🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <36lfm1$nqu@qualcomm.com> antonio@qualcomm.com (Franklin Antonio) writes:

>Cryonics is "death extension".  Sci.life-extension is about life extension. 
>This extended discussion of nonsensical pseudoscience belongs elsewhere.
>Perhaps you would do better putting your advertisements in one of those
>supermarket checkout counter rags... the ones with Elvis returning from
>the dead on the cover.

Cryonics is *not* pseudoscience by any stretch of the imagination. It
is based on extraordinarily sound and conservative scientific
principles, and the research being done on it is first rate. I have
yet to hear a convincing argument as to why cryonics cannot work.

I also know no cryonicists who believe in pseudoscience or mysticism
-- most of them are extraordinarily hard headed individuals with solid
scientific backgrounds, like Dr. Ralph Merkle of Xerox Parc. Indeed,
the PhD density in and around cryonics organizations is astounding.
Furthermore, cryonicists are themselves the biggest rationalist
critics of cryonics, often going to great lengths to be
overconservative in their discussions of how bad the damage caused by
freezing and the like is.

The principle behind cryonics is simple. No one knows how much damage
is repairable. Fifty years ago, if your heart stopped for a minute or
two, you were dead.  Today, with modern emergency room proceedure, you
are quite possibly still alive. "Death" is a meaningless concept.
There is only "revivable with today's technology" and "not revivable
with today's technology". Cryonicists are just people who ask the
question "what about all conceivable future technologies." They ask
the question "if we can halt further damage and get a person to the
future, will there be a time at which the damage caused becomes
repairable?"

Lowering the temperature of a person who has just "died" to that of
liquid nitrogen stops all chemical processes -- decay and
otherwise. At liquid nitrogen temperatures you have millenia before
even any minor changes progress.  On the other hand, the drop to LN2
temperatures, even with current cryoprotectant perfusion methods,
causes substantial damage in and of itself. However, all reasonable
studies show that everything that is thought to be important to your
identity -- the positions of all your neurons, their pattern of
interconnections, etc -- remain completely intact. Damage is caused,
but it is largely of the form of "clean breaks", in which the parts
are not substantially shifted from each other. This is much like
taking a jigsaw puzzle and then disrupting it so that the parts are
only moved a small distance from their original position -- one can
very quickly determine where everything once went.

We know that machines to manipulate matter directly at the atomic
level are possible -- humans are made from them.  Given the thousands
of years of time available, its entirely possible that humans will
develop the capacity to build such machines themselves, and undo the
disruption caused to your nerve cells cell by cell, molecule by
molecule. All the information needed to do this is probably still
intact in your frozen brain, and the capability to build machines that
directly manipulate atoms is widely thought in the scientific
community to be more a matter of when than if -- they were first
proposed by Richard Feyman, I will note. (Indeed, it is already
possible to grab and move around individual atoms with clumsy devices
like atomic force microscopes -- who can say what we will be able to
do in a century, let alone a millenium?)

Certainly the odds that cryopreservation will work are unknown.
However, the cost is negligible, and the alternative is rotting, which
is almost certain to leave nothing intact to try to work with.

Rather than slander something you know nothing about, why don't you
first learn something about the topic before screaming that cryonics
is "death extension" and that cryonicists, who are among the most
educated and rational people I have ever met, are in the same boat as
Shirley Maclean? Nothing claimed by cryonicists is fantastic or
extra-scientific. There are no claims that aren't consistant with the
known laws of physics, chemistry and biology.



--
Perry Metzger		perry@imsi.com
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