reversible cryopreservation from the scenario. All you would need to do is freeze yourself until a cure is found for whatever is causing you pain. But this seems like a non-likely thought experiment scenario anyway -- I can't imagine being able to regenerate body parts and prevent aging from being lethal, yet being unable to comprehensively prevent pain.
I think this can be broken down into two problems.
1. Preventing / curing all causes of pain.
2. Changing how the body responds to pain.
I think problem number 2 is easier to solve. The human body is a biological machine and I hink we will find better ways of handling pain than today. An example could be an implant in the brain that simply blocks the impulses.
I do agree that quality of life is just as important if not more so. And yet I think I would put up with a lot of suffering for a fairly long time in exchange for a shot at being healthy for a much longer time later on. I'm not sure where those balance out. For a thousand years of youth? I'd definitely put up with the pain of dying of cancer for that (or so I say now).
But that's just a thought experiment. No cryonicist expects to be revived in anything less than fully regenerated (or uploaded) condition. Reanimating into a painful and incurable half-life is unlikely, as you probably could not revive someone to begin with if you didn't have the ability to prevent that.
These visionary geniuses and hackers' most brilliant breakthrough was the realization of the inevitable fact that sooner or later, we all die. The trick is in channeling that truth as a motivator. We must strive to achieve as much as possible today, because there might not be a tomorrow.
Steve Jobs:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Steve Jobs is the single worst example that the OP could've picked as a candidate for cryopreservation, as it goes against everything he (and I) believes in.
What does lead you to believe that cryonics give you a second chance? It simply doesn't add up. It needs so many breakthroughs that you'd better get mummified; at least you'd have a reasonable chance for your corpse to stay available for some significant length of time.
Anyone remotely interested in cryonics should go read about it on LessWrong[1], instead of reading the same ol' ambivalent/pro-death comments. The only good reasons (that I can think of right now) not to sign up are if (1) you can't afford the ~$50/month or whatever your life insurance premiums + member dues would be, or (2) you rely on the financial support of people who are strongly anti-cryonics.
Keep in mind that after you suffer your serious accident/illness, you won't have the time/money/energy to sign up for cryonics, and you'll have more trouble convincing your next of kin to support you. And you probably won't be able to get any life insurance to pay for it, obviously.
>The only good reasons (that I can think of right now) not to sign up are if (1) you can't afford the ~$50/month or whatever your life insurance premiums + member dues would be, or (2) you rely on the financial support of people who are strongly anti-cryonics.
Or you think it's dumb and fruitless and a waste of money. We don't have any way of predicting the expected value of cryopreservation. It could be that after you get frozen, an earthquake/tsunami takes out the power and you thaw. Or the company goes under. Or you get abandoned. Or any number of other things.
How likely are you to be unfrozen/cured/revived? No one can say for sure, but it's probably pretty unlikely. On the other hand, what's the likelihood that your estate can do something useful with an extra $25k? That's pretty likely.
How can you say that cryonics working is "probably pretty unlikely" if "we have no way of predicting the expected value of cryopreservation". You can give probabilities to the events that would make cryonics fail and come up with an expected value.
As the other commenter said, not all unknowns are equal. It's possible that Hitler was secretly frozen and will be the first person thawed in the event that we learn how. I doubt anyone can assign a true probability to that possibility, but most everyone would agree it's extremely unlikely.
And no, you can't put a probability on those events which might make cryonics fail, because you don't know how long it will be before we discover a way to revive and restore those that have been frozen. It might happen tomorrow (likely not), or it might never happen. On a long enough timeline, the probability of failure approaches 1.
You also can't really assign a probability that you will personally be unfrozen. Sure, you pay $50/mo to be maintained, but that's wholly different from the $100k it might cost to thaw you.
There are so many ways cryonics could fail you, and really only one way they could succeed.
You don't pay $50/month after you die (that would be a unworkable business model for obvious reasons), rather the $100k or so goes mostly into a trust which pays for your maintenance (more like $100/year, could be far lower on a larger scale) after you are gone. Alcor's funding minimums are higher than CI's partly because they are expecting reanimation to be costly. They also pay ongoing costs mostly from member dues so far, so the patient care trust is just sitting there accumulating interest to be later used for reanimation.
If you can get the probability of failure in any given year low enough, the half-life of the organization could be brought up to thousands of years. You can also set up back-up organizations that are obligated to take over if one of them fails. It's a matter of diversification.
Obviously you do not personally pay after death, but you set aside money for a trust before hand, which amounts to the same thing.
I disagree with your assertion that you can get the company to live thousands of years. How many human organizations have lasted that long? Even the Catholic church has only been around for 2k (so they claim at least) and I can't think of anything else that approaches that longevity, not even nations. And there are way too many cases for potential failure to calculate real probabilities so arguing about getting them low enough is moot.
