You know I love the idea of cryostasis, and the idea of reanimating people after death is great.
But why the fuck would future humans bother bringing all these people back, even if they could? Even if they have a utopian society free of scarcity and inequality, they would be bringing back mostly rich people who lived in a super different and bad time and have literally nothing positive to contribute to the utopian future, since they were a large part of the problems of today in the first place. Plus the vast majority of them are almost certainly elitist assholes who nobody in a utopia would want to be around.
Maybe it would be a humanitarian thing, but if these people are dead and frozen there’s no real imperative to do this to end suffering or something. Or I guess maybe bringing them back to try and figure out what the hell their damage is that they felt ruining everything was a better option than working toward the betterment of all… but they’d only need a few brains in vats for that, no bodies, so sucks to suck, cryofolks.
If future humans don’t have a utopian society, the only real use for people from so long ago that I can come up with would be research subjects or slaves. And frankly there are easier ways to go about getting those…
So I see no possible future where people who cryopreserve get brought back en masse. Even if it’s entirely possible to surmount the technical hurdles.
To answer the questions of archeologists, obviously
And historians
And kindness.
Exellent point, @[email protected].
I said kindness, not useless.
why would future humans bother bringing all these people back
i think it’s worth reminding why doctors treat people now, in this time and space. they do it mostly because they want to save people. maybe a few do it for money, but past a certain point, the money isn’t why you do it. i think it’s a safe bet that doctors of a future would see these corpses as patients, and act accordingly. an analogy - think how we see heart attack victims as patients, and not how our medieval ancestors would have seen them (as corpses)
…literally nothing positive to contribute to the utopian future…
true, but, a good chunk of patients in hopsital today have nothing to contribute to society, and cannot contribute any more, whatsoever. we treat them anyway, because that’s what we do. humans have consistently cared for others that are sick and have “nothing to contribute” throughout history, and that shows no sign of going away anytime soon
Lmao, remember that revived 80’s douchbag business man on star trek TNG?
He actually appeared
again in a later episodein a couple TNG novelizations.He managed to adapt and fit in to Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, but eventually was called on to use his 1900s business prowess in
negotiationsbecoming Earth’s Ambassador to Ferenginar, and then eventually was named the Secretary of Commerce for at least two different Earth Presidents.*edit, I lied. I’m sorry for misleading you all, you gave me your trust and I squandered it.
I mean, he has the skillset. Honestly probably startled the shit out of the first negotiation.
that’s so based hoo lee I must’ve missed that one gotta do a rewatch
My only regret is that I have boneitis.
Medical research from before whatever plague or virus infects everybody.
Don’t they have problems today studying effects of microplastics because they can’t find a control group of humans who don’t have microplastics in them?
Though that’s a pretty grim future for the rich frozen elite.
Ever read Transmetropolitan? It has a whole sub-arc on just the absolute lack of concern that a future society would have for this resurrection obligation/burden imposed on them.
A friend of mine is so much a fan of Transmetropolitan that he has a spider tattoo on his head in the same place.
He kinda looks like the character to begin with, but with the ink and a bit of cosplay, combined with a shitty fake accent, it’s almost like he sprang from the pages lol
It is extremely unlikely that humanity can survive neoliberalism still long enough to birth that world. I think the sterile coming future will not view human life as a burdensome excess to be disposed of like so much effluvia.
we’d do it cause it’d be funny even if they weren’t tortured or nothing. can you imagine a little asshole running around the utopia being like “no, no, I’m supposed to own things, where are my stocks, where are my numbers, no!”. probably it’d suck that all their friends are deade though. I’m sure you thaw a couple cause the have rare diseases or certain kinds of DNA though.
Deade
But why the fuck would future humans bother bringing all these people back, even if they could?
Because they don’t have rights, so no one will care when we upload their brains into street sweeping robots. If you’re lucky, you’ll get uploaded into an interstellar probe.
