Terminally Ill Teen Won Historic Ruling To Preserve Body (bbc.com) 386
A teenage girl has been cryogenically frozen in the hope of being revived at a time when her cancer might be cured. The terminally ill 14-year-old girl from London won a legal fight to be frozen after she died. After her death in October, the girl's remains were transported to a cryonic facility in the United States. From a report: The girl, who was terminally ill with a rare cancer, was supported by her mother in her wish to be cryogenically preserved -- but not by her father. She wrote to the judge explaining that she wanted "to live longer" and did not want "to be buried underground." A High Court judge ruled that the girl's mother should be allowed to decide what happened to the body. The details of her case have just been released. "I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I am only 14 years old and I don't want to die but I know I am going to die. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up -- even in hundreds of years' time. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish," the girl wrote. The judge, Mr Justice Peter Jackson, visited the girl in hospital and said he was moved by "the valiant way in which she was facing her predicament." His ruling, he said, was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.
Pizza Delivery! (Score:4, Funny)
They paid for it (Score:3)
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He said: "Even if the treatment is successful and she is brought back to life in let's say 200 years, she may not find any relative and she might not remember things and she may be left in a desperate situation given that she is only 14 years old and will be in the United States of America."
Her father thought this out rationally, and is concerned about the situation once the novelty of bringing his 14 year d
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Please. Haven't you seen Back to the Future? Marty McFly handled the future just fine.
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Regardless of the girl's wishes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Always hard to see things objectively when so many emotions are involved. Both the mother and father will be dead long before any there's any chance of technology existing to have a hope of reviving a cryogenically-frozen body, so wanting to see their daughter again in their mortal lifespan is not realistic anyway for either of them.
According to the BBC the father agreed to support his daughter's wish before she died. Apparently the money is being put up by the mother's family, so we can only speculate on
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Mom & her family didn't think things through, while he did.
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Her father is never going to see her again. Unless you think the scientists will both cure cancer and solve the unfreezing problems within the next couple decades.
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Her father isn't going to ever see her again regardless.
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Why can't he stop by the freezer and see her?
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Even worse knowing that one of them is against it, she must have some feeling that her father doesn't want to see her again.
I think the six years without contact said that:
The girls' parents were divorced and the girl had not had any contact with her father for six years before she became ill.
Not sure what he was looking for, if it was malice towards the mother or the girl or getting paid off to let it go but I strongly doubt it was over any real concern about her well-being.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wish I could mod you up. This is dead on.
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This is great. Now try the same thought experiment while pretending your soul isn't made of trash. Imagine you're a scientist hundreds of years in the future and you finally now have the incredibly valuable and rare opportunity to talk to a real live human from the ancient world, freshly awakened as though they'd been teleported directly from the past.
Re:Understandable, but foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
So you've just turned a societal pariah into a lab specimen.
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Re:Understandable, but foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
I've often wondered this. If you could take a random person from different eras and plunk them into the present (even allowing for some sort of "techno-magic language translation"), how would they adjust? Obviously, the further back you go, the less able they would be able to cope. Someone from 1950 would stumble but might be generally fine. Someone from 1860 would have a lot of trouble. Someone from 1060 would likely run fleeing from all of the weird things they saw. What's the furthest back you could go and still have the person relatively well-integrated into society?
you get to pick which 50% (Score:4, Funny)
What's the furthest back you could go and still have the person relatively well-integrated into society?
Judging by recent events, 50% of people aren't well suited to fit into society -- without displacing them in time %N years.
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Someone from 1860 would have a lot of trouble.
I think that depends a lot on the someone. Is it some poor slob plucked off the rail road tracks in the western US, or is it some highly educated(for the day) wealthy urbanite? Suppose we snapped Andrew Carnegie off the street in 1860, and dropped him off here in 2016. I think he would be surprised and upset by a number of things but would mostly be able to navigate.
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I wonder what Carnegie would think of our Mellons.
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The question is, would they even be able to breathe, eat or drink without experiencing all sorts of health issues. Whether you increase or decrease the pollution, it will become a lot harder for your body to adjust a jump rather than a gradual increase. 100 years may not be that bad but it's more likely that it will be 200 or 500 years before someone can restore your body and your brain from the cell damage cryogenics does, people may have all sorts of evolutionary traits that deal with different CO, lead o
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If you could take a random person from different eras and plunk them into the present (even allowing for some sort of "techno-magic language translation"), how would they adjust?
HBO's Westworld is taking a hack at this, albeit with androids being subjected to the time-dissonance.