We don't need the specific organization to survive thousands of years in its original form, we just need cryonics patients to be passed ahead peacefully to another organization in the event of failure. But yeah, religions are an example of something organized lasting thousands of years, under historical conditions.
We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absence of much armed conflict, and other amenities of the modern world. Certain things (fashions, cultural memes) seem to get replaced quickly under such conditions, but that doesn't seem likely to extend to something like a trust fund.
Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.
> We don't need the specific organization to survive thousands of years in its original form, we just need cryonics patients to be passed ahead peacefully to another organization in the event of failure.
And how do you believe you'll accomplish this? The second, third, etc. companies are not going to sign up for this responsibility for free. Nor is there any guarantee that they won't also fail, or be merged into one conglomerate that fails.
> We haven't yet had a chance to experiment with things under conditions of universal literacy, the absence of much armed conflict, and other amenities of the modern world. Certain things (fashions, cultural memes) seem to get replaced quickly under such conditions, but that doesn't seem likely to extend to something like a trust fund.
I don't understand how this is at all relevant. I see no compelling reason to believe that the US will not experience natural disasters, wars, failed companies, or any number of other incidents that could cause cryo-failure. The fact that the population is fairly educated is almost completely irrelevant.
> Cryonicists certainly have more motive than the average person to promote stability, literacy, and nonviolence.
Frozen people are not in a position to promote anything. And the people keeping them frozen don't have an incentive to do anything except collect paychecks.
> And how do you believe you'll accomplish this? The second, third, etc. companies are not going to sign up for this responsibility for free.
Yes it costs more money and it has to be done in advance.
> Nor is there any guarantee that they won't also fail, or be merged into one conglomerate that fails.
You could put it in the bylaws that they cannot merge into a conglomerate, or mandate that they split every so often.
> I don't understand how this is at all relevant. I see no compelling reason to believe that the US will not experience natural disasters, wars, failed companies, or any number of other incidents that could cause cryo-failure.
Sure those are a constant risk. The solution is to put money and resources towards reducing the risks, starting with the worst ones and/or the cheapest to fix. This likely has enormous positive externalities for the population as a whole.
> The fact that the population is fairly educated is almost completely irrelevant.
Are you sure? Education is an important element of what sustains civilization.
> Frozen people are not in a position to promote anything.
They are now when they aren't frozen yet.
> And the people keeping them frozen don't have an incentive to do anything except collect paychecks.
They do if they a) expect to be frozen themselves, b) see the patients as fellow humans, or c) see the patients as priceless historical artifacts. But yes they are also motivated by whatever keeps getting them their paychecks -- obviously it is best to stack things so that the paychecks are dependent on things that are desirable for the patients.
> Yes it costs more money and it has to be done in advance. ... You could put it in the bylaws that they cannot merge into a conglomerate, or mandate that they split every so often. ... Sure those are a constant risk. The solution is to put money and resources towards reducing the risks, starting with the worst ones and/or the cheapest to fix. This likely has enormous positive externalities for the population as a whole.
This is a whole lot of ifs. If you could institute enough failovers (how many is enough, when we don't know the average lifespan of a cryo-company?), and if you could stop them from merging, and if you could avoid natural disasters, and if, if, if. There are so many ifs here it's ridiculous, especially given that you haven't provided any hows. This is just hand-waving. Yes, if you could solve all the problems, then there would be no problems. How, though?
> Are you sure? Education is an important element of what sustains civilization.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that an educated population has little or nothing to do with natural disasters, or company failures, or even war.
> They are now when they aren't frozen yet.
Um, okay. This doesn't have much to do with the viability of cryonics. Let's assume that all the cryonists campaign for peace and are then frozen. So now they're in a peaceful world with no way to thaw them and no change in the overall risks except perhaps with regards to war.
I'm saying that cryonics implies taking a certain degree of responsibility for the future. That's not an argument in favor of it working. It is an argument in favor of it being a positive thing overall, irrespective of it working. It provides selfish incentive for caring about the fate of future generations. Since we are trying to establish betting odds and what is a fair price for cryonics, all the externalities need to be taken into account. A world with cryonics is better off than a world without it.
I disagree that company failures or war are unrelated to education levels (or quality). A well educated populace should be more resistant to and capable of avoiding war, and more capable of solving and preventing financial problems. One specific thing for cryonics trusts to do is offer scholarships to those pursuing peace and financial stability as educational specialties.
Natural disasters can be avoided to some degree by careful selection of location. Alcor is based in Arizona partly because of the lack of earthquakes. Hurricanes and tornadoes be protected against by using a monolithic dome. LN2 shortages can be protected against by having a large bulk storage tank on site, and using efficient insulation.
