Another terminally ill lady freezing her head. I first heard about the procedure when baseball player Ted Williams had his head frozen and stored. It my be useful if the league ever has a shortage of baseballs.
Lets make a huge medical assumption that in 2355 the technology is there to connect the head to a cyborg body. They wake up a few heads and prove that the technology works. The cyborgs appear briefly on Dancing with the Formerly Dead Stars.
Now what? Do you think society in 2355 will have any interest in waking up tens of thousands of dead frozen heads? People that have antiquated job skills, no family support, or money.
More importantly, will society feel any moral necessity to help these dead people? Or will they view these cryogenic warehouses as old graveyards? The people are dead; leave them alone.
Are you planning to freeze your head? Do you think society will wake you up? Do they have any obligation to wake you up?
I think they would make the effort. The revivals would have some value - I’m sure there’d be interest in having people from the sixteenth century in our time. Ten thousand people are actually a drop in the bucket when you compare that number to the world population. And most civilizations have an implied sense of the Golden Rule - all other things being equal, there’s an instinct to treat people well so other people will treat you well.
By then I expect they’ll either have a sufficiently wealth & automated economy that none of those are actual concerns, or civilization will have collapsed and the heads will have long since defrosted.
Who knows? Thing is, they might be inclined to help those dead people; but without a preserved brain to work with, it won’t matter if they are inclined to do so or not. They won’t have anything to work with. Of course there’s the risk they’ll wake you up for some horrific purpose; but that seems kind of pointless since there will no doubt be plenty of already living people to do horrible things to if you’re inclined that way.
It seems to me to be a reasonable enough gamble. It costs money but if you’re dead money isn’t any use to you. So basically, you are at that point using up something that’s no longer of value to you in return for a theoretical chance of coming back.
My guess is that after a couple of heads are restored to life, it will turn out they’re very unhappy about it, and the whole project will be stopped for ethical reasons.
Why would society have any obligation to anyone involved with this? This is a private company providing services to private citizens. I would assume that the contract includes the cost of re-animation and if it doesn’t, then there are regulations regarding the disposal of toxic waste.
Personally I would never do this and I doubt any of the people who do take advantage of this service will ever be anything more than frozen or meat-mush.
The company admits there is no know reversal for their service and the ‘neuro’ (head only) clients are dependent on not only scientific break through for reversal, but also scientific break through for the ability to grow out new bodies and the ability for a brain transfer.
In my opinion, this company will be defunct and/or the storage tanks will suffer some sort of failure long before all of that comes to pass.
And yet, according to their site, they have less than 1000 members (people who’ve made all financial arrangements) and are holding about 130 ‘patients’ in cold storage.
Clearly, the world is not beating a path to their door and they don’t have the numbers to justify significant funding of research into reversal techniques.
Larry Niven did a few stories dealing with the ethical questions of people frozen for the future. Called them corpsicles. Old frozen people with no family, no money and no rights. They were dead.
One story (A World Out Of Time) had the future government reviving the corpsicles for use as slaves. The main character became a long range starship pilot and rebelled.
Some other stories used the corpsicles as organ donors. (The Gil Hamilton stories)
Ted William’s head made the news a while back - some one/people calling themselves former employees of the freezer company.
According to this/these story, the first thing they did was drill 8 holes into the brain and inserted microphones so they could hear the brain crack as it froze.
Never mind the holes - if the process cannot freeze a head evenly enough to prevent thermal fracture (stuff contracts as it freezes - if part gets colder faster than the adjacent stuff, well - that’s why there are thermal expansion joints in roads and bridges) then there isn’t going to be a viable brain.
What’s the process so far?
Maintain super cold conditions for eternity. Yeah, right…
Develop way of thawing without having one part warmer than the next (the thawed tissue will die before the rest is thawed enough to get blood flowing)
Find way of re-animating. Yeah - no problem there
Find cure for what killed person. Ummm… there IS a tag with that info, right?
What is the person died of brain cancer? Re-animate all you want - it’s just going to die again.
footnote: develop way to perform surgery/otherwise treat a frozen head…
Never mind the technology - as soon as new money stops coming in, the company quietly folds and the bodies and pieces thereof are buried.
Next topic:
What is the “Eternal Flame” in the USA?
For those who know - how many generations do you suppose will see fit to maintain it?
The Tomb of the Unknowns is easy enough - but to keep a flame burning 7/24/365? Maybe we’ll invent a new style of Vestal Virgins…