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One thing they didn't quite get was a sense of scale. The leader of the tribe was brought ove
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I bet people like Leonardo da Vinci or Plato could easily deal with the change. I bet they would be lost in wonder for many years as they learned all of the new things, but still, being alive is being alive. The trappings change all the time but the main theme is still there.
Sure, there are people who would collapse at the enormity of it all, but any of the real thinkers from the past would do just fine. Hell, they would likely make many new discoveries since they do not have all of the intellectual baggage
Re:Understandable, but foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally. (...) So odds are you just wake up a social pariah, with no skills, in an alien social order with no friends and family. Heck, you might not even speak the lingua franca of that age.
Consider the vast multitude of cultures today, she's probably no worse off than that odd foreign kid. For that matter, what you describe is not much different from what many refugees experience today. And 14 is young enough to get a perfectly normal education, job, find friends and start a family same as your peers. I'd take 70 more years of that over dying at 14 any day. Cryogenics is a fantasy, but I'd take the fantasy over reality any day of the week.
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Cryogenics is a fantasy, but I'd take the fantasy over reality any day of the week.
I agree. To make it a bit more clear for everyone else -
The choices are:
1) Dead. Period. End of story.
2) Dead. Frozen with almost zero chance of you being revived in the future. Not guaranteed to be end of story.
The choice is clearly easy to make. For someone like me who has lived the majority of their expected life, I would not freeze myself. I love being alive but I realize that at some point it should end so new ideas can enter the arena. For whatever reason, it appears that I can only change so much and
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For the sake of argument, suppose this is possible.
You will wake up about 5 generations beyond where you are now. Assuming her death doesn't end the bloodline altogether, the relatives she has in 100 years will have no real familial connection to her. Everyone and everything that defines her sense of happiness now will likely be dead and gone or so evolved that it is unrecognizable (like tech and hobbies).
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally.
So odds are you just wake up a social pariah, with no skills, in an alien social order with no friends and family. Heck, you might not even speak the lingua franca of that age. For all we know, Mandarin could replace English by 2116.
People imagine it like a movie where you wake up in a shiny, accepting utopia and you just go like Ender to the stars where no one knows your past or cares. The reality is probably more akin to you becoming a ward of the state for years, being looked down on except as a curiosity.
Really, this is what you came up best as an argument again this?
Better be death than waking in a completely different world?
Not much different that a friend that cut all his family tie and have gone in a world trip adventure (he's now in China for the last 2-3 years). And he have never being happier.
My point is, family, culture and language are a long, looonnnng shot to be absolute necessity for happiness. And if I had a grand-grand-grand great father about to wake up at my age, I'll be one of the first in
Re:Understandable, but foolish (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, it sounds like a pretty amazing adventure. Time travel, basically. Albeit low chance of actually arriving & zero chance of a return trip. If I'm dying anyways and have the disposable income, why not? I can always choose to kill myself again (permanently) if I find myself unable to adapt to the future. Other than having a wide variety of things I'd rather do with the money while I'm alive, I don't see a down side.
I was born into a world I knew nothing about once & learned all I could to get where I am now. Granted, I'd lack the neuroplasticity of a child's brain for the second attempt, but I'd be willing to give it a try. Beats the alternative anyways.
Re:Understandable, but foolish (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think for a lot people what you are saying is very true. She is however a teenager. At 14 years old she would probably be much more able to adapt to those realities than most of us adults would. She is still young enough to learn skills, etc. Is still at an age where she can readily make friends and from relationships.
The real question is can they freeze here before she is technically deceased? I think this matters becuase its terms of being able to support herself in the future that could be critica
Re:Understandable, but foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
You are assuming that she will be the ONLY one that is "woken up". But if she can be revived, so can all the others. So there will be a whole group of people that share the culture of the early 21st century. They can hang out together.
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Suppose it's possible, and she wakes up 100 years from now, aged 14. Takes 2 tablets and cancer is gone. Or has her mind uploaded to another body. Plenty of time to catch up on what's new in the 22nd century. Sooner than you know it, she'll star in 6D adult entertainment named something like "the 21st century tart-bot".
Re: Understandable, but foolish (Score:2)
It depends on your personality type.
An ISFP would probably be devastated by the loss of family members & friends.
An INTP might barely notice, aside from occasional pangs of nostalgia around the holidays, because he'd be fascinated by the new kitchen appliances and the technology behind them.
An ESTP would revel in his new celebrity status & go on the lecture circuit. Or self-destruct if nobody cared.