That said, the most desirable solution (because it addresses all the different sources of risk simultaneously) is to accelerate the development of revival technology to whatever degree is possible. Maintaining high education levels is critical to this, as is spending money on brain and body repair research. This produces a very large positive externality.
The strategy that works best is to make sure that multiple things have to go wrong in order for a critical failure at each critical point. That is how disasters are prevented in e.g. nuclear facilities. It's expensive and painstaking, but it is a case where throwing money and competent engineers at the problem actually works.
Your argument for cryonics having a low probability of working apparently assumes no one has done or will have done this, despite the obvious fact that they have an extremely strong interest in so doing. And you accuse accuse me of hand-waving?
I'm saying you're making an arbitrary link without substance that suits your purposes. Cryonics does not imply or require actually caring about the future in any significant way. All cryonics implies is a desperate desire for self-prolonging. The process of maintaining someone in a frozen state definitely has negative consequences for the environment. This is not the act of someone trying to help the future. It's the act of someone who puts his own desires over the well-being of the future.
You're crazy to think that a well-educated populace will avoid war. Americans are well-educated and we've been involved in wars nearly non-stop since we were founded. As for companies failing, the last several years have shown us that educated people will happily destroy companies for personal gain (not that we didn't already know this).
Natural disasters can be made less probable by choosing an appropriate location, not avoided entirely. An asteroid can hit Arizona as easily as New York. And earthquakes can basically strike anywhere. They're simply more likely in certain areas.
My argument for cryonics' low probability is based on the fact that so many things can go wrong over such a long time frame (we don't engineer nuclear facilities to last for thousands of years). The fact that some people have pursued cryonics is in no way proof or even evidence of it's feasibility. How many billions of people pursue religion for the same reasons? The desire for self-preservation often results in irrational behaviors.
> Obviously you do not personally pay after death, but you set aside money for a trust before hand, which amounts to the same thing.
This is a good point, but it bears stressing that the bulk of the trust fund is there for reanimation and as protection against economic instability. Only a very tiny fraction gets used for ongoing expenses, at least in the current Alcor situation.
Except that the fraction for reincarnation is likely not nearly enough, given that simple surgeries routinely cost tens of thousands of dollars and building a new body is something we can't even do.
You seem to be assuming that a lot of random things will somehow come together to make cryonics work.
Compound interest? Depends on how the trust is managed. Once you're dead, you're obviously not going to be able to influence that. It also depends on the economy, and we've seen some pretty long runs lately with no cumulative gains.
Overfunding? That doesn't even make sense. We're talking about there no being enough funds, and you pipe in with "what if there's too much!".
External funding? What makes you think someone in the future is going to drop a million to reanimate your head?
Future advances? Sure, but it seems pretty farfetched to say that future advances are going to make body reconstruction affordable. I mean, how long have we been waiting for affordable flying cars?
If there's a non-zero chance that you will be returned to life at some point in the future, then however unlikely that chance is worth 25k. It is a lottery; the cost is small compared to the payoff and it rationalises hope.
I have discovered a way of extending anyone's life. I will extend yours if you send me 25k via paypal. You can find my email in my profile. Note that this is a non-zero chance.
There's an astronomically high probability that you're saying this to make a point, not because you have secret information. That fits perfectly with my model of expected human behavior. The question would be why your model of expected cryobiology/physics/future scientific development places its chance of success in anything like a similarly low category.
The probability that they stay in shape for even a couple of centuries is abysmally low (how many companies survive that long?).
The probability that, in the unlikely case your dead frozen head isn't thrown away at some point in time, you can be revived from it is so extraordinarily remote that I don't see the point.
It is way more likely that at some point technology will allow to simulate famous personalities from their writings, photos, etc than from a frozen piece of meat.
When you're dead, you're dead. Get over it, most people who have been are dead, too. And like the saying goes, cemeteries are full of indispensable men.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not big on the stuff. But it's no Pascal's Wager either. This is way better than supernatural shit. This is a bad bet, not an impossible bet / illogical argument.
Eh, I'll give you part of Pascal's Wager. The other part of it is the logical absurdity of thinking that someone who doesn't already believe can be blackmailed into believing. Pascal's Wager can only be used to defend belief, not create. (But every time I've heard someone IRL use it they seem to not understand that). That's a big part of what Pascal's Wager "is" to me.
I think that argument applies to cryonics. :) The people who invoke the wager are trying to defend their belief, not actually convert others. To anyone who doesn't believe in cryonics, the wager is pretty absurd.
Sure, thousands of years of torture are possible for you if you're a cryonicist -- but in such a world the same risk would apply to trillions of other sentients. If you aren't completely selfish, you're better off investing your energy in preventing such a world instead of trying to dodge the bullet personally.
