[extropy-chat] Alternative to Cryo was The Amazing Cellular Repair device

[The Avantguardian]

--- Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> > Yes. But my take on cryogenics is not to freeze
> people
> 
> It's cryonics. 
> Cryogenics is something different.

I don't like the term cryonics. Whatever the "truth"
of the matter may be, that word has a bad reputation
in mainstream scientific circles. Since I am a in
mainstream science, I prefer to use a different label
that has less of a stigma. No offense to anyone
intended, but words carry political baggage. 

> 
> No can do, save of a time-freeze spell. Given that
> our current knowledge of physics doesn't even give a
> hint how that could be possible, your next best bet
> is
> a modern cryopreservation method.
> 
> These are actually quite good, and can't be (much)
> improved upon -- especially if you're aiming for
> structural preservation, and not viability (which 
> is a somewhat different, and harsher metric).

That's my point. I am aiming at viability, a harsher
metric yes, but the only one I would pay for.
Mechanists might disagree with me but I am a vitalist.
Structure without the spark is a corpse. Chemically
equivalent to the living, but not alive.  

> 
> Have you ever worked with H2S?

Not in the lab, but I have eggs go bad on me. That
sulfer smell of rotten eggs is H2S. Many bacteria
release it as a waste product.

> 
>
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&hs=50u&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=X&oi=scholart&q=H2S+toxicity+humans
> 
> You don't want to gas a primate with H2S, oh no.
> This is worse than using cyanide.

According to table 1 of the toxicology article that
was one of the first hits in the google search link
you sent me available at this URL:

http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.pa.32.040192.000545;jsessionid=iUq1MikKgRGg

According to this toxicology article by Reiffenstein
et al. , 50-100 ppm of H2S (the concentration used by
Blackstone et al. was 80 ppm) results in "irritation
of the respiratory tract" whereas 500-1000 ppm results
in unconsiousness, neural paralysis, and death. I
would *personally* take my chances with 80 ppm.

> Don't try this with people. What would happened with
> your mice after 6 days? 60 days? 6 years?

I don't know. I hope Blackstone and his colleagues try
it out at colder temps and longer times. They aren't
my mice, I wish they were.

> I recommend you to hit Medline for hypothermia and
> chilling injury. They wouldn't have aged much,
> because
> they would have been dead pretty soon.

I am pretty familiar with hypothermia. It has actually
been purposely induced in patients undergoing open
heart surgery, to slow down ischemic damage to the
brain and other organs. The trick is to warm them up
slowly, preferably from the inside out.

> 
> > freezing damage, yet there is almost no metabolism
> 
> "almost no metabolism" doesn't mean your biology is
> frozen in a glass matrix. Your mice continue to
> unravel
> at nanoscale, albeit somewhat slowed. 
> Quite soon
> your cross the point of no return by which the
> system
> can resume with own power, and your rodent is gone
> for good.

I think that if 1% BMR can be achieved, than it would
be transhumanism's ticket to SENS. Go to sleep, a
hundred years go by in the outside world, you age 1
year, wake up and bingo, they have a cure for what
ails you, possibly even old-age. Then again, you might
wake up to find that medicine has been banned and you
have a bunch luddites praying for your soul. It would
still be a gamble.

> 
> With vitrification, no damage occurs beyond of the
> original caused during the suspension. And it quite
> easy to measure what that damage is, and to gauge
> how much of it is irreversible information erasure,
> and which can be transformed back at structure
> descriptor
> level.

We don't even have a structure descriptor for memory
let alone consciousness in humans. If 20 years from
now, we find out that consciousness is all volatile
RAM, it aint gonna do much good for all the frozen
heads. 


> No way. 

Hey, nobody is twisting your arm to be a believer. All
I am saying is that *I* would sign up for this and
that *I* would invest what chump change I can scrape
together in a company that does this. They're
rationale and mouse demonstration has me sold.
Especially if someone else can verify. *You* are free
to do what *you* want.

> It would be a rather stupid idea to warm up a
> vitrified
> critter. You'd get orders of magnitude more damage
> than
> during the suspension. We've been through this
> before,
> multiple times, in fact.
> 
> It might be sufficiently low to allow
> retransplantation
> of healthy organs with a survival rate high enough
> to
> be practical, but you don't want to have this happen
> to
> the whole human primate. Trust me.

If preserving my structure is all that mattered, why
not just fossilize myself in epoxy like a bug in
amber? That way my relatives can use me as a doorstop
or something else useful. Why bother to have a hard to
maintain cryonics facility keep me at liquid N2 temp
if there is no intention of ever thawing me out?

> I wish a had a subscription. Does anyone have
> institutional
> access to Cryobiology?

I do. Send me a reasonably short wish list of articles
and I can help you out.


The Avantguardian 
is 
Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." - Woody Allen

"Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope" - Robert G. Ingersoll


		
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