An INFJ would get depressed about the privilege that allowed him -- but not countless others -- to liv
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What about the body's flora and immune system? Today, we have to get all sorts of shots before visiting certain foreign countries. Could it be that the future version of one's own country would be just as foreign in terms of whatever pathogens are common? Could the newly-revived body be ill-equipped to face this?
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Or maybe the reverse. The kid might be swarming with stuff that people in the 31st century eradicated centuries ago and are no longer immune to.
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Presumably by then, the immune system will be better understood and she would be given the treatment (such as vaccines whatever replaces them and/or returning the immune system to its "just born" state boosted with a starter of [fake] mom's immune system and/or) necessary to protect her before exposing her to the unfamiliar pathogens.
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Re:Understandable, but foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
You will wake up about 5 generations beyond where you are now. Assuming her death doesn't end the bloodline altogether, the relatives she has in 100 years will have no real familial connection to her. Everyone and everything that defines her sense of happiness now will likely be dead and gone or so evolved that it is unrecognizable (like tech and hobbies).
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally.
So odds are you just wake up a social pariah, with no skills, in an alien social order with no friends and family. Heck, you might not even speak the lingua franca of that age. For all we know, Mandarin could replace English by 2116.
What's bizarre here is that you think this is worse than death. I guess you're one of those believers in an afterlife that no one, including the powerful supernatural beings who supposedly manage the thing, has bothered to show exists.
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Who cares? Being alive is better than being dead. No, that statement is nonsensical as there is nothing in death so it can't be compared to. As much as I have suffered, no matter how much I will suffer, I want to be alive. Worst case scenario I continue exploring the world from my own mind because my body is ineffective or in a prison... but I will continue exploring the world. THAT is life. Not friends, family, etc.
Don't get me wrong, friends, family, and social stuff is very important... but without life,
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Custody disputes on Slashdot?? (Score:2)
His ruling, he said, was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.
Exactly. Even before I could reach the closing sentence of the summary, I was trying to figure out what this situation had to do with "science" or even cryonics. This was just a dispute between parents over a kid. Nothing to see here.
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Re:Custody disputes on Slashdot?? (Score:4)
And the ruling is absurd... if one of the parents wanted to make handbags out of her skin, the judge would of ruled against them.
The decision was rightly the teen's, not the parents'. It's her body, after all. Provided the teen can come up with a way to pay for the procedure, that is—and in this case the mother was willing to serve as sponsor. No one else has any legitimate say in the matter.
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It would be neat. (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine waking up in 400 years, surrounded by scientists and doctors all cheering at their breakthrough. "Is there still a WWW?", you ask. "Yes! Just think of what you want to visit and this holographic unit will bring it up in 3D for all of us to see." Smile then concentrate on goatse.
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I'm sure Slashdot will still be here in 400 years, and Cowboy Neal will be our new Robotic Overlord.
moon pie what a time to be alive (Score:2)
moon pie what a time to be alive
By all means do it (Score:2)
The father probably didn't want to pay for the yearly costs of keeping a dead corpse on ice in the pointless idea that it will be possible to revive a corpse in the near future. If the mom and daughter want to spend needlessly on this than by all means pony up the cash.
I'm waiting for the breakthrough discovery of a special chemical that will prevent ice crystals from forming and allow for a better thaw that doesn't destroy cellular membranes. It'll be ironic when the cryonic scientific community goes an
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The father probably didn't want to pay for the yearly costs of keeping a dead corpse on ice
Nope. The mom's family had already agree to cover the cost. It would have cost Dad nothing either way.
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How much does this cost?
Regardless how much, I could think of plenty of better things to spend that money on. How about instead donating that money to finding a cure for this rare cancer, a scholarship fund, or saving the damn whales?
Instead they decide to give it to a company that is offering nothing more than a refrigerated storage unit.
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"Tiny pieces of frozen head sprayed around the room."
There's a sentence I didn't think I'd ever see in a non-fiction story.
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Facebook to Slashdot - new record (Score:2)
This has to be a new record for the time between when something showed up in my Facebook feed to the time when someone cross posted to Slashdot. Sad, sad day.
Freezing the body? (Score:2)
Doesn't it need to be done immediately? I would imagine that the body changes dramatically after death and I wouldn't think that those changes would be reversible.
Good for her (Score:3)
While I don't think there's any actual chance of her ever being revived and cured, I'd be willing to bet that the thought that there was a chance (however slim) helped the girl accept her situation and made her last days a lot less hellish than they might have otherwise been.
Anybody want to start a cryogenics business? (Score:2)
I'm imagining a high tech looking front room and lab with a hidden door that leads to a crematorium. You could do it for the bargain rate of $20k per pop (less than the $37k listed in the article) and it would, for all intents and purposes, be the same.