> If you aren't completely selfish, you're better off investing your energy in preventing such a world
How is getting your head frozen investing in preventing such a world? If you want to improve the future, maybe you should invest your $25K in humanitarian efforts instead of a desperate attempt at personal life extension.
> How is getting your head frozen investing in preventing such a world?
It isn't, directly. It is an investment in something else which makes that a more important issue to an individual. That affects the probability of the individual taking actions that favor the given outcome. The main purpose of getting your head frozen is saving the individual's life directly, but it does have this positive externality.
> If you want to improve the future, maybe you should invest your $25K in humanitarian efforts instead of a desperate attempt at personal life extension.
How does passively letting yourself die increase your incentive to plan for a better world in the distant future?
> It isn't, directly. It is an investment in something else which makes that a more important issue to an individual. That affects the probability of the individual taking actions that favor the given outcome. The main purpose of getting your head frozen is saving the individual's life directly, but it does have this positive externality.
No, it doesn't. This is all feel-good silliness. You've said stuff like this in numerous replies, but you've given no reason for anyone to believe that cryonics has any positive impact. A 25K donation for Malaria treatment would probably do a lot more. That provides concrete benefits, rather than intangible hopes that cryonists will somehow work toward a better tomorrow.
> How does passively letting yourself die increase your incentive to plan for a better world in the distant future?
How does spending money on snake oil do more for the world than spending that same money on solving real problems?
For your argument to make any sense, we have to accept that no one cares about the state or fate of the world after their own deaths, which is absurdly cynical.
People usually have a limited amount they will give to charity and will generally spend the rest on something selfish. Cryonics feels selfish, so they will spend money on it that they would not have given to charity anyway.
People who care about the state of the world after their deaths are not in the same position as those who actually expect to experience it. They are not as likely to care as much or to employ rational means to that end, because their concern is a more altruistic and abstract one, the sort of emotion which evolves for signaling/tribal purposes rather than personal survival. Entirely different neural machinery is employed when evaluating the problem differently.
I don't know how you reached the conclusion that my argument relies on no one caring about the future in spite of death. My argument is that you can increase your rational, self-interested incentives to care about the future by planning to be cryopreserved.
So you're saying that people interested in cryonics will not actually give more money to charities? Doesn't that go counter to the assertion that you've repeatedly made that cryonists are more likely to invest in improving the future?
People who care about the state of the world after their deaths are more likely to donate. How much have charities benefited from posthumous donations? A cryonist who does not expect to "die" has no incentive to donate in their will. At least religions say "you can't take it with you". Cryonics says "sure you can; put it in the bank".
You're also making a false connection between the desire for self-preservation and rational behavior. People do all kinds of stupid crap because they think it will keep them alive. They go to faith healers, they take dangerous or useless substances, they engage in pointless rituals, etc. I would say "pursuing cryonics" belongs to that list.
If you think a person can be reanimated from their writings, even a tiny piece of carefully preserved neural tissue should be extremely valuable for making sure the person is simulated accurately.
You should probably stop using the terms "dead" and "frozen" in this context. Cryopreservation seeks to avoid ice crystal formation, and cryonics seeks to avoid death. So it has the effect of affirming the consequent.
That is not true, and when you express it like that, it is a Pascal's wager! I would not pay 25k for a 0.00001% chance of revival, because I do not value my life at >25 billion USD.
Also often forgotten is that biology isn't like an on/off switch - will you come back the same way physcially? Mentally? Could you live with having lost some of your higher mental facilities?
Given the mental damage done by aging (http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#aging), it is a fact that ~>98% of humans, given the opportunity to live with having lost some of their higher mental facilities, will in fact choose to live.
I don't expect to survive with my memories all intact unless I am very lucky. However the complete regeneration of missing parts and restoration of lost functions seems like a very solvable problem.
The fact that a large portion of cryonics funding will eventually go towards this kind of research and thus help non-cryonics patients who have brain injuries is a rather significant spillover benefit.
That's a reasonable concern, but at this meta level there are two things going in cryonics' favor: there's a good chance you're overconfident about its non-utility[1], and there's a chance that your reanimation comes much earlier than expected, so the cumulative risks don't add up to much.
And FWIW, Alcor and Cryonics Institute don't require power for storage; they require deliveries of liquid nitrogen. I don't think either facility has much earthquake/tsunami risk, either.
[1] Personally, I would want to be > 99% sure about this before completely giving up on cryonics.
On what basis do you claim there's a good chance I'm overconfident about cryonics' non-utility? I could say your overconfident in its utility and be standing on ground at leas as firm a you.
There's also a chance that you never get reanimated, or that you're reanimated by future humans who torture you to see how ancient humans react to stimulus, or any number of other possibilities that make cryonics unattractive.
