Would you be cryogenically frozen?

[dvb]

I'm curious to know who'd be interested in getting frozen so that they could some day wake up in the future and be facinated by all the advances in technology and space travel.

Wouldn't it be fun?

Let me know your opinions!

I for 1 would jump at the chance if I was on my deathbed.

[Humphrey]

Problem is it won't work.

When your cells freeze, the expanding ice inside them litterally tears apart the cellular membrane. Even if they thaw you, moanyk, if not all of your cells will be dead and ripped apart. Not a good thing. .

[dvb]

Ahh you're correct. But some scientists in nanotechnology believe that they'll 1 day be able to repair the cellular damage. We haven't come that far yet, but they believe in another 20 years or so, the technology will have evolved to this state.

[gethen]

Didn't vote for any of the choices. When it's time to go, I plan to just go. Whatever happens to the body later is not a big concern. I won't be needing it. :wink:

[Mr. X]

Very very very near death, I would probably do it.

I'm one of those cling to life however you can in the last minute like you're really really desperate types. Anything that remotely increases my probabilities to walk the earth again no matter how far fetched is always welcome, at least more than death in my book.

Besides having:

19XX - 20XX
22XX - 26XX
31XX - ?

On your tombstone is priceless.
Or how about rising from your bed and saying: "I live... again!"

Like so much things biological, the snag we hit now will most likely be circumvented in the far future, even the one related to freezing.

[Normandy6644]

Nice Army of Darkness reference Mr. X.

What I don't understand is the people who only freeze their heads. What good is that?!?!? I know the idea is that they will put your head on someone else's body, but when it comes down to it, is that really living your own life anymore, or just borrowing?

[Mr. X]

Normandy6644:

Thanks!

They consider that what they "are" is their brain. The rest is just baggage. So if they could just ditch your withered old body, take some poor sap's youthful body, ditch his brain and put yours in it you'd be happier like this.

I can't say I disagree. There's something tempting about having my head moved around from body to body every 50 years or so.

[Sever]

But what if the world ended while you were in stasis?

[dvb]

That's the chance you take. The world could end tomorrow, and we wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

Life is a gamble, and if no one ever took risks, then we wouldn't be where we are today.

What I don't understand is the people who only freeze their heads. What good is that?!?!? I know the idea is that they will put your head on someone else's body, but when it comes down to it, is that really living your own life anymore, or just borrowing?

I've heard people say that the mind and body are 1. In other words every living cell in our body retains memory and is a part of us. If we stuck our head on someone elses body, we might begin to have memories that the previous posessor of that body had. I know it all sounds crazy, but they had some doctor on Opera once that was talking about people having memory relapses of things that never happened to them, but happened to people that they received organ transplants from.

All really freaky stuff! Just freeze my body thanks.

[Normandy6644]

Wow that is pretty crazy. I still find something creepy about my head sitting in the freezer. I'm gone when I'm gone!

[pteranodon]

I don't have any expertise in this field but how would they avoid DNA and protein degradation caused by oxygen? :-k

[Chuck]

They'd keep you in a tank of liquid nitrogen so you wouldn't decay. Freezing just the head is cheaper. In the future they can take a DNA sample from your head and grow you a new body from it.

It seems unlikely to work but if it doesn't then you just stay dead. Since you're dead already you have nothing to lose.

What it really does is make the dying feel better by giving them some hope of recovery.

[Mr. X]

A what-if kind of situation. It can't get much worse than it is at that point, huh?

[TinFoilHat]

Cryogenic freezing is an expensive scam. Nobody frozen today is going to be revived, barring utterly magic technology.

I plan on being cremated. That way, I won't be resurrected until nanotechnology has advanced enough to reconstruct me from a handful of ashes. I see this as being only slightly harder than reviving a dead body which has had every cell ruptured and every synapse seperated.

[pteranodon]

Cryogenic freezing is an expensive scam. Nobody frozen today is going to be revived, barring utterly magic technology.

I plan on being cremated. That way, I won't be resurrected until nanotechnology has advanced enough to reconstruct me from a handful of ashes. I see this as being only slightly harder than reviving a dead body which has had every cell ruptured and every synapse seperated.

=D> I second that.

[Ikyoto]

Cremation is the way I'm going as well. Freezing to "cheat" death is an action of pure fear and (IMO) selfishness.

Why fear what you do not know. If there is something after death, and you've lived as well as you can, what is there to fear. If there is nothing after death, why worry?

Selfishness? Yup. The resources needed to preserve a body or even a head are pretty substantial, to say nothing of the population problems we are already facing.

Cremate my carcass, mix the ashes in with cement and pour it into a mold for a bench... Then donate me to a school for wayward girls!

[Sigma_Orionis]

I remember in the 70s and early 80s there were all sorts of rumors of celebrities being frozen when they were near death,Walt Disney and Aristotle Onassis among others. Of course none of this was true. Since it was always mentioned as rumors do "services" like this actually exist? Does somebody actually offer you to freeze you when you are about to die?

