- In short: A cryonics company has frozen its first client in Australia in the hope of bringing him back to life in the future.
- The client, a man in his 80s, died in Sydney before being frozen at minus 200 degrees Celsius at a Holbrook facility.
- What’s next? The cryonics facility is expecting higher demand as its membership base ages, although it’s still unknown whether anyone preserved this way can ever be revived.
I seem to remember a recent news item about a whole bunch of frozen people thawing into goop and having to be washed out of the chambers.
If I shared the same insane and impotent obsession with the future, I would pay more to be turned into a fossil, all my cells replaced with minerals. Much more durable and the same zero chance of ever living again.
Sign me up for mineralization, infinitely cooler than being freezer-burned nasty soup
Good news, everybody! Turning your cremation ashes into diamonds is pretty close to being mineralized? https://www.lonite.com/cremation-diamonds-from-ashes they claim close to 99.99% ash carbon, but who knows.
Han Solo carbonite Nooooooooo!
A man in his 80s? Bruh. if I die in my 80s you put a bullet in me to make sure I stay down. Last thing I wanna do is wake back up!
But future medical science will make it all better! Surely!
If the future has the technology to revive you, it has the technology to de-age you. So don’t worry, you are either not waking up at all (most likely), or waking up young.
Or waking up to tuvok and a phaser.
This shit always makes me giggle.
You wanna know what happens to all the moisture in your body when you freeze it?
It crystallizes, turning basically every cell in your body into an expanding razor blade which slices through every other cell.
Your brain gets turned into mush, held together by a matrix of ice.
Imagine dropping a piece of paper into a paper shredder, then putting those paper strips into a blender with water. Then you take the blended mass of paper mush out, and try to reassemble it.
That’s what these people think medical technology can do in the future.
Fucking morons. There’s nothing to put back together! It’s fucked! You cannot unblend your death certificate!
If you don’t believe me, try freeze a block of tofu at the back of your freezer at the coldest setting, then thaw it out.
From the article
The company said the client was then moved to A O’Hare Funeral Directors at Leichhardt where doctors and perfusionists, who operate heart-lung bypass machines, worked to pump a liquid, which acts as a type of anti-freeze, through the body to help preserve cells and lower the body’s temperature.
It’s a pretty crude description for an audience not expected to know anything about this, but even so it’s obvious they’re not just shoving a body in liquid nitrogen and calling it a day.
they’re not just shoving a body in liquid nitrogen and calling it a day.
They might as well. No amount of antifreeze is going to stop cells from crystallizing on a mollecular level.
This is even disregarding the most important part, the brain, which you can’t flood with antifreeze.
There just isn’t a way around this.
They found a way to make a funeral a monthly expense, why can’t you respect their hustle?
Yup. This.
Good luck to him, I guess. With the speed at which life is changing now, even if he is successfully brought back and de-aged, it will likely be extremely difficult to adapt.
If future generations can revive someone, they’ve probably also cured aging. So for adapting they’ll have all the time in the world, potentially more.
Time is pretty irrelevant when it comes to mental health issues.
Except that there may be better ways to treat mental health issues in the future.
I’d only consider doing this to follow Simon Phoenix into the future.
I would say they have a cryogenically frozen old guys chance in hell of ever being revived but hey, you never know I guess.
Even if they could reliably suspend a person and revive them in the future, what would motivate them to do so? Dead people cannot own assets, and so your customer would be a pauper by the time you defrosted them, in addition to being unequipped to cope with life in the future. (Prisoners finishing multi-decade sentences and finding themselves in a world where everything is done with mobile apps have it hard enough; someone walking up in, say, a century or two would have a vastly harder time.) And, given that running a high-spec corpse freezer costs money and has no proven results, and that your business is not preserving living humans for centuries but selling rich narcissists the promise of an afterlife, with the freezers as mere props, all the incentives would be to skimp on the most expensive parts and feign surprise when your customers turn out to have liquefied.
It would be a tremendously bad business move to choose not to revive them. They’d immediately lose all business as people obviously wouldn’t trust their service anymore.
Who would know? Everyone who knew them will be long dead by the time the question comes up.
In the comment I was replying to, we are already in the future, already have the tech to revive them, and the company chooses not to.
Imagine if a private foundation that was effectively an investment fund operated a facility that had been operating since the 1700s, keeping a handful of aristocrats and financiers in suspended animation, nominally at tremendous expense (hey, good alchemists and necromancers aren’t cheap). In reality, they cut a lot of corners and invested the change in building empires and buying yachts. Would anyone know or care? Would some millennial Hohenzollern or Rothschild really want to bring back their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandpa back to show them the wonders of the modern world and ask them for their wisdom? And if it turned out that it wasn’t possible and the company said “please accept our deepest apologies, it looks like there was a failure of the undeath-support protocols some 130 years ago due to a human error. We’d fire the employee involved, but he’s long dead. Anyway, here’s $50,000 by way of apology”, that that wouldn’t settle it?
Maybe it would, but it doesn’t change anything. You asked why would they revive them, they would revive them to prove to potential customers that their service works and get more money. Yes they can just quit making more money like you described, but as I said, that seems like a stupid business decision.
No corporation seems to give a shit about long-term viability when fucking over customers gets them short-term gains.
Dead people cannot own assets
"I’m not quite dead yet! "
I remember reading a while ago that with medical and technical advances over the next 50 years, they reckoned that some people born now will be able to effectively live forever, eg replacing or regenerating body parts, cure cancer etc etc
I’d need to think for a while about if you could, would you want to live forever? I vaguely remember a sci fi short story that had this question as part one of it’s themes.
I’d like to live an extended life (age slower), though that would also be dependent on how many of my friends and family could live alongside me. I don’t know about forever, that’s a pretty difficult concept for me to grasp. I am scared of death but that’s more a fear of ceasing to exist before I’m ready, more than ceasing to exist at all. Regardless, humanity will face so many challenges within this century that there’s a possibility none of this matters anyway. We could all be wiped out, or the world could be so different (in a dangerous or just alienating way) that I might just be ready to go earlier than I can imagine at this stage of my life.
There’s nothing else to do, though.