Since religion promises eternal life, and a large number of respected scientists are religious, I assume that you are Christian, right? Also Muslim? And maybe Jewish?
If something is agreed to have a chance of extending my life for thousands of years by more than 5% of people whose thinking I respect and
Check
it costs less than 200k and
Check
there are no obvious people who are profiting from this then
Check
This is at least as true for religion (which you can practice for free) as it is for cryonics (which is a business venture).
I want to be >99% sure about it not being viable before giving up on it.
In what way can you be >99% sure that religion is not viable? What logic allows you to believe in cryonics but not religion, given that each have basically the same scientific underpinnings (which is to say, none at all).
EDIT: Unless you meant that the logic you described was not yours, but just mmaro's, in which case fair enough.
The logic he described belonged to no one. Neither he nor mmaro actually claimed it. It was an entirely hypothetical scenario in which some people might see mmaro's statements as something other than selling snake oil (I certainly wouldn't, it still wouldn't amount to "evidence" of any sort, just more fuzzy hope).
He hasn't made that argument or anything close to it. The most he's said/implied is that $50/month is worth it. If he has some other logic, he'll need to share it if he hopes to convince anyone. Otherwise, he's just a guy standing on the sidewalk with a bottle of magic pills.
It's not the lack of cryo arrangements that's the problem. (I've considered cryo myself, but I'm not impressed with the likelyhood of success. Too many fracturing events, not to mention the likely extreme costs of recovery post-freezer. But if you're looking for more life, it's your only potential option.) The problem is that we haven't been focusing enough on the real issue: Death. Finding ways to extend human life indefinitely should be our generation's "Space Race." Our Apollo Program. Want to create jobs? Help us find the cure. Instead we obsess over petty things. (And I'm as guilty as the rest.)
But regardless, there is one truth we all have to face: We will one day die. Even should you beat the biological death, should you somehow survive the backlash of fellow humans who reject your bid for immortality, you will still fail. Because one day the Universe will either run out of energy or contract back upon itself, at which point you will either starve or be crushed. You have a few billion years to find an answer for that.
I hadn't considered my greatest fear, but now I recognize it:
Finding ways to extend human life indefinitely should be our generation's "Space Race."
We already suffer from over-population and pollution. Death is a key piece of the demographic shift, and just about every other anthropological process related to the change and evolution of culture and society.
Living longer would not increase our society's capability or capacity, it would almost assuredly decrease it, not to mention life would be exceptionally crowded, everywhere.
>Living longer would not increase our society's capability or capacity, it would almost assuredly decrease it, not to mention life would be exceptionally crowded, everywhere.
I think it would improve our capacity. Look at how much investment is put into someone before they can productively give back to the economy - kids take years of being raised, teacher's time, plus years of experience before they start paying their own way.
I think life extension would spread that capital cost out over a much longer productive life - right now say years 1-20 you are a resource drain, and the same for years 65-90. So you are producing stuff for society just half of your life (yet, this is enough for a surplus - the quality of goods output today in the world is continuously increasing) If we double lifespan it would double the productive years, so each life would be MUCH more productive.
That's not even including the fact that the second (doubled) productive section could take advantage of the first section's experience. So if we doubled each individual's productive lifetime, (by increasing total lifespan by just 50%) it would most likely more than double their total output.
Imagine how valuable someone who had 40 years of experience, plus a 20 year old's fast mind would be?
[note that by productivity I mean the amount of human / natural resources a person takes up; kids take up parents & teacher's time, older people take up highly trained doctor's time. People who are "productive" are generating more valuable services than they're taking up. So, people spending longer within that middle section would make them even more of a gain for the world]
We already have a solution to overpopulation: birth control. Longer lived people have more memories and skills, so of course our capacity would increase -- if not counteracted by neurological senescence. The trick is to regenerate the person to a youthful state, where they can be productive and creative yet retain their knowledge and skills. I don't expect it to be easy, but people in cryostasis can afford to wait a while.
I never said it would be easy. Life changes. Human life before the Industrial Revolution was considerably different than now. Birth rates would have to fall. We would have to find ways to support more of us on fewer resources. Major sacrifices and changes in lifestyle would be absolutely required. Our species as it is now would likely not survive such a transition.
But, as Carl Sagan said: "It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses."
birth rates in all modern western countries are declining, in a few to the point where reproduction is not guaranteed (eg. fewer than two children per couple). I believe this trend will likely continue to the point where we don't reproduce and instead (hopefully) cease to die.
By "death", I assume you mean senescence: the natural biomolecular attrition that inexorably leads to organismal death absent of outside causes.
It is true that turtles can live for almost 200 years and some plants can live for thousands of years. If we are essentially, biochemically the same, we could in theory overcome our biochemical "bugs" to achieve negligible senescence. So, we'd live forever.