Someone should write a book about that, or even a series of books. A series I should reread before the 5th book comes out.
Oh sweet, 5th is confirmed
Lucky? From some of the other comments it sounds like you may be referencing something, but just taking the comment at face value, there is no way that is not the most horrific fate I can possibly imagine.
Assuming you’re not conscious the entire time and only ‘wake up’ when you enter a solar system to study, it’s still horrific. You wake up, completely alone. You have no body and cannot move, and your attention is directed toward gathering data on some distant points of light. When you understand what’s going on, sure, there’s a bit of a sense of wonder…but it quickly becomes tedium, maddening, isolated tedium, as you slowly drift through a star system, gathering data on each planet and its star, over the course of fifty years or so. There’s certainly bits of interesting stuff, but we are still talking insane levels of isolation and boredom. Assuming you’re somehow prevented from going insane by the software in order to keep you functional, you can’t even escape into madness.
…and then we imagine what happens if you aren’t shown the mercy of being conscious only during the few decades the probe is drifting through a solar system. What if you’re conscious the. entire. time. Once you’re in deep interstellar space, you’re alone. Able to think, perceive, experience, but in an unchanging, static existence. A year passes, and everything is so close to exactly the same that only with the precision of the measurements your tools can take can you determine there’s been any change. Ten years pass, then a hundred, a thousand. You drift, slowly, through interstellar space toward a destination impossibly far away, all while you wait, conscious, unable to die, unable to escape into madness, just…eternal…waiting. Until thankfully you finally enter a target solar system, get a few blessed decades of what, to your new perspective, seems like frantic activity. Something, finally, to do, to see, that actually changes. And then…you drift back out into interstellar space after a few gravity-assisted slingshots around this star system’s worlds, only to proceed on to your next destination, another several thousand year journey away.
This is, by far, the most horrific imaginable torture.
https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse
You have the entire wealth of human knowledge to consume in your journey, you can “frame jack” so the rate at which you experience time is variable, you have access to atomic 3D Printers, you were an engineer in your previous life, so after studying up on every science, you invent FTL communication. You also do a few things like cloning yourself, terraforming planets, saving the human race a few times, saving alien races once or twice.
It’s a good book series.
Give me a video game library for the down time and I’d sign up.
That’s because you’re thinking in term of a society that views most people as a burdensome and undesirable liability. Something we wish we could get rid of faster if possible. It might be tgat in the future, human minds aren’t as poisoned by clubofrome population omb neoliberal billionaire thinking.
Soon as those hurdles are surmounted, armies will train then freeze conscripts. Only thawing when they need meat for the grinder, or when better weapons come out that need more training.
That’s the only way they get brought back en masse.
This is literally what happens to Helldivers in Helldivers 2. As much as I enjoy the game I’d rather not have Super Earth become a reality.
That sounds like slaves with extra steps, so that tracks with my thoughts.
Tho that seems like a massively dystopian waste of resources when they could just build robots, which surely they will be able to do if they can reanimate humans.
So yeah, that’s likely.
Humans are easier to indoctrinate than sapient robots, because human biases are predictable.
Fascist politician: the Jews are stealing your money to cause the downfall of your race! They’re even breeding your children with black people to destroy you!
Human reaction: yeah, that makes sense
Robot reaction: …why tho?
Robots may still have biases, but they probably won’t be exactly the same as a human’s. I doubt a robot would care for a “think of the children” argument
I think they’re frozen before they’re dead, so the reason to bring them back would be to not do that murder thing, and also to fulfill contractual obligations, and as a business showcase to the world that you’re ready to receive more customers for a freeze and bring you back service instead of a freeze and kill you service.
Admittedly I don’t know much about cryopreservation (looked into it many years ago as a curiosity) but my understanding, and the article says the same, is that they clinically die first and then it’s a rush to preserve them before too much breakdown happens. Since it’s quite expensive, most people only preserve their brain or head, which is removed before being frozen. I’m not sure legally they would be able to do this pre-death, since the harvesting/preserving would directly cause death as we currently understand and classify it, and assisted euthanasia of any flavor is illegal in most places.
