Inspired bythis question
My take would be that as the human body contains a high proportion of fluids, and said fluids would expand during the freezing process, the result would be catastrophic anyway. Now, I know these folk are already dead, but as each cell ‘explodes’ from the expansion would the possibility of revival be precluded anyway?
The idea is that by the time we could seriously look at reviving the dead person, our technology will be advanced enough to get over that, uh, ahem, “little” hurdle.
But yeah, its a biggie.
Depends on who you listen to.
At least one thing I’ve read on this issue claims that technology will be developed at some future point to repair the damage, AS THEY THAW YOU OUT, leaving only the problem of curing whatever killed you in the first place (since it’s illegal, at this point, to freeze anyone what ain’t dead).
Another, somewhat more popular idea, involves the possibility of simply “reading” your brain, cloning a new you, and “downloading” the old information and personality into the cloned body. This is why a great many cryogenics outfits offer the option of only freezing your HEAD, as opposed to your whole body.
I am kind of dubious about this. Until such time as someone can prove it will be profitable, who’s gonna invest in developing the technology? The only possible use I can see for it is in shipping large numbers of people over long distances at minimal space and expense, and if the Army ever starts trying to move troops that way, I strongly suspect their recruitments are going to drop to ziparoonie, overnight.
Either that, or space travel. But we aren’t going to be shipping frozen colonists to Ceti Alpha Six for quite a while, I should think.
Why chop off and freeze the head? Why not just take a few photos and measurements, maybe include some info from when they were younger or their preferences for a new body, and then take an instance of their brain? Record the electrical impulses, amount of various chemicals, etc… Surely this would be better than the frozen head, as when the electrical impulses of someone’s brain stop they are considered dead. Supposing we could reverse the effects of being frozen and cure their illness, we would still be left with a brain that would work except that the correct pattern of signals is lost forever.
Have any experiments been done on stopping the brain completely and then restarting it? Can this even be done without irreparably damaging the brain?
No, cryogenic freezing is highly unlikely to work, so your better off leaving your money to your dog.
The bodies cells are destroyed in the freezing process so any body looking to bring you back would have to repair you all the way up from the cellular level, also I doubt if the structure of your neural pathways survives the process.
Cecil Adams, in one of his more, uh, accepting moods, on cyrogenics.
I know one of the Alcor guys, specifically Ralph Merkle. Before I met him, I’d heard of cyrogenics only in a silly sci-fi sense and didn’t take it seriously. After meeting him, I took it a lot more seriously. He’s a very bright (if eccentric) fellow, and the others I’ve met there are similar.
Will they be able to unfreeze? Not today, but perhaps someday. Since they started, they’ve made some advances in how they freeze you, so that somebody frozen today will have less cellular damage than someone frozen ten years ago. The biggest advances are from the liquid they replace your blood with (needs to be non-expansive and non-damaging in other ways) and speed of freezing.
Why just the head? Because that’s really the only part that matters. The theory is that they’ll grow or graft a new body, or that perhaps people won’t even have bodies in a thousand years.
The other problem beyond cell destruction in the freezing process is the damage done from the time you die to the time they freeze you. So, you want to minimize that. Folks that sign up for this wear a special medical bracelet that says “if I die, take my body to X immediately.”
Frankly, I buy into it potentially working. I kinda doubt I’ll do it but who knows. The way-future would be pretty amazing to see.
And even if people in the future could unthaw you and cure you, why the hell would they want to?
I’m reminded of a Far Side cartoon: We see a cryogenics lab with a huge freezer, containing both whole bodies and heads. The janitor, on his way out after cleaning, has just accidentally kicked the freezer’s plug out of the outlet.
Urf.
What I should have said earlier was, “I don’t see why anyone is going to invest to develop the technology to freeze and unfreeze human beings safely, in such a way that corpsicles can be successfully resuscitated, 100% of the time,” unless the technology can also be used to save people who freeze to death under normal circumstances.
I had an interesting chat a while back with a fellow who believed in the idea bigtime. Claimed that the incredible possibilities of nanotechnology would allow for the complete reconstruction of a human body, on the cellular level, even after the massive rupturing on the cellular level caused by turning one into a corpsicle.
This may well happen some day. But I suspect that it will be far enough in the future that those people who are now frozen in buckets in a vault somewhere are going to have a VERY difficult time adjusting to their new surroundings.
This is, as Aaslatten has pointed out, assuming that the occupants of this brave new future have any earthly reason to thaw out and resuscitate extra people who are already going to have two strikes against them in this weird new society of the future.
Consider this: they will be about as able to function in it as a sixteenth-century townsman would be able to handle living in Manhattan… and precisely why would modern scientists, corporations, and suchlike have any interest in thawing out hordes of sixteenth-century townsmen? One or three, sure. The National Geographic people could learn lots from them, and I’m sure David Letterman would LOVE to have them on the show. Howard Stern, too, assuming any were female and could be convinced to take their tops off.