Unfortunately, that's a hard problem because we didn't design the system -- unlike computers and programing languages -- and we're trying to reverse engineer an insanely complex system created by the massively parallel process of natural selection acting on random mutation. And we're hampered by things like IACUC.
Computational capacity may double every 2 years, but a mouse still has a generation time of 3 months, just like it did a million years ago. That's why biomedical progress (frustratingly) doesn't progress at Moore's Law, and you can't just throw money or engineering talent at the problem.
So yeah, focus on "death" as a biochemical problem, but "focusing on death" won't solve the problem at the same pace as focusing your engineering talent on a human engineering problem. The natural sciences are much more stochastic, and there's no clear path to immortality.
Continuing on this point, it might be a hell of a lot easier to create an artificial brain (or at least AI as clever as a human) than reverse engineer a biological system "designed" to expire.
I agree, and I think a convergence of the two would be even easier - some way to replace an active biological brain (neuron by neuron) with one synthetic. Similar to artificial hearts, etc. Maybe it starts as treatment for strokes or similar brain damage, to work around the irreparable portions of the brain. As long as each neuron behaves and is networked identically to the one replaced (which might require some guesswork in cases of severe damage), it should result in an identical system.
So why create a synthetic if you can convert an organic? Probably more likely than us creating a 'real' A.I. anyway.
I see we're reading from the same playbook. It would be cleaner to abandon biology, but how do you design something smarter than yourself? Is it easier? Nobody has a clue since we've never purposefully created human intelligence or AGI.
(Our replicators have, but they're responsible for this mess in the first place)
I agree biological immortality is a lofty goal, but it is orders of magnitude harder than space race.
At least with getting people into space, the basic techniques (launch rocket, orbit earth) and constraints were figured out. Devil was in the endless details.
Humans still barely understand how aging works, much less how to theoretically stop it. Sure there's hypotheses here and there, but no unified description or strategy to stop the process.
I disagree. While we could figure out how to travel to the moon in a very short time (think 60 years from the wright brothers till neil armstrong), anything beyond mars might well be far beyond our capabilities. this is much due to the fact that any chemical reaction based propulsion is so inefficient, that travelling beyond mars would be extremly costly and consume a large part of our earthly resources. If we would promote nuclear reaction based propulsion devices I might get hope again - but those are politically difficult to promote (because of very reasonable concerns about their dangers).
nonetheless I'm pretty optimistic about the possibilities of genetic reengineering. a lot of that research is really constrained by those ancient (aristotelean) laws concerning stem cell research.
The one thing we understand the least is us. Sounds like endless potential for research opportunities. A real challenge. Maybe the project doesn't result in effective immortality. But the space race didn't result in only getting to orbit or only landing men on the Moon. The side benefits would be as beneficial as the final goal.
If we find (an affordable) way to extend human life indefinitely, then at some point individuals are going to be faced with the choice of voluntarily "stepping aside" (or whatever polite term we might come up with) or stop having children. I don't think either would be in most people's nature, which doesn't seem to lead to any pleasant consequences I can think of.
The question is not "if" but "when." Biotech and medicine are only getting better. At some point we'll be able to reverse aging, then we'll have to deal with the consequences. To prevent overpopulation, people can either have kids or live incredibly long lives. Not both.
I bet once indefinite life extension becomes feasible, something along these lines will happen:
Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, died, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them.
(from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow)
True, but we'd hit that limit too. Space travel would allow cubic growth at best (expanding at c in all directions). Populations typically grow exponentially.
Actually, everyone could still have one child each. Each successive generation would be 1/2 the size of the previous and the population would approach a limit of approximately two times what it currently is since 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8... = 2.
Immortality is generally taken to imply eternal youth as well (at least moderate youth). Not a lot of people want to live forever in a body that continues to age. Given eternal youth, there's no reason an 18-year old would be restricted to dating other 18-year olds. They could just as easily date 1000-year olds (unless by monogamy you mean eternal pairing).
Why is death a bad thing? Not in the "I want everyone to die" sense, but I personally find my mortality a motivating force (to get things done quickly and avoid procrastination :)
Bad things can have good externalities. I, for one, value the productivity increasing side-effects of my mortality much less than the fact that it means I will die.
On the contrary, given the serious lack of natural resources facing us on mother earth, our space race should be - "the space race". We might have just enough time to figure out how to start living on Moon or may be Mars before we collapse into self destructive fighting for natural resources.
Actually, the natural resources are mostly extremely abundant.
Plus, industrialized nations lose population (birth rate < death rate). So industrializing the whole world as quickly as possible is probably a good way to stabilize the total global population.
The choices already exist. Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs could certainly have cryopreserved themselves if they wanted to. It's not like Alcor is unknown, especially in the circles Ritchie and Jobs were in.