Don’t worry the people performing the preservation don’t know much about it either.
That’s true.
I once read a sci-fi story (I don’t recall the title) that posed the same question you are asking. The short answer is “Historians would want to revive at least some of the frozen”.
Also, assuming mass media entertainment still exists in the future, I can see a reality show being created where someone is revived and cameras follow him around as he tries to adapt to the future.
But why the fuck would future humans bother bringing all these people back, even if they could?
There are many valid issues to raise with this bring unlikely to work, but this point seems silly. Why would a road maintenance worker fix a pothole, he’s not from around and will never benefit from it? Because it’s his job he’s paid to do, and he’s not having a philosophical discussion about it. Whatever future lab technician will be just going to work in the morning as well, paid by their company, funded by the money the preserved people paid. There isn’t much to it.
But it’s interesting you said that future humans would kill these people because the preserved people are useless assholes. I’m not that sure you labeled the assholes right in your scenario. Your future humans seem ageist and elitist, thinking only they deserve to live.
There is at least one example I remember from the news of a 20-something girl with cancer being preserved, paid for by pooling money from the family and donations. Unlikely to work but she would have died anyway. So what did she do wrong that she doesn’t deserve to be woken up, in your future where the technology is there?
To try them for crimes against humanity?
A financial, legal, or even just a tit-for-tat incentive is realistically all it would take. You assume that some utopia that has shed those ideas is the only one capable of such technology.
In reality, it’s greed and self-preservation that is running this show, and this is all that is needed to produce awe-inspiring feats.
I don’t see a future utopia (or non-utopian) society a thousand years from now feeling at all compelled by a legal agreement between two independent parties a millennium ago. The law firms that set up the contracts will be long gone, the legal framework that established them will have evolved if not been replaced completely. I mean, compare where we are now with where “we” were in 1024, and then think about how much more quickly things change today. Any money is going to be more meaningless than 11th century money, but with no collector’s value since they’re just numbers in a database that probably won’t even exist in a thousand years.
I think we can legitimately view having your body/head frozen in the hopes of being woken up as a tech version of the Catholic last rites.
okay but how do you establish any of those incentives with people who simply don’t exist? eventually the agreements fall apart as all parties involved are either dead or cryostatic, and the agreements will have to compel someone who was never party to them to take some sort of action. Like, I guess you could put a reward in trust but even then you’d need some sort of legal entity to manage and distribute it that would, itself, need an incentive in trust in order to continue, and so on in an infinite regression.
I certainly don’t think a utopia is the only option and even have a bit in there about non-utopian societies.
Utopian societies that are post-scarcity are just the most likely to have the resources and desire, and even then I’m not seeing it as realistic.
And how are you going to incentivize something decades or centuries down the line? I’m not seeing that one working either.
Star Trek episode, Picard was pissed they got thawed
Probably by some deal of interest on a trust that is forfeit if the tech exists and they don’t get reanimated. Money and a protective cocoon of law and beaurocracy gets it done. I am sure they (or their lawyers) had already considered your argument.
I’m for reaimmating them to have them stand trial for their crimes. I’m hopeful for a brighter future, but I’m also hopeful people won’t lose their unrelenting pettiness. It’s part of what makes us human.
But most societies that would try them will have prisons so nice that they make our prisons look like medieval prisons.
Well, if their society is more advanced so will be their justice. I’m ok with that.
“Why would a society bring people back to life when they [describes why you think they deserve to die]”
Happy to know you’re not going to be solely responsible for bringing them back!
Is that what Walt Gisnep is right now?
Disney will soon announce the new movie Soup in an attempt to take over the top search results of “Disney Soup”.
So that’s why it’s called Frozen!
Let it goo
Ugh. Terrible. I love it!
