Will people be frozen in the future?

Ok, the freezing part I can get - I keep food that way for months.

This is the bit I don't get....



It's a package deal? First you get frozen, then shot off into space? Sure in a coupla billion years you will have drifted into interstellar space, but you ain't going to be enjoying it are you? You might as well be frozen on the Alps as somewhere near Beta Centauri....

And no, they didn't freeze Walt Disney - the Jew-hating bastard.
http://www.snopes.com/disney/waltdisn/frozen.asp

The other thing that really bamboozles me is that people arrange to have their heads cryogenically preserved. Your head?? I might not be an expert on human anatomy, but I have a pretty good idea that the people in the future will still require bodies. There won't be a sort of 'chop-shop' of headless (but obviously alive) bodies available to stick our 21st Century heads onto.

And don't say 'Well, they're going to transplant them onto the bodies of those people who've died'. Those people are going to have THEIR heads frozen to transplant as well......

http://www.transtopia.org/cryonics.html

Charge me extra???? Charge me extra????? You can't bill me if I'm ******* dead!! Yeah, sue my dead ass - I won't bother about turning up in court and you can try and get a court to tell the sheriff to drag me off to the county jail.

mr stillwater :

now you now the origin of "he lost his head" - it's in the deepfreeze !
hbg

What future? I'm frozen now!

Just think; a head without a body that thinks about sex 24/7. LOL

Here's the deal as far as my thoughts on cryogenics goes. As of the current situation, it's an imperfect science. Read the story of the late sports figure, Ted Williams for a nightmare scenario (his head cracked).

Yes, they can freeze your body solid. With quite an expensive overhead, they can maintain your frozen body at that temperature. Assuming that the refrig/environmental controls hold until the backup systems kick on, should there be a failure, you could stand a chance of being unfrozen, albeit s-l-o-w-l-y, at the appropriate time. But being unfrozen doesn't mean returning to life.

What happens to brain tissue/cognitive functions after this solid freezing? How much money (and staff) will it take to maintain this suspended limbo state for say 50-100 years? Who or what sort of world will you "wake up" to (friends, relatives)? What happens if you "wake up" but are in a vegetative state?

Then there's legal liability in case of any sort of failure if they "kill" you. Remember when they freeze you right now, it's just before your first "death". the legal system would have to get caught up with all the legal hocus-pocus of issues if this were to come about.

Far too many what-iffs for my low-budget brain.

Wasn't Ted Williams frozen?

Scroll back. Yes, Ted was and the process was faulty...as his head "cracked"

Currently, human cryopreservation is not reversible, which means that it is not currently possible to bring people out of cryopreservation.

For far more ino than I can comprehend,. see the following link on cryonics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics

If freezing works, why isn't Otzi walking around with us today?



(Or... Is he?)

Fascinating subject. See that previous link about the use of cryo-protectants of body and brain tissue.

Here's the portion after that explanation:

Ischemic Injury

""Ischemia means inadequate or absent blood circulation that deprives tissue of oxygen and nutrients. At least several minutes of ischemia is a typical part of cryonics because of the common legal requirement that cryonics procedures do not begin until after blood circulation stops. The heart must stop beating so that legal death can be declared. When there is advance notice of impending clinical death, it is sometimes possible to deploy a team of technicians to perform a “standby”. The team artificially restores blood circulation and breathing using techniques similar to CPR as soon as possible after the heart stops. The aim is to keep tissues alive after legal death by analogy to conventional medical procedures in which viable organs and tissues are obtained for transplant from legally deceased donors. Legal death does not mean that all the cells of the body have died.

Often in cryonics the brain is without oxygen for many minutes at warm temperatures, or even hours if the heart stops unexpectedly. This causes ischemic injury to the brain and other tissues that makes resuscitation impossible by present medical technology. Cryonicists justify preservation under such conditions by noting recent advances that allow brain resuscitation after longer periods of ischemia than the traditional 4 to 6 minute limit, and persistence of brain structure and even some brain cell function after long periods of clinical death. They argue that definitions of death change as technology advances, and the early stages of what is called “death” today is actually a form of ischemic injury that will be reversible in the future. They claim that personal survival during long periods of clinical death is determined by information theoretic criteria.


[edit] Revival
Those who believe that revival may someday be possible generally look toward advanced bioengineering, molecular nanotechnology, nanomedicine, or mind uploading as key technologies. Revival requires repairing damage from lack of oxygen, cryoprotectant toxicity, thermal stress (fracturing), freezing in tissues that do not successfully vitrify, and reversing the effects that caused the patient's death. In many cases extensive tissue regeneration will be necessary. Hypothetical revival scenarios generally envision repairs being performed by vast numbers of microscopic organisms or devices. These devices would restore healthy cell structure and chemistry at the molecular level, ideally before warming. More radically, mind transfer has also been suggested as a possible revival approach if and when technology is ever developed to scan the memory contents of a preserved brain.

It has often been written that cryonics revival will be a last-in-first-out (LIFO) process. In this view, preservation methods will get progressively better until eventually they are demonstrably reversible, after which medicine will begin to reach back and revive people cryopreserved by more primitive methods. Revival of people cryopreserved by the current combination of neurovitrification and deep-cooling (technically not "freezing", as cryoprotectant inhibits ice crystallization) may require centuries, if it is possible at all.

It has been claimed that if technologies for general molecular analysis and repair are ever developed, then theoretically any damaged body could be “revived.” Survival would then depend on whether preserved brain information was sufficient to permit restoration of all or part of the personal identity of the original person, with amnesia being the final dividing line between life and death.

ummm..who's Otzi?

See page 1.

Funny, you never see Gus and Otzi in the same room together.

there was a feature on NPR about a guy who ran a cryogenic, umm, farm. He had a few freezers and people paid to have their loved ones frozen there. Maybe he still does.
Trouble was it was damn expensive and he ran out of money a few times - so his clients defrosted for a bit a number of times.... Not so good.

That is a common urban common myth about Walt. See snopes.com

Me too! So we shall meet again in the Pacific, cicerone!

more exciting than this.....?

You guys are sick.

So... you prefer men? Or is it dead men? Or frozen men? Or old men? Or what, exactly? Frozen dead old men?