What do you (since this is a self post) think we as society should do about it?
* Better social networking for cryonics participants.
* More persuasive essays on the topic.
* New blood in the movement.
* Stronger associations to stronger movements.
* Different or more aggressive marketing/promotion tactics.
* Prizes similar to the X-Prize for demonstrating reversible cryopreservation on a small scale (e.g. organs)
* (Maybe unrealistic?) Government funding for cryobiology, specifically as pertains to brain preservation, and secondarily as pertains to whole organisms.
One major thing I'm noticing is that cryonics frequently seems to be seen as a low-status thing, despite being popularly associated with wealthy billionaires. There seems to be a paleo-humanistic (as I call it) tendency to rationalize and even glorify death as part of the grand cycle of life, and cryonics seems to be directly set against that. This may be why so many of the old sci-fi greats (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc.) opted out. AFACT most living sci-fi and great humanistic writers of the aging generation (Terry Pratchett, David Brin, and so forth) are not signed up nor particularly supportive. I'm not sure how to change this narrative but I strongly feel there is a problem with it.
Another big problem I see is that cryonics tends to be popularly associated with selfishness -- yet it is compatible with altruism, and in fact has exceptional potential to save billions of lives if pursued aggressively (and if it works). Technically, it seems like one need not be concerned with one's own survival at all to be in favor of cryopreserving the world (particularly when economies of scale are factored in).
What you're seeing isn't a status thing, it's selection bias. The smart people you've mentioned generally aren't the type of people to partake in such hokum.
Some of these are quite interesting though the "probabilities" are completely arbitrary, of course. From what I can gather the reasons against cryo can be clustered into these:
1) Access failure: an external event prevents the initiation of your cryo-preservation, such as your relatives and/or your hospital insisting on your death taking place as scheduled, or other things preventing you from having access to the facilities needed. - These dangers are substantial. I'd wager that the majority of society is against even simple life extension, and thus even more opposed to cryo. There is also no way to mitigate this risk, since people tend not to die in circumstances under their direct control. Your best bet is probably to convince a close family member to act on your behalf when the time comes, because family has a lot of authority with... you know, the authorities.
2) Persistence failure: things that cause your preserved brain to be destroyed, such as war, system outages, economic trouble, or global catastrophes (including new laws or a radical culture shift). - The probability of just one of these occurring is pretty high, but there is simply no way to accurately estimate this risk. However, the probability of these events leading to your demise is lowered if more people adopt cryo preservation.
3) Preservation/restauration failure: some technical reason prevents your pattern from being restored into a working copy. These include excessive tissue damage before or during storage, or technical problems in reconstructing your brain back into working order. - Compared to the other risks, this one is probably very low. If you're in cryo, time is on your side. While I think that biological reanimation is most likely not on the table when it comes to brains conserved with current technologies, digital restauration looks like a very promising avenue.
4) Religious/philosophical problems: as failure modes go, these certainly stand out. Technically, they don't belong here, nevertheless some variant of religious reasoning is included in many of these lists. - I'm going to discard these points though (including the "probability" that our minds are not entirely based on a material substrate), because if those matter to someone the discussion is already over.
Your "1" doesn't include the chance that not everything we care about is preserved with current techniques. Also people might make a mistake in the freezing process. It's very difficult to develop any process without the feedback of whether it is working.
Your "3" doesn't include the chance that restoration is impossible, overly expensive, or not done for some other reason (no one is interested in you).
Your "1" doesn't include the chance that not everything we care about
is preserved with current techniques. Also people might make a mistake
in the freezing process. [...]
I'm sorry I probably didn't make myself clear enough there. This is not my 1 = failure to access preservation technology but actually my category 3 = preservation/restauration failure. I did include those scenarios.
Your "3" doesn't include the chance that restoration is impossible
Yes, it does include that, more specifically: it takes into account that some minds might not be sufficiently preserved for technical reasons. But if you mean that restoration in general could turn out to be impossible, I'm going to have to take a stand against that. I have a modest background in information technology and biology, and from where I stand there is nothing in principle that precludes restauration. The main question here becomes: how big is the interval between cardiac arrest and cryo? From our current understanding I'd say that we're probably good if this time is between 1 and 2 hours (depending on the temperature of the environment and the manner of death).
overly expensive,
That's right, because I think that's a ridiculous reason.
or not done for some other reason (no one is interested in you).
This is what I mean by "persistence failure" (see there).
