Café de Nuit

This reminds me of the urban legend of Walt Disney. They say he sold his soul to the Devil, then had himself frozen so that he would never die.

Hi all,
This is a worrying story. When I die, I hope people will just bury me and get on with their lives.
The most worrying bit is the son who keeps taking care of his parents, even though they are long long gone. Adn what if they got back to life in 2050, as old sick people. no thanks

jennifer

Are you against Cryonics? I haven't decided yet.

Summury of Cryonics:
Since you cannot be cured today, you get to a freezer once your heart stops and remain in "temporal stasis" so to speak until medicine advances far enough to cure you. The temperatures you are kept are so low that you do not rot away.
It is like preventing your death from the moment your heart stops to (hopefuly) until you are de-frozen. So while you are not clinicaly alive... technically you are (but you're not concious).

Problems:
1. The procedure is extremely difficult. You don't just put the body in a freezer, since the blood would froze and permanently damage all the tissue in the body.

A trained medical team must inject you with chemicals once your heart stops immediately. Then they should take out all your blood within some time and replace it with another chemical. Then you go to the freezer where the temperature should be low enough so that your tissue (and the brain) remains intact and doesn't rot.

2. Nobody guarantees that the chemicals and the suggested temperature will indeed keep your body safe from rot and the freezing itself.

3. Actually the technology to un-froze a body (injecting back all the blood, repair minor damage from freezing etc) hasn't been developed...

While problem 1 is circumvented by properly trained teams, problem 3 makes more people treat Cryonics as a joke. On problem 2 I believe that -65 C would indeed keep the body in a functioning state for about a month or so but after that... Also I don't know what problems such low temperature might do to the tissue.

And then there are non-technical problems like:

1. Is it death-cheating?
2. People that would be unfrozen 40 years after they were frozen (even if they were completely healthy) would suffer an extreme shock.
Prisoners that have been in prison for 20 years (meaning they had some minor contact with technology, even if by ear alone) are in a shock when they enter a world completely different than the one they knew.

Imagine a 60 years old man that wakes up today in a hospital after he went to bed in... 1966.
- His children are technically older than he is.
- Surgery is done with beams! (Laser)
- We have gone to the moon. Repeatedly. Still there is no colony there.
- Culturaly and ethically we are a complety different world. Black people are at last treated as equal, women are (mostly) treated as equals. The Soviet Union has collapsed. Europe is economically united. Enviromentalists fight against the companies.

Good point Alhoon,

I might say that while the shock would be avery real problem, I imagine that all cryonic canidates would think thenmselves adventurous enough and find the "World of Tomorow" a great perk of the procedure.

As well, there os an additonal complication: while these future-doctors are busy putting your blood back in, defrosting your kidneys,a nd looking for ice crystals in your brain, they must also make preparations to keep you from dying from the same problem that put you in the freezer in the first place.
Long, long, long after they have found a cure for your disease, they'll still be trying to find a cure for what you did to your corpse.