Cryogenics

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Cryogenic freezing is nothing but a scam once your a frozen corpsicle you
are very dead, you will have as much life in you as a pint of frozen yogurt.

Fascinating video, suspended animation is much less science fiction then
cryogenics, since the mammalian diving response is so well documented.

You know those private lawn cemeteries where they promise to mow the lawn "forever"?

Well, what happens when they are full and have no more graves to sell?

Who is going to mow the lawn? Who is going to pay the property tax?

I guarantee that sooner or later you are going to get a shopping center built over your grave.

As for keeping your body in a tank of liquid nitrogen, seriously, how long do you think the company is going to be around?

My naive self only has a basic knowledge of cryogenics, but I think it is enough to allow me to give you my opinion on the matter. We (guys who know the process) for a fact that if an individual were to be frozen, they would have to be declared legally dead. But what is "death"? Is it a permanent cessation of existence or curable condition? How the f<fart> could we possibly know the answer to that question? It depends, really, on someone's perspective; it's all subjective. I, despite being an agnostic, am mixed on the idea of preserving the dead for future revival. Suppose a brain dead guy signed himself up to get put in a fridge prior to his mind completely sputtering out. What would be the point of preserving him so that his now nonexistent consciousness could be downloaded USB-style into a new body? It's like using Alex J. Murphy's corpse from RoboCop as a puppet instead of incorporating him into the cyborg suit. It just does not compute.

I am not a neurologist (only the cool kids got to residencies in neurology/neurosurgery), but I have a few thoughts:

The brain is (essentially) the only structure we are concerned with. Let's assume that we can develop artificial systems to keep the brain fed, oxygenated and electrolytically balanced after revival.

The anatomy of neurons does not seem to lend itself to long term suspended animation (cryogenics is just one subset of suspended animation). Neurons are fierce consumers of food energy and oxygen, the K-Na transfer across neuron membranes consumes enormous amounts of energy. Now, this activity cannot simply stop. A lack of neural activity could bring on synaptic drift and decay. Our strongest cognition and memory is associated with those synapses that fire most often.

To preserve the strength of synaptic function is not possible without the oxygen and chemical energy required to continue it, which requires metabolic activity. To expect indefinite suspension of metabolic activity without significant neuropathy, or synaptic dysfunction does not appear to me to be realist.

I suspect a "brain in a jar" model is going to present far greater potential for progress.

I'm going to play devils advocate here. Suppose you know that you are going to die anyway but you believe that, in the future after being frozen, there is a slight chance that you could be revived and cured of whatever ailment is threatening your life. At that point, I would think that some people would go for the cryogenic option just for the off chance that they could be revived while the prospect of not being revived wouldn't matter to them much. I mean, if you are not revived then the same thing will happen to you that would of happened to anyway.

I'm not making any statement about whether cryogenics would work or not, just trying to argue the point.

The premise of cryogenic freezing is that folks in the future will willing accept the burden of thawing out people and curing them of what ails them. That is very nervy. On what basis should we of the present impose our frozen carcasses on the not yet born?

ruveyn