I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t fear death. How can I fear nothingness? (Which is what I expect.) At the same time, I enjoy living and I would truly love to see what happens in the coming decades, centuries and beyond.

Finally, I also think your criticism of people fearful of death is unfair. Most people are afraid of the unknown. Death being the biggest and most final unknown there is, it’s not surprising that most people would fear it.

Even I have to admit to myself, that when I actually am dying, I will likely be afraid. I’m agnostic, but it’s said no person dies an atheist…..lol. And that makes sense. Even if you have a strong intellect and pride yourself on your rationalism, the truth is, if you are dying, it’s got to be very hard not to think, “What if I’m wrong? And my disbelief means something bad will happen to me after I die?”

Lastly, I’d like to point out that there has been significant progress in the past 20 years. A very obvious example is vitrification. 20 years ago this method of preserving a brain was not available to cyonics patients.

Less directly but no less relevant to the eventual goal of bringing back suspended patients are advances in our understanding of neurology, brain chemistry, genetics, AI, nanotechnology and a host of other knowledge domains that will ultimately likely enable cryonics to bring people back.

Are there any guarantees? Nope. But between burial, cremation, and freezing, there is only 1 option that gives even the possibility of coming back as me. And the logical way to look at all this is this: We don’t know what will happen in the future. So why not choose the one method of dealing with death that at least gives us the potential of continuing our lives. At liquid nitrogen temperatures, a suspended patient is preserved so well that 10,000 years is equal to only a few seconds at room temperature. It truly “stops” time for the suspendee’s brain.

But I am sure that his “diagnosis” fittingly describes most of the people living in the western world, and especially all those religious types living in the USA.

Btw: I agree with the basis of your sentiments, and I myself neither seek death nor try to hard to avoid it.Seeing conceptualizations for what they are doesn’t mean we need to despise them, or calling them unreal or unnatural.

It is the nature of our mind to create a personality, ego, to shatter and feel, a base from which we can orderly conduct our lives.

Living consciously is all about really getting to chose, having a choice, and therefore- as a means- becoming conscious aboutthe way our “ego” comes into being, and is arbitrarely to some point, all the while being malleable.

In the end, all our thoughts and ideas are real themselves and not just illusions, since our subjective world at a given time is contained in our bodies and they a an element of the whole of reality, making our subjectivity a subset of aformentioned reality.

However, in the end you can’t really banish your ego, but you can deconstruct all those cravings, values, feelings etc that you have unconsciously aquired in the course of your life, calm your mind, and then truly chose how you want to be, how your personality looks like (to some extent).

I mean, you can decide to want/like something, and then it is true that you do so, if you consciously chose that.But you shouldn’t be attached to your wants to point that causes suffering.

In the end we all should know that -as for now- we can’t really say that eventual death isn’t certain.We should take this as our working hypothesis, and live life without being all too scared, since in a sense we all are already dead.

Gabriel, i not really agree with that. It’s when you stuck with your ‘ego’, then such thinking comes. But human mind can model the world in very different ways, also when ego is not present. Your mind can be the whole world, so when your body dies, you know that the world persists, so nothing is lost. Maybe you yourself won’t experience further advancements… but the world will.

It’s not about rationalizing death. I can see longevity coming and believe there is a good chance for myself to live as long as i want. But don’t really care, since i know, the thoughts like “oh god, i’d like to live a bit longer” – are illusions, are not true.

When you judge people from your own frame of reference, as a consequence, it is your own perspective that seems awkward and childish, for you ignore the “goodness” of what longevity would bring.

Essentially, whatever lens you look through, we are all humans and all have the same wants – we just have different ideas about how to get there. That all said, I definitely agree that you shouldn’t be afraid of death…and I don’t mean that in the sense of seeing death as a good thing….just in the sense of, live life to the fullest, and if the opportunity arises in the form of some sort of augmentation to stave away death, then consider personally if this is right for you or you accept death as a good thing and choose to go for that. If such a thing never happens, it’s all moot and you should still continue to live life to the fullest anyway.

Ultimately we all have to decide what it is we want for ourselves…some may argue this agnostic impartial way of looking at things is wrong, but the thing is, it’s still up to us to individually decide what to do with ourselves, whether or not we actually have the tangible means to do something about death or not — we all have to decide if “backing up” ourselves is what we want, or to “age gracefully”…..you can make very aggressive/intelligent reasoning to go either way, but in the end, it’s up to us, and whatever the choice is, people should be respected for it and not feel mobbed by people who “want to save them” regardless of what camp they belong too.

Again, maybe this isn’t the ‘right’ way to look at things…I’m simply calling out for Respect, whatever it is you believe in — the Singularity after all, is only one of many scenarios that the future could objectively have in store for us, and whatever it is that happens, whether it was somehow “fated” or not (whether through prophecy or created in the sense that the future is something we make versus what “happens” to us…so the singularity was also fated to happen), and we all have to work with it into our plans and continue to do our best, whether we knew of it or not beforehand or whatever.