I think Hackers will have the last laugh after all. When hackers finally build an AI, it will also be the first soul. An intelligent mind decoupled from a body and thus capable of being immortal. The first step in this direction was the stored program concept itself which was best articulated by Von Neumann (http://qss.stanford.edu/~godfrey/vonNeumann/vnedvac.pdf) and realized in the EDVAC. This allowed programs to be decoupled from hardware. Dennis Ritchie, whose loss we all mourn, made what I consider the second big step. Decoupling large software systems from hardware, via a portable operating system. It will take a while (10-20 years?), but maybe something like ROS (http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-platform) will someday become a full mind that is still decoupled from any particular hardware...a soul!!!
I'm very interested in life extension/repair/rejuvenation (ala Aubrey De Grey), but I really have no interest in cryogenics. This may be because I'm only 32 years old, and in good health, but from everything I've read, the former is much more realistic than the latter.
So I don't consider Ritchie's death without cryopreservation any more of a tragedy than the death itself.
Even if cyro doesn't preserve everything, it will probably be a better record of the past than anything else that exists from our era.
As an analogy think about how we feel about people 2000 years ago - if we could have just a few comprehensive samples of something in their world, we would really like it. Even things like exhaustive lists of every word they said for a week would be incredibly useful for linguists, lists of everything they ate would be useful, etc.
We shouldn't rely on their choices of what is worth preserving - we should adopt a broad based approach and try to preserve the maximum amount of things, and hope it will be useful later on.
I think today we have even used graffiti preserved on the walls of Pompei to get an idea of what the ancient world was like - surely there would be valuable information stored in even an imperfectly-frozen brain?
Who knows what kind of crazy theories they may have in the future, that they just would need to have a few brains to test out with?
Sooner or later we all have to die. It's inevitable. But, if you feel like you might have wasted your life if you were to die tomorrow, why not get up and do something about it?
Wow. I'm surprised how many points this post has given the absurd premises that cryopreservation is based upon.
There are far too many easily identifiable things that could go wrong in the process for me to even consider dumping money into such hokum. These are the same type of people that were insisting the world double up on alchemy research two thousand years ago.
Maybe we should've. Chemistry would've been impossible to develop without alchemy's findings, based as it is on the elements alchemists discovered and the techniques & equipment they refined; and alchemists gave us gunpowder, which seems like it might've had something to do with the Age of Exploration and subsequent Industrialization.
> To do away with death is to do away with evolution. Not a very good idea.
It's a great idea. Evolution is about the dumbest possible optimization process which still works. I don't see Google throwing its hands up and saying 'screw engineering Bigtable or MapReduce with our silly minds, we'll just evolve those fuckers!'
Evolution happens from one generation to the next and there isn't much we can do to prevent it. You are thinking of natural selection, and we've already done away with that by ensuring humans have the opportunity to procreate regardless of physical defects.
Maybe when there's real evidence that cryonics is actually useful?
Hackers of all people ought to know that no matter what your models say, it's all bullshit until you test it. And as far as I know, there's not even a model generally accepted by the scientific community that indicates any reasonable probability of success anyway.
Models are tested by experiments. Freeze a dog for a few years and resuscitate it, then we can talk seriously about the value of cryopreservation. Until then, you're throwing your money away in a desperate grasp at immortality. And that's money that could actually help real people now. At least that could be your legacy. Don't be the next Newton trying to turn crap into gold.
Most of the money goes into an investment account, and eventually to biotech/nanotech research to reanimate the patient. Most of the work in reanimating the patient is repairing extreme brain damage (from cold and ischemia).
Repairing brain damage is extremely valuable to people who suffer from it, and to society. Sure there are more direct ways to fund brain damage research, but you don't get the same motivation; this feels like a selfish benefit to the person who spends on it so it is more likely to compete with luxuries instead of charitable causes.
Brain slices have really high cell survival rates (normal electrical activity), and rabbit kidneys have been reanimated with full functionality.
At a minimum there should be a very large and prestigious prize (like the X-Prize) for milestones such as demonstrating organized whole brain electrical activity.
No one knows for sure if there's anything on the other side, but I definitely don't want to stick around this world forever. Immortality would be a curse.
Obviously nobody really wants to be immortal and one day outlast the solar-system and eventually be left floating around in space for trillions of years.
When you've experienced a few minor illnesses and a bit of short-lived pain, such as a broken limb or two, living forever still sounds great.
I had a (thankfully temporary) condition that resulted in chronic pain for about a year. It wasn't terrible pain, but pain that never goes away wears you down in a way that horrible, but short-lived, pain simply doesn't. After a while you just want it to stop. Before this period in my life I was of the opinion that immortality was worth almost anything. Now I believe that quality of life is just as important, if not more so. I would not want to live forever if it involved even a small amount of chronic pain. I used to think a little pain would be a small price to pay. That was ignorance.
Jobs and Ritchie both died from diseases that probably gave them a good deal of chronic pain over the last years of their lives. I can completely understand why extending their lives was not desirable to them.