Let It Go
May 28, 2024 2:01 AM   Subscribe

That all sounds scientific and careful. But is it really science or just applying scientific tools to a fantasy proposition? Is it possible to freeze the human body and revive it decades later? Currently, it’s not remotely plausible. Will it ever be? That’s probably an open question. As it stands now, cryonics is a bizarre intersection of scientific thinking and wishful thinking. from Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality [BigThink] [CW: Not Safe for Breakfast]
posted by chavenet (29 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
ice, ice adult
posted by HearHere at 2:04 AM on May 28 [9 favorites]


A chilling tale…
posted by UhOhChongo! at 3:41 AM on May 28 [3 favorites]


I think it was Niven who posited a future society capable of recovering the personality/memories of a corpsicle and inserting them in a condemned convict, then forcing the “new” person to work off the costs of the procedure by being sent on one way trips to colonize the stars.

“I had great investments in gold and other valuable commodities!
Yeah, we can transmute matter now, so those were worthless centuries ago.”
posted by funkaspuck at 3:58 AM on May 28 [5 favorites]


No mention of Ted Williams?
posted by R. Mutt at 4:30 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]


Thanks for this - looking forward to reading it.

One of my favorite things to run on 'This American Life" - and an exemplary piece of the high California gothic - focuses on a cryonics failure in the late 1970s.

Protagonist Bob Nelson later wrote a truly one-of-a-kind memoir about it.
posted by ryanshepard at 4:32 AM on May 28 [5 favorites]


Ah - seeing now that Nelson is a focus here as well. The "Chatsworth incident" looms large in cryonics history.
posted by ryanshepard at 4:38 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]


so his body was in rotten shape — no pun intended

there is a special hell where the writers who note that a clearly intended pun was not so intended and the editors that let it through are stitched together in pairs, human-centipede style, and they're both the front and the back of the centipede at the same time
posted by logicpunk at 4:50 AM on May 28 [8 favorites]


Ah the old human-centipede ouroboros.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:04 AM on May 28 [5 favorites]


Golf clap for the thread title.
posted by groda at 5:13 AM on May 28 [5 favorites]


Ah the old human-centipede ouroboros.

From the description, it sounds more like a human-millipede ouroboros with all those tiny feet stamping in ever tightening circles.
posted by y2karl at 6:23 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]


Cryonics may not have preserved any people, but it did give us Frozen Dead Guy Days.

My favorite cryonics story is of course the ST:NG episode wherein a thawed capitalist asshole learns that he's busted flat, and Data makes a country music friend.
posted by emjaybee at 6:52 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]


Despite the content warning, I was not prepared for the mention of chainsaws. But it did convince me that this is the most pseudo of pseudosciences.
posted by tommasz at 7:01 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]


Cryogenic storage is all its cracked up to be then!
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:27 AM on May 28 [4 favorites]


Button!
A Russian cryogenics company stores not only people but pets, including one entry under rodents, a deceased chinchilla named Button.
posted by Glinn at 8:11 AM on May 28 [3 favorites]


All I know is that Ted Williams was never frozen by a screwball during his playing career...
posted by AJaffe at 10:06 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]


I never did understand the endgame for these people. Even supposing all of this works (which it absolutely does not, as detailed in the article), reviving a frozen person is never going to be trivial. So who's going to bother doing it?

Sure, if we had a 17th century French minor aristocrat on ice we might wake them up to ask a few questions, but what if we had a thousand? Why would it be in anyone's interest to revive them all? They're just going to demand their estates be returned to them, which ain't happening, and then what? They retrain for the modern job market? They go on welfare? They're now indentured servants to the person who paid for their revivification?
posted by echo target at 10:14 AM on May 28 [11 favorites]




Yeah, limitations of the technology aside (*cough*), I assume that legally, these people are all dead and I'd be extremely surprised that even the most robust of wills would provide a good legal framework for bringing them back to life in a way they'd be happy with. Maybe there's a trust that is good enough to pay the people involved in maintenance of the corpse for a long time, but I suspect it's going to get a lot harder for people to not eventually redistribute that wealth as the people that cared about it originally all eventually bite the dust as well.
posted by Aleyn at 11:40 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]


As this thread and the one about rich dudes building deepsea sumbersibles reveal, rich people have too much time on their hands and too much money they will blow on crackpot schemes like cryogenics. I propose we help them out with the money part and do something useful with it like curing cancer.