…and then what?
The main problem is that as water freezes, it forms crystals. These crystals are sharp on the ends, and they puncture the cell walls as they grow.
Yes, it is conceivable that nanotechnology can create cellular repair systems small enough to fit inside individual cells, and which are capable of deducing the original configurations before the damage from ice, and restoring them to their original states.
Anyone who was revived by such a process under our current economic models would probably belong to whoever or whatever sponsored the revival process.
But in a future where nanotechnology has come about, our “normal” economic considerations will not apply. A completely different set of circumstances will rule (here’s an example: if a cow can make steak from dirt, grass, air, water and sunshine, then so can a machine built by nanobots. If we can convert dirt into food, nobody need starve, and food can cost nothing). Nanotechnology is a manufacturing technology. When trillions of tiny robots can be built from dirt and acetone, you can design and build ANYTHING, and it will cost NOTHING.
People who are cryogenically preserved might be revived in a nano-enabled future just because it’s something cool to do (pun intended).
~Wolfrick
aaslatten wrote
Yes, this is another big concept that’s thought about by such folks, and there are two points they make:
a) money and legal structures. Of course, there’s a good chance the organization that keeps you on ice could make some bad investments and doesn’t have the cash to keep you. It’s also possible (remember we’re talking a long long time here) that the United States could cease to exist and the value of that money could go away. But gotta try the best you can.
b) When it comes time to dethaw, when the first person is about to be pulled out, who will it be? Well, it’ll likely be someone who had recently died. Perhaps someones father or other close relative. And once that person is thawed, they’ll likely unthaw other people, walking backwards in time. There needs to be a personal reason for someone to take the action of unthawing. So, there’s a mild element of prostelytizing in the cyrogenics circles. You need to have someone in the next generation buy into this, so they’ll sell the next generation, and so on. Keep the chain going so to speak.
They cut off a dead man’s head.
Then they mutiliated and sold him on the black market.
Now, I would have loved to have seen Williams’s head go to a top notch neurology department for study; even against his wishes. The man was a far end extra peak on a bell curve, his hand eye co-ordination was so, so … well, just so off the bell curve.
But only a rank charlatan would have become embroiled in this nasty little mess; I would never trust any-one who supported the technology now.
You don’t think getting your head chopped off, frozen for a few centuries, a new body cloned and grafted on, and being brought back from the dead might be a little more traumatic than flying cars?
I suspect that repairing the damage caused by the freezing process might turn out to be not only extremely difficult, but actually physically impossible.
Because much of the damage is going to be internal to cells, we would need to build machines significantly smaller in order to repair the damage. In order for the machines to operate, they will require a temperature high enough that they are not completely inert.
The human body has natural cell-repair machinery. Unless it is possible to create something dramatically more efficient than what evolution has created over billions of years, attempting to repair the damage would require significantly heating up the body. It may not be possible to repair cell damage in a frozen body faster than it decays.
However: is it really necessary to repair the frozen body in order for cryonic suspension to “work?” As Wang-ka mentioned, some people have proposed that it might be possible to “read” the information in a frozen brain and either run it in a simulated body on a computer or “write” it out into a new body. As far as I know, it is accepted by most neurologists that most or all of the information in the brain is encoded in the network of interconnections between neurons. Neurons are many orders of magnitude larger than atoms or molecules, and if a person is frozen to a sufficiently low temperature, sufficiently soon after (or ideally before) clinical death, and sufficiently quickly, all the information that records a person’s personality and memories might be preserved.
To “read out” the information in a frozen brain would be a challenge, but far less of one than restoring that brain to life. It would merely be necessary to slowly deconstruct the brain from the outside in, making note of the positions of neurons and all other relevant details using an atomic force microscope or some other precise instrument. This could be done at an arbitrarily low temperature, and there is no need to limit damage to the body.
To “run” this recording of a brain on a computer would require far better computers and a much more complete understanding of neurology than we currently possess, but there is no reason to think these will not come with time.
This method is a much lower bar to reach than the “standard” scenario of the revival of a frozen corpse. I believe the means to do so are easily within the potential reach of our society. Would such a recording be the same individual as the original person? That’s a philosophical question that may never be settled. Nonetheless, I don’t think cryonics is an absurd hope.
JasonFin wrote
All (3) of the people I know who are deep into cryogenics are also deep into nano-technology. Coincidence?
There is something called Vitrification which is supposed to prevent most of this damage during freezing; later on, by the time we are building starships (if ever) Biostasis or Nanostasis (as described by Drexler ) might be possibel at body temperature or thereabouts…
(warning- sci-fi stuff)
http://www.orionsarm.com/tech/nanostasis.html
but I have to say it seems unlikely that the people who are being frozen now will ever be revived in anything like a viable state.
Sorry.