Want to live FOREVER? Major breakthrough in cryogenic freezing

[Gordo]

Want to live FOREVER? Major breakthrough in cryogenic freezing

"THE possibility of being able to live FOREVER just became one step closer as scientists proved that they can revive cryogenically frozen life."

 

I guess 10% success with a fish embryo is better than nothing, but obviously there is a long way to go. I wonder though if at some point this tech moves along faster than actual anti-aging science does, would people voluntarily do this to themselves while still alive and in good health instead of waiting until dead or failing health (which is probably too late to save you even far into the future).

[TomBAvoider]

well that depends. I mean, if it is confirmed as viable - i.e. as close to 100% reliable, then what is the penalty? After all, if unfreezing is reliable, then you can ask to be frozen until such a time as when your issues/disease have been solved - or you could ask to be unfrozen regardless in, f.ex. 80 years, then live one year aging normally, and re-freeze yourself for another 80 year spurt or whatnot. The problem you're gonna have of course, is the world around you - your family, friends, loved ones will be long gone by the time they unfreeze you. But you face that issue regardless, if you just go ahead and die, you are still leaving the company of those near and dear to you. Bottom line, I don't see what the downsides are. And hey, if the science is advanced enough, I think they can life-extend a human just as well starting from a base of 40-year old body, or 60-year old or 80-year old. And what is the advantage of living life consecutively until you die, vs freezing and unfreezing in regular intervals. The later strategy - freezing/unfreezing in intervals lets you skip a boring era. Imagine that you wake up and it's the equivalent of the middle ages - who wants to spend their life in such miserable times, so you freez up and take a break for 100-200 years and pop back up during renaissance. Same here - speaking just for myself, I'm pretty done with the current times... seems to me society has been getting dumber and the world worse off by many measures, so do I really want to waste the last few decades of my life on these abysmal times? I'd rather skip an 80 year chunk of time and hope that 80 years in the future I wake up to more exciting times. Anyway, options are always nice. I see no advantage to saying "no, I don't want to have the option of cryo". The problem today, is that it's not an option. As usual, my mantra is "technology is still abysmally primitive" - no matter AI, or medical science or whatnot. We're living in the dark ages.

[drewab]

While there is clearly an incredibly long way to go, it is encouraging nonetheless to hear about this!

[Gordo]

Yes, but I doubt it will ever be 100% reliable, so you'd be taking a gamble, I guess you'd have to figure out the odds and make a decision from there.  All of your points on the benefits are valid, and if it was 100% reliable I'd agree completely with you, wake me up every 50 years, I'll take 4 months off from being frozen, that will extend my life to 10,000 years minimum, assuming absolutely no further progress in anti-aging technology.  

 

But lets say there is a 2% risk of death from the freeze, then there is maybe 5% risk the facility you are stored in becomes either damaged, neglected/abandoned, or destroyed due to natural or unnatural causes (war, meteor impact, terrorism, earthquake, flood, climate change disaster, revolutionaries that see these frozen rich people as a threat, etc.)  A hypothetical 7% risk every single time you go under for a 50 year period, you are all but assured an unplanned demise eventually, if it happened after 1000 years that means you only got 80 actual months of "conscious living" from the time you were first frozen.  I guess these odds would then have to be offset by the odds of a cure for aging being developed while you were frozen.  I'm thinking most would still wait until they were on their death bed to do this.

 

[AIL]

Anyone who has seen "Idiocracy" and took a moment to think about how plausible that scenario actually is, given the current developments, would probably shun away from partaking in such intervention. :p

[Thomas G]

I'd be more interested in doing this as the closest thing we have to time travel than as a way to live forever.

 

If you gave me a reasonable chance of success that everything would work fine and I could wake up in 2117, I'd find it very tempting!

[Gordo]

I could see a significant number of people declaring immediately after an election, "wake me up as soon as X is out of office I don't want to spend any of my living years during that era" hah.  

 

I think you would have to have some serious savings to afford this though, plus you'd want enough extra to hopefully grow/compound while you were frozen.  Your job prospects and skills would likely be obsolete when you were awakened.  Of course at some point money and jobs may not exist anymore, so you could always wait until then too.  I think the prospects of waking up in a stone age are very slim, overpopulated world is a possibility but I don't think Earth will be wiped out until our sun goes red giant which hopefully is as far off as scientists believe (few billion years) although I'm not completely convinced they know this.

[Todd Allen]

Gordo, the earth won't be vaporized until the sun goes red giant but life will likely end much sooner.  I've seen estimates of 500 million to 1 billion years remaining for earth as habitable.  Assuming human induced GW doesn't run out of control in the more immediate future.