[Chuck]

http://www.alcor.org

[pteranodon]

They'd keep you in a tank of liquid nitrogen so you wouldn't decay. Freezing just the head is cheaper. In the future they can take a DNA sample from your head and grow you a new body from it.

It seems unlikely to work but if it doesn't then you just stay dead. Since you're dead already you have nothing to lose.

What it really does is make the dying feel better by giving them some hope of recovery.

Well, in tis case I think oxygen will get dissolved in the fluid anyway, just retarding the decay process.

[banquo's_bumble_puppy]

Freeze me now. Maybe my life will be better in the year 3000. Planet Xpress here I come....

[Sigma_Orionis]

http://www.alcor.org

I am almost sorry I asked, thanks for the info!

[dvb]

I don't think that my wanting to be frozen is out of cheating death or selfishness. I want to know what the world will be like in 100-200 years from now. Provided we don't blow ourselves up that is.

Who knows what's to come.

Maybe we'll have colonized mars, and space travel could become mainstream.

I'm an optimistic person, so I tend to look at the bright side of things.

[mike alexander]

Me? No.

The idea of magical nanotechnology to fix all the freezing damage is rather simpleminded, anyhow. The smarter way would be to find a way to solidify the carcass as a glass to avoid the ice damage in the first place. And I would use liquid helium. Colder the better.

Another problem is that it takes a finite time to freeze and thaw, and the likelyhood of doing it fast enough and uniformly enough seems vanishingly small.

On the other hand, some insects and amphibians can freeze solid and then recover. A mammalian brain strikes me as unlikely to survive such a process under any circumstances.

[§rv]

I don't see the need to be frozen...then again I believe in reincarnation.....However, I chose that I would live forever even though I don't want to. Just think about it, wouldn't you get a tad bit bored by this mundane life over the next few hundred years. Whenever I have to go, I will gladly do so.

[pteranodon]

I don't see the need to be frozen...then again I believe in reincarnation.....However, I chose that I would live forever even though I don't want to. Just think about it, wouldn't you get a tad bit bored by this mundane life over the next few hundred years. Whenever I have to go, I will gladly do so.

=D> =D> =D> =D>
(I believe in reincarnation too)

[jkmccrann]

Cryogenic freezing is an expensive scam. Nobody frozen today is going to be revived, barring utterly magic technology.

I plan on being cremated. That way, I won't be resurrected until nanotechnology has advanced enough to reconstruct me from a handful of ashes. I see this as being only slightly harder than reviving a dead body which has had every cell ruptured and every synapse seperated.

You just never know TinFoil!

In any case, I think living forever is waaay overated, although, if it came with a fountain of youth, maybe........hmmmmmmmmmmmm

[Heid the Ba']

No. Life is a tiny sliver of light between two eternities of darkness. I can cope with that.

[SolusLupus]

I'm for living for eternity. For selfish reasons, so I can experience as much as possible out of life, and enjoy as much as possible out of life -- to be able to do all that I could possibly do and want to do. Selflessly, so I can provide a benefit for other pepole through my personal experience throughout my life.

I don't understand why people assume that you must be afraid of death to desire an eternity of life. I'm not afraid of death. Everyone else dies, why shouldn't I?

However, I also think that there is an end positive result for immortality, and that one day technology will allow immortality to not only become a reality, but also to have the resources and technology to support such life (to prevent the problems of overpopulation).

As for Cryogenics... eh. Maybe it'll work someday, maybe it won't. C'est la vie, really. However, when I die (since it's very unlikely I will ever get to experience the grace of immortality), I hope to be cremated and have my ashes spread across the world. Much better than "taking up space" in graveyards. (Ugh, I hate graveyards - so much space taken up by matter that has no use!)

[farmerjumperdon]

Absolutely not. Turnover is the natural order of things. When your turn is up, be a good citizen and exit gracefully. I think most people come to accept it by the time their physical being is about to expire. None of my grandparents were fighting death at the end - they went with dignity and were fine that they had lived their life and it was time to move on. I'd guess all of the currently frozen people were mentally unstable (or at least egotistical to an extreme) to some degree and could not come to terms with the natural end to their life.

[SolusLupus]

I'd guess all of the currently frozen people were mentally unstable (or at least egotistical to an extreme) to some degree and could not come to terms with the natural end to their life.

And I could say that you're mentally unstable for accepting death. Immediately assuming someone's mentally unstable because they happen to disagree with you, your grandparents, or whatever, is insulting and rather Ad Hominem.

I like to think that I'm not mentally unstable, and I support the idea of immortality. However, considering that you seem to have made up your judgement ("If they disagree with me, they're mentally unstable"), there's no way I can say anything without you merely pinning that label onto me.

Also, there's the fact that you can't really argue with them. So, because you can't discuss their viewpoints, you immediately assume the worst (that they're mentally unstable or egotistical to the extreme). I wouldn't want someone doing that to me -- assuming the worst of my motivations and/or mental processes merely because someone isn't able to discuss with me my motivations.

I think you can guess why that would annoy me.