The Duke (Score:2)
They did this with John Wayne too. He's not dead. He's frozen. He's gonna be pissed when they thaw him out.
My biggest problem with this. (Score:2)
Re:Problem ... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. They may, and they may not. Time will tell.
2. Again, they may hate us, or they may not. Hell, they might worship the cyborged head of Bill Gates. Again, time will tell.
3. Cryo may not work NOW, because we lack the tech to successfully reverse it. Cryo **may** be the best currently-available method of maintaining structure as much as possible after death, but generally causes severe enough damage to be un-recoverable, with current tech. But this young lady isn't counting on current tech, she's counting on FUTURE tech. And she was dying anyway, so what's the worst that would happen ? She'd STAY dead. . .
Re:Problem ... Faith (Score:3)
The problem is a question of faith? What justifies faith. What type of evidence is enough to give one faith. Faith is 'the belief in things not yet observed' a conjecture based on available evidence.
I find it ironic, that some have faith in cryogenics given the evidence for any possible success is certainly no better and in many ways much less then the evidence for a omnipotent creator who will resurrect your body at a future date.
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Easy. One of them has been classified as science and the other has not. Easy to see why one is more acceptable to a certain crowd anyway.
But I agree with your basic premise.
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Cryo **may** be the best currently-available method of maintaining structure as much as possible after death, but generally causes severe enough damage to be un-recoverable, with current tech. But this young lady isn't counting on current tech, she's counting on FUTURE tech.
She's counting on magic, if you swipe all the pieces off a chess board and onto the floor the position is lost, no matter what kind of future technology you invent it can never be recovered. It can't just sorta look like your brain, it actually has to preserve the very links and chemical composition that make up your thought patterns and memories. Sometimes there's so much hand-waving involved you'd think they could find an urn, un-incinerate the remains and wake that person back up. Whatever is damaged or
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Just think of the perfectly preserved bodies that future archaeologists will be able to study!
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And how many myths will be created about buried treasure and curses and the movies that can be made.
Re: Problem ... (Score:2)
Re: Problem ... (Score:4, Informative)
Until a human compatible antifreeze is discovered, cryogenics is a waste of time and money. Unless future humans want piles of mush.
You are thinking too narrowly. You don't necessarily need to revive the flesh. You could slice the frozen brain, scan the neuron connections, and then duplicate them in-silico.
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You haven't researched this since 1970 have you? There's ways they've figured out to freeze bodies without causing the cellular damage.
Of course, still nobody has been successfully revived yet, AFAIK but that is as theoretically solvable of a technical problem...
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Discovering the dwelling place of God is just as "theoretically solvable" as this.
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2) I doubt they're going to hate a 14 year old girl with cancer. Some billionaire shithead who led a company that actively harmed the environment... Just imagine if the Koch brothers were frozen... We might want to wake those fuckers up just so we could use them as pinatas.
3) Do some research on the inviability of cryo.. At last check they're doing stuff like at the moment of death, pumping out all the blood and replacing it w
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In Colorado, there's a town famous for having a frozen dead guy on hand. It's important to recognize what this is: a vain (and hopeless) bid for immortality.
Yeah. 14 years of life should be enough for anybody.
Re:The ultimate in postmortem narcissism (Score:5, Insightful)
In Colorado, there's a town famous for having a frozen dead guy on hand. It's important to recognize what this is: a vain (and hopeless) bid for immortality.
Thing I'm wondering is - why don't they freeze her while she's still alive? Even if they find a cure for cancer, that will likely not be something that resurrects the dead. So if they are gonna freeze her after she dies, it's a wasted effort, too.
Instead, freeze her now while she's still alive, and whenever the cure is discovered, the doctors will thaw and cure her. Of course, nobody she knows may be alive, her relatives - descendants of any siblings she may have - won't know her, she won't know any of the things that may have developed by then, so her only choice may be to marry someone 700 years younger to her - assuming they haven't abolished marriage and divorce by then.
Too bad the judge's heart trumped his brain, and he couldn't say 'no' to the ridiculous request of this precious snowflake
Re:The ultimate in postmortem narcissism (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing I'm wondering is - why don't they freeze her while she's still alive? Even if they find a cure for cancer, that will likely not be something that resurrects the dead.
The current state-of-the-art freezing processes would kill her anyway, so the end result is the same. We don't have the ability to freeze the body without fatally damaging the cells. Anyone with the technology to reverse the massive cellular damage from the cryo would most likely be able to deal with the rest without any trouble. From a legal point of view, freezing someone while still alive would be much more problematic—it would probably be classified as a form of assisted suicide, given our current inability to reverse the process. No one wants to take on that kind of liability for a infinitesimally better chance of successful revival in the distant future.