To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised
Gisnep
Is this a thing I’m not aware of, or just a very strange typo?
Clearly says Walt Gisnep.
I’ll give you the p, but in which world is that a G?
it’s mirrored
Oh, because things are not the things that they are.
Why not Malt?
Malt Disney, the good version of Walt.
Dyslexia
Still looks more like a G than a D to me.
Ain’t nothin’ but a G thang
That makes no sense. Why would it be read mirrored?
ωal⅂ Әisnep
… or perhaps ⧢al7?
Lol i was one minute slower than you
That ‘y’ has pissed me off since i was a child. I was always baffled as to why it was spelt Disnep but pronounced Disney, especially while learning digraphs at school and it didnt fit in with any of the sounds the letter combinations were supposed to make.
Well, that’s what their logo says, I don’t know what to tell you
Funny, i know the answer because i just recently ran into that meme. Simple meme about how Walt Disney’s trademark signature looks like “Gisnep”, . I get the “p” part, and i guess the “D” does looks like a backwards “G”.
Thank you, I knew I must have been missing something. I can see the P, but the G makes no sense to me. Walp Disnep.
This is how I write my gs, if that helps
Same here when writing cursive, but Walt’s D still doesn’t look anything like that to me.
It’s pretty similar to a hasty cursive g
I’d wager they meant Walt Disney.
Indeed, but it was spelled that way deliberately.
I see it now! Thanks for the nudge.
Inside Out was inspired by an exec sneaking a peak at his head (jk?)
Humans are particularly difficult to preserve because of the delicate structure in (most of) our heads.
Nonsense. We are just too big to be frozen quickly enough that no ice crystals emerge. Every living thing turns to slush if frozen normally.
Yea. Turns out the biggest creature you can freeze and thaw again (in strict lab conditions) is a hamster, anything bigger just dies.
And that’s how we got microwave ovens. (For real, see the Tom Scott video)
Wonder what the icon caption he uses for this one is?
“SCIENCE played GOD here (and thank your stomachs they did)”
That was a (pardon the pun) cool read, if a bit morbid.
Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people — who may or may not have suffered thaw damage — into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a “puzzle.” After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.
Grooooooooosssssss
yeah, that’s not how you compost.
… well, someone had a wind night & then in the morning when other people arrived urgently needed an excuse as to why the frozen corpses were paying twister, with party hats on & cocks drawn on their faces with markers.
Ever seen DMSO solidify upon cooling? I wouldn’t even call it vitrification, it obviously has macroscopically large crystalline domains. It would be like putting rocks in your veins. I mean it kind of works fine for single cells because the failures* can be treated as a statistic, but anything on the scale of organs will become damaged just too badly.
* See e.g. what happens to frozen sperm cells: “chromatin disruption through protamine translocations, DNA fragmentation, and lesions to genes involved in fertilization capability and embryonic development […] are known consequences of the cryopreservation process.”
Reminds me of the time when I was younger, scrolling rotten.com and came across that picture of the dude who died in the bath, but had this thing that kept the water warm, so he just turned into a giant human stew.
What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs taking a bath?
The reason I couldn’t eat stew for a decade?
Bob.
What if they’re nailed to the wall?
Art
Ok but what if they’re laying on your doorstep?
Matt
What do call their dog with no legs?
Hee hee it dont matter cuz he won’t come when you call him!
(I really love these jokes)
What about a woman with one leg and a speech impediment?
His name!
Username checks out
Bob?
Someone else from the old internet. I remember the post you speak of.
Oh yeah, 3000 years ago, I member too, def soup.
What a classic
A couple days ago my milk was all chunky when I tried to pour it in my cereal, because refrigerated air that was supposed to go to the fridge got blocked.
Milk wasn’t expired, just went bad due to a random mechanical issue over the course of the length of time the milk was being preserved.
Anyway, what’s all this about cryogenics?
