[ExI] Cryonics (wa re:arthur c clarke dies)

[Tom Nowell]

>I actually had a friend who, in essence actually gave
>a version of that
>last answer. He said that he had three reasons for
>not signing up.
>
>       (1)  It might not work.
>       (2)  Future people might not bring him back
>       (3)  He might not like living there in the
>future if they did.

I was at the NextroBritannia meeting at the weekend
(missed most of the actual meeting except for Ander's
presentation, but the discussion afterwards was
great).
We actually discussed cryonics a little, and it turned
out one of the people there was a clinical
perfusionist who's job is keeping people's brains
supplied with enough oxygen while their hearts are
stopped for surgical reasons. It turns out you can be
kept alive without your own heart beating for a long
time (this doesn't happen often, but people have
survived long periods while waiting for transplant). 

During this discussion, I mentioned the comic book
"Transmetropolitan" and Anders talked about how he
enjoyed it. In it, there's a story about a woman
revived from cryonic preservation - many of her
dramatic memories of the twentieth century appear
fleetingly, and the damage done to her by a tumour is
reversed. However, the language barrier between her
and the people of the future city is too great, and
she ends up living on the streets with the other crazy
homeless people, some of whom are also lost in this
future world.
 (Transmetropolitan is about a Hunter S Thompson-like
gonzo journalist in a far future city, and addresses
many transhuman themes, such as people downloading
themselves into utility fog, people mixing their DNA
with the DNA of aliens who sold their genome for cash,
cultural enclaves, nanotech problems - it's an
interesting fictional treatment of many things we're
interested in)
 I guess that fear of the future, or future shock, are
a real stumbling block for cryonics. Anders Sandberg
repeatedly made the point that he believed future
shock was a real problem for communicating
transhumanist ideas in general. We can see that
recovering people from cryogenic freezing isn't going
to happen soon - but how far away is it? The range of
estimates from twenty years to well over a hundred has
people scared - by the time they get thawed, will they
be able to adapt? Alcor makes it clear on their
website that cryonics is a last in, first out
business.
 Thinking of Alcor brings up another point - Alcor and
Cryonics International have different approaches and
pricing, and postings on the net from supporters of
each approach can only serve to muddy the water and
raise people's doubts as to how feasible cryonics is.
 One final point, again referring to fiction -
Clifford D Simak wrote a fine novel called "Why call
them back from heaven?" where the world's industry is
mostly owned by the gigantic trust fund for people
who've been cryopreserved. Everyone is busy trying to
save for an eternal,immortal future. The main
character is an ambulance repair technician who's
negligence causes an ambulance to fail to reach
someone in time to preserve them. For this negligent
homicide, he is sentenced to death - the chip that
monitors his life signs and summons the cryonics team
when he dies is removed. On his travels as a man
doomed to die, he meets religious people with an
objection to immortality, and uncovers a plot to
suppress information that shows there is not enough
space to restore everyone who's ever been preserved.
This book shows one vision of the world could be
affected if everyone, en masse, opts for cryonics.

Tom


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