Yes, it is expensive, as your freezer has to be set at temperatures below -80°C/-112°F, down to -196°C/-321°F, and maintained this way for decades without single interruption.
This requires expensive equipment and draws insane amounts of power, and also necessitates multiple power backups.
TIL things still get hot in space under direct sunlight. I always assumed space would be cold even in sunlight but apparently not.
anyway, I would think you could still be in a sunlit orbit as long as you had a reflective shield for shading. You'll probably still need power to maintain temps and monitor status, so solar energy would still be helpful.
Fun fact! During the Apollo flights to and from the Moon, the spacecraft would perform “Passive Thermal Control” or “barbecue roll” where it would rotate around its long axis about once per hour, to distribute the thermal load from the sun and keep one side from heating up too much
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I don't think we need to understand tge structure. Just create a fidel digital copy and run it according to electrochemical rules we have from physics and I believe a largely intact consciousness will emerge.
But wouldn't understanding the structure assist is rebuilding a mechanical version and, thus, recreating the consciousness into an artificial mechanism (such as a Terminator-esque android)?
It depends what you mean by "understand". If we have an intact digital connectome and we execute its circuitry in the right kind of simulator. A consciousness would ptobably emerge out of it. But I wouldn't call this "understanding". Trillion neurons and other structures are so complex and interwined, it strains the very idea of "understanding" how it works.
At least not without major aids to break it down into smaller easier to understand chunks.
That's fair. I do make a distinction between understanding how something works and why something works. Making it work the way you describe, to me at least, is understanding enough of how it works to be able to reproduce it, even if we don't yet understand why it works. Until we understand this science, it's magic.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