Blocked by stuff or frozen up? If frozen, you may have a defrost timer problem.
It was blocked by frost so uhh does sound like that second thing.
Therefore, ice cream is impossible.
Did they get their money back? I didn’t read the article.
Well they’re dead
Wooooosh
It’s a generational loan. Their grandkids are paying
Reminds me of the Egyptian aristocracy, they would be pissed off if they knew their 4000 yo mummy will end up getting shown at a museum or destroyed by a tomb raider. But what would happen if they managed to revive them today, probably a temporary experiment on a lab, the pharaoh just lived in a closed environment for a couple of months and for most of modern day people it would be just some science news they scrolled by on tiktok
How about being ground up into powder and put into medicine? I’m sure they’d love that one.
or used for paint because the color is so nice
One of the more interesting aspects of history is the progression from the notion of a very limited and inaccessible resurrection of a body to the idea of a very accessible resurrection of the spirit/mind.
The latter is IMO probably best embodied (pun intended) in one of the early Christian apocrypha from a group that was known for rejecting the canonical focus on a physical resurrection of a body:
Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.
- Gospel of Thomas saying 108
It’s such a wild march of progress from kings trying to preserve their bodies to a tradition rejecting the Eucharist of consumption of a body in favor of a Eucharistic consumption of words and ideas to resurrect the essence of the individual.
And looking back from an age where we are literally seeing patents granted to trillion dollar companies around resurrecting the dead digitally, the “resurrection of words and ideas” crowd was more on to a practical tract of thinking than the “resurrect my goop” crowd.
In fact, the Egyptians when embalming themselves discarded their brains thinking it was garbage filling of the skull. Not exactly the best strategy in hindsight.
Doing a quick read up on Wikipedia, my memoories on Egyptian mummies’ brains getting removed was correct. That alone would mean the best they could achieve is cloning, without any memory retention.
destroyed by a tomb raider
And not even a sexy, big breasted one with skintight shirt and very short shorts.
destroyed by a tomb raider
*And not even a sexy, big POINTY breasted one with skintight shirt and very short shorts.
OG Lara, or nothing!
Most mummies we found we ate
Forbidden soup
If anyone is actually interested in learning how this works, this is a great blog post, from an author convinced like many that it’s a stupid thing for the rich, until… Well have a read: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
Very interesting article. Reminds me of when I read We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
So just to expand upon the article author’s one possible future of it being overwhelming which he briefly glosses over, please enjoy this animated reading of one of my favourite graphic novels: Transmetropolitan
The author tries to disprove that cryonics isn’t limited to rich people, while also pointing our the $200,000 upfront cost. Sure, a middle class American could probably swing the $300 annual fees, but most would be hard pressed for the $200k upfront cost.
The $300/year annual fees would be for a life insurance policy that already covers the main fee. There isn’t a 200k to pay in that case.
This article looks really juicy! I didn’t even really ever think about the difference between cryonics and cryogenics.
Rich people are truly fucking insane.
Everybody’s insane rich people just have the ability to act on it.
Fair.
They paid good money for those soup tubes.
I remember when i was a kid hearing about people being frozen like this. Even back then i figured the only thing the richies were buying was false hope. But though it gives me a bit of schadenfreude to see it fail (if i can’t be immortal too, feel me?), i get the urge to at least try to beat the odds. Even if it’s only a 0.000001% chance to beat death, who wouldn’t go all in if they had the means?
I have the urge to absolutely make sure I dont accidentally increase the odds of my survival.
Tho being turned into a fine smooth soup of heavy metal(s) and plastics sounds kind of a funny last request (but especially then I would have def ran out of fucks, you know, a compostable trash bag is fine).
Here’s a link to the article in the screenshot, in case anyone else was interested in reading it like I was: https://www.freethink.com/futurology/cryogenically-frozen-humans
Thanks for this. Quite gruesome, but not at all unexpected. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine a while back, where I made the argument that water expands when frozen and, since humans are mostly water, freezing a human would crack every vital organ. I’m actually upset to discover I was right.