People are so anxious about the future and have all these grand endings in their heads because they want to prepare for them (for some, indoctrination)…from a practical pov, what’s arguably more important….is just living your life as best you can. Rather then living life on the edge of your seat every-day waiting for “Bridge Two” or another sign of the Rapture, or whatever you believe in….try focusing more on seeing that big movie this weekend. It’s not about being ignorant or lazy or selfish….just that, in all honesty…there are bigger things going on in your life then what/when is the inevitable fate of the world…..maybe that sounds like a oxymoron, but maybe there’s more truth to it then it appears.

The drowning are drowning I think, leave the drowning to their fate. They are drowning for a reason.

You probably understand now why your logic is ridiculous.

And note that the work you mention is only tangentially relevant to cryopreservation as it is no crypreservation at all, just slowing down living processess by cooling (but much above freezing point) to relive the stress on an injured body under severe (surgical) operation.

I would better see results around the topics I mentioned, i.e.

1, progress on full scale cryopreservation and reviving of simple organisms like e.g. protozoa, parazoa and then metazoan with a clear characteristic of the (hopefully evolving) limit in organism complexity for successfully completed cryopreservation and reviving.

2, progress on full scale cryopreservation of embryos at later developmental stages as zygotes, although successful re implantation of such embryos is a difficult independent problem preventing true measure of the innocuity of the freeze / unfreeze process.

3, progress on body parts cryopreservation, again with a clear indication of the limit of organ complexity currently addressed.

To assess true progress, we need metrics. I’m not seeing such metrics in a field, unfortunately still stuck at a stage of (black) “art” or proto science.

The chain of love: after revival A sponsors loved ones B and C – then B sponsors D and E, and C sponsors F and G…. and so forth.

It is an interesting question whether even small numbers of revived people would be able to function in the vastly changed world in which they found themselves. I tend to think that many would in fact be able to cope with this ultimate “future shock” (at least about as well as other people alive in that era), because by that time there should be numerous technologies for restoring or even enhancing youthful plasticity in brain function. However it might well be necessary to have education centers to re-integrate them into society.

Will such a future society want to take on that burden? Who knows, but I’m inclined to think probably so at some point, once the cost becomes sufficiently affordable – as a window on the past, if nothing else. Often the ordinary can give you a better idea of what the past was like than the lives of the rich and powerful.

But I do agree, there would be some excitement and value in bringing back people from the past. Have them tell the story of how we didn’t have mind reading AI that obeyed our every desire, how we had to walk 50 miles in the snow to sit in a room with a teacher and copy what was written in chalk on a board coloured black and green.

In June 2005 scientists at the University of Pittsburgh’s Safar Center for Resuscitation Research announced they had managed to place dogs in suspended animation and bring them back to life, most of them without brain damage, by draining the blood out of the dogs’ bodies and injecting a low temperature solution into their circulatory systems, which in turn keeps the bodies alive in stasis. After three hours of being clinically dead, the dogs’ blood was returned to their circulatory systems, and the animals were revived by delivering an electric shock to their hearts. The heart started pumping the blood around the frozen body, and the dogs were brought back to life.

On 20 January 2006, doctors from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced they had placed pigs in suspended animation with a similar technique. The pigs were anaesthetised and major blood loss was induced, along with simulated – via scalpel – severe injuries (eg. a punctured aorta as might happen in a car accident or shooting). After the pigs lost about half their blood the remaining blood was replaced with a chilled saline solution. As the body temperature reached 10 °C (50 °F) the damaged blood vessel was repaired and the blood was returned. The method was tested 200 times with a 90% success rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation

I could be wrong, of course.

But probably not.

Besides, could the author or any knowledgeable person here enlighten us about the real PRACTICAL progress of contemporaneous cryonics?

I mean, what is the current limit in organism complexity (and/or size) to be fully frozen and then revivified?

It’s clear that the problem has been solved for (human) zygotes for quite a long time. But, then, morula? blastula? gastrula? Obviously experiments on human embryos, even at those early developmental stages will be prohibited, but has it been attempted with mice embryos?

Another building block of considerable interest for medicine (hence with potential for huge funding) is cryopreservation of body parts to alleviate the shallow buffer of recently deceased donors.

Brains cryopreservation is just one step before (more probably beyond) the holy grail of full body preservation. But in the mean time, are we already able to cryopreserve tissues? And then organs? Which ones, if any?

Those are humbler but nevertheless essential building blocks to achieve, one day, full scale cryopreservation. Unfortunately I don’t see much milestone progresses on those topics. I sincerely hope this is just because I’m underinformed, LOL

We simply live in too primitive a time still when it comes to preserving life…hopefully something that will change with augmentations in the near-future which will enhance life to the point of making preservation and cryonics look like a joke.

I agree.

Pity, I loved Larry Niven’s “World out of Time” and have read it many times but let’s face it, Peersa would have flown the ship.