Video The Cryonics Institute Offers a Chance at Immortality (Video #2) 155
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Today's interviewee is Cryonics Institute (CI) Director Andy Zawacki, who takes Slashdot's Robert Rozeboom into the facility where they keep the tanks with frozen people in them. Yesterday, Rob talked with David Ettinger, who is both the group's lawyer and the son of CI founder Robert Ettinger. For those of you who are obsessed with the process of vitrification, here's a link to a story about The Cryonics Institute's 69th Patient and how she was taken care of, starting at the moment of her deanimation (AKA death). The story has anatomical drawings, charts, and color pictures of Andy carrying out the actual procedure. But Cryonics, while endorsed as a concept by numerous scientists, may not be as good a way to insure immortality as transplanting your brain into a fresh (probably robotic) body, as Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov hopes to do by 2035. There are also many groups that claim to offer spiritual (as opposed to corporeal) immortality. Which method of living forever works best? That remains to be seen, assuming any of them work at all. Perhaps we'll find out after the Singularity.
First (Score:4, Insightful)
The Cyronics Institute are a bunch of quacks and con men. Discuss.
How many times can you die? (Score:5, Insightful)
Care to explain immortality after death to me? Just how does that work? I die, yet I'm immortal?
The religious answer is generally that there is some essential component of you (i.e. a soul) that persists after death and enjoys some sort of continued existence after death, most commonly with an element or reward or punishment for how you lived in life. It isn't "you" that dies when your flesh does.
The scientific answer is that death is merely a broad word for a set of bodily failures that lead to the breakdown and dissolution of the biological machinery that sustains your consciousness and/or metabolism. As science advances, we roll back those defects and in some cases cure them.
Many wounds that were inevitably fatal are imminently curable now. Gut wounds used to ensure a horrible death due to sepsis. Antibiotics stopped that. Heart wounds used to ensure bleeding to death. Blood transplants and open-heart surgery stopped that. We are now at the point that we have to base death on the cessation and decay of the brain.
Soon, we may have to refine that to a question of information loss. If we can freeze the brain before any irreversible damage is done to it, then we may later be able to restore it or copy the information (i.e "you") off of it to another medium. And given advances in repairing the body, even "irreversible" may be subject to redefinition over time. The nice thing is that once your brain is frozen, we have all the time in the world to figure out how to undo whatever did you in.
And once restored in a new body, what reason is there to expect that you can't be periodically backed up in case of the worst? If you can die and still live, then are you not immortal for all practical purposes?
But this is, of course, all highly unproven technology. Scientific or not, it's still essentially a leap of faith. However, if you don't have a religious reason to believe that you will live on in some other fashion after death, and you've got the money to spare for it then it seems like a much fairer wager than Pascal's.