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The father had legitimate concerns about how she would live after 200 years if she was revived (cited in another post of mine below). You are welcome to clamor for an endless extension of life, but there are issues other than that that have to be considered, and her genius of a mom was incapable of seeing beyond the suffering of her little girl. And cryogenically freezing her would not kill her, so no, it wouldn't be murder: her cells would just be frozen until a time when they figure out how to remove her cancer
200 years from now when she is revived, she will be a citizen of the United Federation of Planets (or will become a ghoul, depending on what universe evolves). She will be provided for.
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Or maybe he was opposed to being forced to spend a lot more money on what he (probably rightfully) views as a complete waste of time and money.
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Re:The ultimate in postmortem narcissism (Score:4, Interesting)
It's our era's version of mummification. We preserve the body on the hope that it can be restored. We have a bright future in our imaginations instead of an afterlife. But it's really all the same thing.
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It's incredibly wasteful, too.
It is only wasteful if few people do it. But if thousands or millions freeze themselves, there is good economy of scale. If you have a million corpse cryogenic warehouse, the cost per-body would be very low. Even cheaper if you only freeze the head, since a new body can be generated from stem cells.
Better hope there's no power outage.
In the event of a power outage, it would take a long time for all the N2 to evaporate. A large well insulated cryogenic warehouse can easily go without power for days.
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Once we get a space elevator, we could just store these people in space! Let them become comets for a thousand years then retrieve them on their next pass by Earth... I would totally go for that!
Re:The ultimate in postmortem narcissism (Score:4, Insightful)
If you disappeared off the planet right now, only a few people would really, truly be devastated. Your parents, if they're still alive. Your spouse or significant-other. Your children. Possibly your siblings and possibly their children if you have a close relationship. Devastated as they would be, however, even they would probably move-on with life, and in time would remember you somewhat dispassionately instead of being consumed with mourning. Parents would remember you from time to time. Spouse or significant other would move-on. Children would have to move on as it's normal for their parents to die before them anyway.
We all die. We're all pretty good at handling the death around us, even in cultures where significant effort is made to thwart death. The death of a fourteen year old girl from disease past the ability of medical science to treat is unfotunate, but it's also pretty routine, and to be honest, our ability to suspend the body and preserve it is so poor that she's never going to be reanimated and cured from what ails her now. It's a shame that snake-oil salesmen have convinced some people that it's possible to do this, when all it will do is consume resources without any return.
Re:The ultimate in postmortem narcissism (Score:4, Insightful)
Another few questions to ask:
Who is going to keep on paying for her being frozen? Her parents may do that for the rest of their lives, but then who will pay after they are gone?
What if the cryonics business that is keeping her frozen goes out of business?
Who is going to expend resources to revive the person, cure the disease and get her trained for living in the world of then. (It won't be cheap!)
If there are relatives (distant at that) living at that time, then will they take care of this stranger?
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What if the cryonics business that is keeping her frozen goes out of business?
This is a very good question! Which leads us to the question of if something happens, and the dearly frozen is thawed, is the company holding the peoplesicle guilty of manslaughter?
What if a hundred years from now, descendants of the frozen don't want to support the monthly bill. Are they permitted to defrost the corpse? Or is this depraved indifference manslaughter or even murder one?
It's easy to say "But she's dead already." But a person kooky enough to put a dead family member in the cooler is craz
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And thus the zombie apocalypse begun.
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Oh my gosh, like, you're a downer, like, whatever, like, people in 2216 are so going to want a 21st century teen around. Like, oh my gosh, you're such a hater.
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Why would they care about how useful their technology when applied to someone frozen with 300 year old technology? They will care if its useful when applied to someone frozen with what is then relatively current technology.
If they really want to go into the revival of dead bodies preserved with old technologies, they would go back at least as far as Egyptian mummies and revive them (if, nothing else, for the humor value of watching someone from that era "awake" in a futuristic world - it would make a great
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Yeh... I came here wondering if that would be a clever way to achieve Physician assisted suicide.
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First, it's precedent. Second, you clearly have read absolutely nothing about this situation. I spent a total of about 10 seconds skimming the article and still picked up enough to know that this was not the case you want to make your "men have no rights" stand on. You're hurting the very cause you're (apparently) trying to help by doing so.
This father-of-the-year had no contact with his terminally ill daughter for SEVEN years prior. His daughter didn't even want him to see her body when she was gone...