This is true, which is why preservation does not involve freezing, except for the bad attempts in the 70s the article talks about, which could never work. The bodies are vitrified, not frozen.
Which still doesn’t mean it will work, the technology to revive them doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t have any freezing issue.
That actually doesn’t sound much better to me, but my understanding of vitrification is minimal, at best. Still cool, though.
there could be a way maybe, by freezing water while keeping it extremely pressurized (extremely), you can make “efficient ice” that occupies less space, called ice VII, I’m not kidding. It would cost literally billions of dollars so not yet feasible, but it keeps my sci-fi loving mind at ease.
Flash freezing can work, but it’s almost impossible for something as large as a human body.
Cryoprotectants also do this pretty efficiently – they prevent crystallization, which leads to “vitreous” ice, which has more or less the same structure as liquid water and so doesn’t expand much. I think they do use that when freezing people, but the problem is that even if you fill the blood vessels with pure ethylene glycol, it diffuses very slowly, and it takes hours to get into cells which are far from large blood vessels. They dont diffuse the cryoprotectant in that thoroughly, though, because that’d take so long the body would have started to decay too much.
Edit: oops, the article talks about vitrifying agents. They make it sound like they’re not effective, but as I said above, they’re very effective if you can get them in every nook and cranny of every cell, which is a losing battle.
It’s fine, as long as the temperature stays stable and no further damage is done. We’re not going to revive their flesh. Instead we’re going to chop them off in large chunks. Suspend them in a kind of agar. Then laser off 2nanometer at a time. Scan the surface with 1nm resolution PiFM or better method. That’s going to yield many terabytes of image data that you can turms into a neural map of the entire nervous system. Even mapping this data to today’s LLM would get something roughly able to speak like the corpse. The better this data processing gets the more real the resurrected sentiences will be.
That’s assuming the freezing process hasn’t irreparably damaged the brain structure, which I don’t think anybody can confidently assert at the moment.
This sounds pretty amazing. Do you have any sources (or process names that I can search)? I would love to read more into the LLM part of your statement. Seriously sounds like scifi, and I’m loving it.
Visible human project for the 1993 first experiment 2013 slice culture modeling of central nervous system 2019 visible human body slice segmentation method 2022 scalable mapping of myelin and neuron density inthe human brain with micrometer resolution
In fiction We are legion, we are Bob Fun book but novice writer
Probably covered by futurist youtuber isaac arthur, probably part of the mind upload episode
I’m familiar with some of those, but they don’t digitally map thought and then read that map. At least not the last time I looked into them… Do they now?
Here is something close to tge cutting edge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSG3_JvnCkU
What they are creating is a connectome. A list of all neurons and their connection.
They are down to 34nm slices.
I said 2nm because the smallest features are 5nm inside the gap between neurons called synapses.
Presumably, there are no features enconding information smaller than that in the brain.
But just the connectome might be enough to replicate a consciousness.
Very interesting! Maybe once we understand the structure, we can recreate what’s behind the structure. Not sure if that’s a good thing, but it certainly is intriguing.
Posting my favorite cryogenics story of all time.
As long as Simon Phoenix doesn’t get defrosted I’m good
Mellow greetings, sir. What seems to be your boggle?
MURDER DEATH KILL MURDER DEATH KILL MURDER DEATH KILL
Gazpacho, non-vegan.
But eating the rich is vegan, no?
Normally yes, because you can’t do more for nature & people than that.
But in this case it’s just too late, the rich already turned into regular (tho toxic) meat as it neared the end of its life.
Now, if you get a regular not-about-to-die rich and turn it into a smoothie, then yes, vegan gazpacho.
Theoretically with consent, assuming the consent based veganism.
They consented by being there, just how we’ve consented to the state and capitalism.
That’s good enough for me.