Absent that, their frostburned corpses could be ground up and used for fertilizer once we're tired of keeping them. Unless the stuff that got pumped into them is toxic. In which case, maybe yeet them into the Sun.
posted by emjaybee at 11:50 AM on May 28 [2 favorites]


Yes! We have party ice!

"Where the elite meet to beat the heat and avoid having to meet St. Pete"
posted by chavenet at 12:11 PM on May 28 [6 favorites]


Issue # 8 of Transmetropolitan had a take on reviving the frozen. Feel free to pass because of, well, Warren Ellis.
posted by Eikonaut at 12:13 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]


The ideas behind cryogenics are so old. We've known for decades that you just cannot repair frozen tissue this way. We've also known that we're not going to be building a post-scarcity society that would allow somebody to step in from the past without taking on significant debt or wage slavery. Futurama is, what, 25 years old?

What hurts is seeing parents do this. I saw an incredibly sad documentary on Netflix not long ago about a couple who lost their little girl to brain cancer sometime in the past ten years and had her cryopreserved. They eventually had another daughter -- and gave her the same name. I hope they manage to heal.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:13 PM on May 28 [5 favorites]


they had no problem reviving miles monroe.
posted by rude.boy at 12:36 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]


Even supposing all of this works (which it absolutely does not, as detailed in the article), reviving a frozen person is never going to be trivial. So who's going to bother doing it?

Generally speaking, if it were possible, then would be a form of necessary medical care, and providing necessary medical care for everyone who needs it is the right thing to do. Barring that particular future utopia, you'd see it pursued by the future version of the same people today who are interested in cryonics and life extension in general. Not necessarily as altruism, but as something similar to choosing cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma.

That requires two things: revival to become possible, and a certain set of ideas to persist into the future. The former seems very unlikely with currently available preservation techniques, and I think the likelyhood of the latter is up for debate.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:25 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]


it sounds more like a human-millipede ouroboros

Total derail, but I have been on the human-millipede train (hah) for over a decade now. Unfortunately, when searching for my old comment I found one even earlier that had the same sentiment.

To un-derail, maybe the unfreezing is the actual end-game of Roko's Basilisk. You had the hubris to cryogenically freeze yourself, so now we will awaken you an torture you for all eternity just because we can.
posted by Literaryhero at 9:30 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]


Generally speaking, if it were possible, then would be a form of necessary medical care, and providing necessary medical care for everyone who needs it is the right thing to do.

I'd like to think moral imperatives are eternal and unchanging, but I imagine that having access to technology which can reverse death would, of necessity, result in a change to our sense of what our moral obligations are to others.

Like, a lot of our sense of what medical care it is necessary to provide to others is based on the avoidance of permanent damage (including untimely death). If no damage is permanent, then suddenly there's a lot less urgency. I can totally see a society with dewars full of frozen heads deciding that, hey, they've hung out this long in effective suspended animation (or death, if you prefer), and there's no really good reason to bring them back now instead of, say in a few centuries.
posted by jackbishop at 4:09 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]


I think our only shot at immortality is probably to digitize our brains, like in Pantheon. We're still probably a long way from that. Who knows, maybe one day we'll find a way for our bodies to regenerate themselves indefinitely. Probably not in time for me to live until we achieve fully automated luxury space communism, which is too bad. Oh well, I'll have to make the most of the next 40-odd years I guess.
posted by signsofrain at 9:22 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]


I saw an incredibly sad documentary on Netflix not long ago about a couple who lost their little girl to brain cancer sometime in the past ten years and had her cryopreserved

But her brain... the cancer... the brain cancer... how did they think...?
posted by clawsoon at 9:37 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]


clawsoon: here's an article about them. Like I say, I hope they can heal, but I don't see how that happens without acceptance. On the other hand, God knows that losing a child is the worst of all things, so I can't judge.

I heard a pretty great podcast about cryonics not long ago -- Frozen Head. It's got the beats of a true crime podcast, even though most of the stuff that happens is at least debatably legal, even if it shouldn't be.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:19 AM on May 30 [1 favorite]


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