If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout

Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by nradov on Thursday April 28, 2016 @06:09PM (#11592270)

Let us know when someone successfully revives a frozen rodent. Until then this stuff is just idle speculation, on par with worrying about the "fallout" from an alien invasion.

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by loader on Thursday April 28, 2016 @06:30PM (#11592366)

If, in 20 years, they discover how to revive a frozen rodent, it would still be worth it to freeze it today.

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by nradov on Thursday April 28, 2016 @08:03PM (#11592831)

Why? I doubt we'll have a shortage of lab animals in 20 years.

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by FeepingCreature on Friday April 29, 2016 @06:43AM (#11594831)

I mean the argument for cryo basically goes "if, in 60 years, we discover how to revive frozen people, we'll probably wish we could go back and tell the people of 2016 to start freezing everybody who's dying right away. So since the only ways to avoid this outcome are total stagnation and mass extinctions that kill us _anyways_, we should probably allocate some money to doing that."

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by eli_gottlieb on Saturday April 30, 2016 @02:47PM (#11602985)

Money is finite. Given the available evidence, I'd rather spend it on universal health-care for the poor than on scientifically unsupported medical treatments. Besides which, the largest boosts to life-expectancy have tended to come from public health interventions that cross-cut the age spectrum rather than end-of-life desperation measures anyway.

We'd all like to act as if each human life had infinite value, but unfortunately, we don't have infinite resources to act with.

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by FeepingCreature on Sunday May 01, 2016 @12:05AM (#11604819)

Eh, if you factor in economy of scale cryonics can arguably be competetive with end-of-life desperation measures or actually save money.

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by eli_gottlieb on Sunday May 01, 2016 @12:16AM (#11604847)

Possibly, but my point was that the actually-effective measures come decades before end-of-life.

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by Kinnard on Thursday April 28, 2016 @06:27PM (#11592347)

No one frozen has been revived yet, but animals cooled have been and the procedure is being tested on human trauma victims in hospitals now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Res...

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by tim333 on Thursday April 28, 2016 @06:52PM (#11592462)

There's not much you can do today about future alien invasions. You can however freeze today.

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by nradov on Thursday April 28, 2016 @08:02PM (#11592826)

I could also pray to Zeus to grant me eternal life. It would be cheaper, and have exactly the same probability of success.

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by tim333 on Friday April 29, 2016 @06:33AM (#11594797)

We differ on the probabilities. If you think of the brain as a biological computer then saying freezing is hopeless is a bit like saying keeping the hard drive from a broken computer is hopeless because you have zero chance of ever getting the data off.

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Re:If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout by tempestn on Friday April 29, 2016 @06:46AM (#11594845)

I think most "believers" in cryopreservation would agree that it's a long shot. Even if restoration is theoretically possible, a lot of things need to line up for it to actually happen for an individual. But as you say, there's a significant difference between unlikely and impossible (which I'm going to assume is what was meant by praying to Zeus). The hard drive probably has rather better chances than the frozen brain though.

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