• tyranny@crazypeople.online
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    5 hours ago

    this comic gets at an important idea, that preserving something indefinitely means indefinite maintenance and energy, which not only has to be funded indefinitely but also is vulnerable to errors. and it gets at this idea through a fairly east-to-understand and humorous scenario. well played, Gary Larson

  • finallymadeanaccount@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Similar things have happened

    Nelson went on holiday, and left a groundskeeper named Joe who barely spoke English in charge of refilling the liquid nitrogen in the capsule. While away, the pump stopped working, and the patients were allowed to decompose for several days after the liquid nitrogen had evaporated. Nelson initially refilled the capsule with liquid nitrogen but later came clean about what had happened and was sued. The patients in other capsules had also thawed out.

  • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    23 hours ago

    A long time I haven’t heard people ranting about cryopreservation, has it become mainstream or maybe forgotten?

    • Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      My impression was that, much like AI, we made some cool stuff and then people realized the whole “Buy in now, we’ll figure out the rest later” model is a scam.

      Like, i vaguely remember someone saying to freeze yourself now, and by the time we need to thaw you out we’ll have the technology.

      • Blemgo@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        I think the biggest issue is that, at least quite a few years back, is that the methods of cryogenically preserve the bodies without ice crystals forming cause the arteries to weaken due to the chemicals used instead of blood. So if they were to thaw the body they would need a way to completely replace every artery in the body, or else they will rupture everywhere inside the body once they revive it. So basically the body is doomed to be unusable.

      • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 hours ago

        Yeah who can tell, not me. But the alternative is 100% guaranteed.

        Also, it’s not because someone tries to scam you, that it doesn’t work (or will work in the future).

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      18 hours ago

      I read an article about this a while ago. Apparently the main obstacle is the formation of destructive ice crystals. They can avoid this by cooling fast enough to extreme low temperatures, which is already used in practice on very small things:

      This process is now routine for eggs, sperm, and embryos, which are cooled to −196 °C in less than two seconds and can be used even after decades in storage.

      There have been recent breakthroughs in preserving whole organs, albeit not indefinitely so far:

      In new research, one team has been able to supercool the kidneys of pigs—animals whose organs are of a similar size to human ones—and preserve them for days. The kidneys survived being stored at −4 °C (25 °F) and eventually reimplanted back into pigs.

      There’s also techniques that don’t rely on cooling:

      Another way to prolong the lifespan of an organ is to use a machine that perfuses it with nutrients, mimicking what happens inside the body. Machine perfusion devices have become more commonly used over the last decade or so and are typically used to maintain livers and kidneys for up to about 24 hours.

      They’re not close to bringing frozen people back from the dead though:

      When Coles’s friend Greg Fahy, a cryobiologist, studied pieces of his brain years later, he found that the brain cells, which had shrunk, “bounced back” once they were rewarmed. But that doesn’t mean the cells are alive, or that it might one day be possible to reanimate the brain. As Matthew Powell Palm of Texas A&M [the guy who did the pig organ thing] told me at the time: “There are so many ways those neurons could be toast.”

      • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 hours ago

        Yeah, this is fantastic tech, nice examples! Another is that most donor organs are discarded but wouldn’t be if we could cryopreserve them!

        And yeah, those people already cryopreserved today will be the hardest to “get back”, they were also already dead (because legislation, can’t cryopreserve a living human being even if they’re dying right now).

        That shouldn’t stop research though IMO.

      • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
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        15 hours ago

        I don’t know what the hold up is. A man was successfully flash frozen in carbonite and unfrozen several months later, with temporary blindness being the only side effect. This was around 1980, I think.

    • InnerScientist@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Forgotten and most that were frozen had to be scraped out of the the cryo chamber for one reason or another.

    • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social
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      20 hours ago

      has it become mainstream or maybe forgotten?

      Last I remember reading, it seems to have largely revealed itself to be little more than a scam. Although, sure-- if you’re rich enough, egotistical-enough, and desperate enough, you can give yourself some comfort in the delusion that you’ll be both adequately stored and then later, someone will want to try to unfreeze you at some point and cure you / de-age you.

      *shrug*

      • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        19 hours ago

        Well, how can it be a scam if they keep you?

        We are getting better and better at cryopreservation and thawing all the time. It’s a young technology, like cancer treatment was a hundred years ago.

        As for the whole “egoistic” part, wouldn’t you try to escape death by taking your cancer medicine?

        And desperate? For wanting to live?

        All those takes are completely wild to me. I mean nobody is forcing anyone to do it, and if you don’t, well you get buried or cremated, what’s the big deal?

        • arrow74@lemmy.zip
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          15 hours ago

          Just because we are getting better at something doesn’t mean if we did it incorrectly in the past it suddenly becomes better.

          None of these bodies were frozen in a way that matches modern techniques. No matter how advanced we become we can’t fix that.

          It’s like if you had a washing machine from 30 years ago and said it uses less electricity now because washing machine technology has advanced so much

          • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            8 hours ago

            It’s more like you have a huge pile of copper and electricity just had been invented IMO. It sure will work one day, that’s a certainty, why not take the chance, if you can?

        • JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social
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          19 hours ago

          There *is* no big deal going on there, AFAIK. People have been coping with existential dread for millennia, and at this point it would be weird to expect otherwise.

          My points mainly involve the fact that historically, cryo-preservation doesn’t work as intended, however much improved it might be at this point. Also, there’s the inevitable subtext that in a civilisation racing towards collapse, the idea that you’re going to miraculously defy all odds, somehow coming back to live happier days someplace seems borderline-hilarious to me.

          More probable as I see it is building yourself a rocket ship and settling on luna, where you’ll enjoy feasts of moon-cheese for the rest of your days. 🙂

          • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            8 hours ago

            Yeah I get it, nicely put too.

            I’m much less a doomer myself and we’re potentially on the cusp of super longevity and more (yay bunker cheeze after the nuclear war for centuries 😉).

        • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
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          15 hours ago

          Listen, I don’t have a lot of fancy technology, but I do have a chest freezer that I haven’t used in a few years. If you want to give me $3,000, I can leave your body in there for, like, five years or whatever. DM me.

            • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
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              4 hours ago

              Why the hostility? I’m being up front with my offer and I’m not guaranteeing I can make you live forever or anything. It is possible, but unlikely, that an important breakthrough might happen in those five years; sure, it might not be the MOST advanced tech, but it IS at an affordable price point after the point you need to buy anything else.

              But, fine man, if you just want to be dead with absolutely ZERO chance of being revivified and cured of whatever killed you, that’s a personal decision.