Any number? What’s the cost to maintain all of them? Have any storage process been abandoned due to mishap or expense and the person(s) interred permanently? I remember Elizabeth Taylor wanting to be kept in a cryo tank. What happened to that?
AFAIK, only Alcor currently does cryosuspension. From wikipedia:
edit: BTW “neuro” means only the head is preserved - ala Futurama.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but if you’re interested in the subject “this American life” did a very interesting podcast about some early experiments in freezing dead people. Well worth a listen.
I came in here to post about this. That program really stuck with me (and kind of creeped me out.)
The late Ted Williams (his head) is now in cold storage. Question: if we could download the contents of the human brain, keeping the corpse around would be pretty redundant-any progress on this fron?
All of them I hope. I’d hate to think that anyone was alive in one.
You’re being a little trite when you use the term “download” so casually. This isn’t a “transfer a MAC floppy disk to a PC hard drive” type of problem. I haven’t heard anything remotely definitive regarding how information (I don’t say data, because that would also be too trite) is stored in the human brain. So no, I don’t expect progress to be rapid.
The cryogenics people will (more or less) openly concede that they really don’t know what direction the reviving of a dead corpse will entail, they just hope the cryopreservation is adequate.
I don’t know what’s the plan with the heads, it would be practically impossible identify each spinal cord neuron for brain transfer or head transplant. So more muscle control is possible. If reviving becomes possible for a head, I suspect it wouldn’t be pleasant at all. If we oxygenate blood or a blood substitute and pump it to the major arteries of the head, and the eyes and face muscles still work, and the brain revives – there’s still no way to modulate the air to speak … or scream.
I’m curious to know how this works out financially. I once read a “tell all” type book which painted Alcor as a kinda shady outfit. If Alcor ever went broke, the results would be ugly.
Corpsicles. It’s all a fantasy, an expensive, wasteful fantasy.
There is a very good estimate for the total amount of data of all sorts stored in a human head here (pdf)
https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view/558/380
turns out it is 2.6x10[sup]42[/sup] bits; a vast quantity which would take millions of years to read/transfer to another substrate. So if you want an upload of the human mind you’ll have to cut some corners.
Well… if it only took 70 years to get all that information into the brain the first time, there are clearly ways of doing it more quickly.
Of course, even if you had some pseudo-magical solution for reading all that data, working from a frozen head wouldn’t be ideal. I’d wait until we can duplicate a living brain before I’ll consider freezing mine.
You pay annual dues which are pretty expensive. Aside from that you have to have your method of preservation financed in advance. Most people use a life insurance policy payable to Alcor but you can make other arrangements.
So are headstones, memorials, and burial plots. People want that fantasy in times of loss.
There was some hope for cryonic suspension as long as there was serious research being done into tissue vitrification. The problem with it that currently you can’t avoid the formation of ice crystals which shred cells from the inside out. Vitrification would have prevented that and offered some chance for being able to thaw someone out w/o having them turned into mush.
Now however, I think the research is mainly into regrowing replacement organs from induced pluripotent stem cells so there is no need to freeze (vitrify) donated organs to create vast organ banks. Autologously harvested stem cells also eliminate the possibility of rejection.
I did a IMHO thread like this–essentially would you download your mind (with several backups) and become a computer if it meant you could live for a ridiculously long period of time, upgrade yourself as technology advances,…etc.
Someone brought up the very astute, and essentially threadkilling point: “You” would cease to exist. Instead, there would be a machine that truly believed it was you. Kind of a philosophical mind blower, really, and one that makes the concept of teleportation of humans a lot more difficult.
Unless and until it works, and then it will have been science fiction.
What about just fabricating memories of visiting the Eifel tower and uploading them so you wouldn’t have to pay for airfare to get there.
I’m pretty sure I suspect that’s happening to me every day. Impossible memories from out of nowhere that don’t fit what I think my timeline has been, other things I should remember–gone until I’m reminded I should remember something and then, nope, nothing but cobwebs in that particular braincupboard. Pretty sure I’m an old Apple experiment running on a burnt out Commodore64 in some old nerd’s mom’s basement…
It’s not like you’d still be alive when they froze it. Cryonics may be a longshot in the extreme and/or a scam, but it still gives you better odds than letting your brain rot underground or setting it on fire.
One could say the same thing about religion.
A rather common argument, but plenty of people think it would still be you. An exact copy of you is a better candidate at being you than the person who was you two weeks ago, for instance. If you don’t have an issue with idea that you today and you yesterday are the same person, then, logically, you shouldn’t have a problem with you and the individual you’re a perfect copy of being the same person too.