"Will Cryogenically Frozen People Ever Be Revived?" Topic

"Corpse-freezing hasn't exactly gone mainstream, but most people are now familiar with the concept: you lay out a ton of cash, sign some papers, and spend a couple post-death decades in a cutting-edge meat locker, calmly awaiting the conditions for your eventual revival. Over 300 cold, dead Americans—or dead, cold American brains, depending on which procedure they opted for (whole-body vs. brain-only)—can currently be found in storage facilities across the country. All of them took a gamble—one that was pretty cheap, metaphysically speaking: the worse case scenario here is just continued death.

For the time being, that is also the only scenario. Only time will tell whether these extremely dead optimists will once more, someday, get stuck in traffic, and/or roam an uncanny Singularity-scape with their AI-abetted computer brains. But we can at least start to guess whether—or if—that day will ever come. For this week's Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of neuroscientists, bioethicists, cryo advocates and skeptics to get some sense of what will happen to those frozen former consciousness-havers. Honestly it's not looking good for them just yet—but the future's main business is to show up the past's myopia/blinkeredness, so, who knows!…"
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Amicalement
Armand

I doubt it & even if they are, what shape will the corpse be in? Silly self absorbed humans IMHO.
Paul

Will Cryogenically Frozen People Ever Be Revived?

Probably.

Will people cryogenically frozen before we had worked out a viable process to revive them, ever be revived.

Highly unlikely.

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Many years ago, I read a scifi short short story from an Asimov anthology about a man being revived from a cryogenic state. He had someone there to answer his questions as he regained his strength. He found out that all his heirs had died out and his investments had bottomed out, but he didn't need to worry about that while he rested up for his heart surgery.

"Oh .. they finally diagnosed that something was wrong with my heart?"

"No. But something is wrong with mine."

Yes, they may never be revived, but hey, that's no reason not to have a good time!

frozendeadguydays.org

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Chill out!

Dave

Highly unlikely.

Right now it is. We can't even figure out how to prevent ice crystal damage completely.

But portions of humans are successfully cryogenically preserved right now, namely sperm, oocytes, and other tissues (including heart tissue). But that is not the same as cryogenically freezing and then thawing whole people or animals.

Most people who die waiting for organ transplants, do so because donated organs do not last long enough for the need to show up. Apparently half of donated hearts and lungs are thrown out because they cannot be stored viably. This will probably be the next frontier in cryogenics, more so that freezing people as a way of time traveling (I'm just reading the last part of Liu Cixin's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy where cryogenic time traveling is a common occurrence).

@ ZuluPaul I agree with the self absorbed thinking of this topic.

@ etotheipi, great story!

Apparently half of donated hearts and lungs are thrown out because they cannot be stored viably. This will probably be the next frontier in cryogenics

That's cool. And that's probably a viable pathway to figuring out how to freeze and revive a human being.

great story!

Thanks. I like my scifi like I like my coffee, dark and bitter. :)

I think cryogenic research (which may lead to something other than cryogenics as a solution) is one of the keys to interstellar flight.

Not addressed: who's going to pay for the thawing/reconstruciton?

More interesting, would it be any fun to be revived?

When the day comes that it's first possible to revive someone it will be, as all medical procedures are at first, fantastically expensive. I don't think there's enough money set aside. Do your descendants have the money? Are they willing to part with it? Is this covered by some future government health care program? No matter how you slice it, someone in the future will have to go without something to pay for restoration. The lawyers may have a lot of fun here.

Sure, most procedures get cheaper over time, but this procedure is not likely to be done many times.

Now imagine you're a perfectly happy 18th century person, and you take advantage of cryo. They wake you up in 2018. You talk funny, you have bad teeth, you have no job skills. Since no one ever taught you algebra or diagramming sentences your brain isn't prepared for mobile phones. You think differently. Historians want you to spend all your time in interviews. You don't understand what is and isn't possible in the world. Morality has changed – you are morally repellent to the people around you and vice versa. Your rights and responsibilities as a citizen have changed. You have trouble building satisfactory relationships because of the lack of common ground. Even therapy and counseling is problematic, because you are not used to that kind of prolonged, abstract self-examination. The vocabulary and mode of thinking about yourself and talking about yourself is different.

And everyone you cared about is long dead. Every place that was special to you has been paved over. Every cause or ideal that meant something to you is utterly irrelevant.

Hopefully there's a government program to help you, because it's going to cost more than you can pay to get you adjusted.

You could hang out with the other 18thC thawees, but maybe you don't have that much in common with them, either, and best case you're just isolated together.

For certain personality types this adventure would be extremely desirable. For most it would be a nightmare.

So while I expect eventually the medical problems will be solvable I'm not sure about the legal, financial, and psychological problems.

So… Walt Disney never return? (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

You can unfreeze them but they would still be quite…

Dead

Only if we launch them into space where one of the Enterprises will find them.

Nope. As mentioned above, water crystals……read The Far Arena by Richard Ben Sapir….story of a gladiator brought back to life. The holy grail of cryogenics is a viable anti freeze agent.

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Ha-Ha-Ha!.

Amicalement
Armand

Whatever made them human is long gone…