That was a (pardon the pun) cool read, if a bit morbid.
Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people — who may or may not have suffered thaw damage — into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a “puzzle.” After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.
Grooooooooosssssss
yeah, that’s not how you compost.
… well, someone had a wind night & then in the morning when other people arrived urgently needed an excuse as to why the frozen corpses were paying twister, with party hats on & cocks drawn on their faces with markers.
Ever seen DMSO solidify upon cooling? I wouldn’t even call it vitrification, it obviously has macroscopically large crystalline domains. It would be like putting rocks in your veins. I mean it kind of works fine for single cells because the failures* can be treated as a statistic, but anything on the scale of organs will become damaged just too badly.
* See e.g. what happens to frozen sperm cells: “chromatin disruption through protamine translocations, DNA fragmentation, and lesions to genes involved in fertilization capability and embryonic development […] are known consequences of the cryopreservation process.”
Reminds me of the Egyptian aristocracy, they would be pissed off if they knew their 4000 yo mummy will end up getting shown at a museum or destroyed by a tomb raider. But what would happen if they managed to revive them today, probably a temporary experiment on a lab, the pharaoh just lived in a closed environment for a couple of months and for most of modern day people it would be just some science news they scrolled by on tiktok
How about being ground up into powder and put into medicine? I’m sure they’d love that one.
or used for paint because the color is so nice
One of the more interesting aspects of history is the progression from the notion of a very limited and inaccessible resurrection of a body to the idea of a very accessible resurrection of the spirit/mind.
The latter is IMO probably best embodied (pun intended) in one of the early Christian apocrypha from a group that was known for rejecting the canonical focus on a physical resurrection of a body:
Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.
- Gospel of Thomas saying 108
It’s such a wild march of progress from kings trying to preserve their bodies to a tradition rejecting the Eucharist of consumption of a body in favor of a Eucharistic consumption of words and ideas to resurrect the essence of the individual.
And looking back from an age where we are literally seeing patents granted to trillion dollar companies around resurrecting the dead digitally, the “resurrection of words and ideas” crowd was more on to a practical tract of thinking than the “resurrect my goop” crowd.
In fact, the Egyptians when embalming themselves discarded their brains thinking it was garbage filling of the skull. Not exactly the best strategy in hindsight.
Doing a quick read up on Wikipedia, my memoories on Egyptian mummies’ brains getting removed was correct. That alone would mean the best they could achieve is cloning, without any memory retention.
destroyed by a tomb raider
And not even a sexy, big breasted one with skintight shirt and very short shorts.
destroyed by a tomb raider
*And not even a sexy, big POINTY breasted one with skintight shirt and very short shorts.
OG Lara, or nothing!
Most mummies we found we ate
A couple days ago my milk was all chunky when I tried to pour it in my cereal, because refrigerated air that was supposed to go to the fridge got blocked.
Milk wasn’t expired, just went bad due to a random mechanical issue over the course of the length of time the milk was being preserved.
Anyway, what’s all this about cryogenics?
Blocked by stuff or frozen up? If frozen, you may have a defrost timer problem.
It was blocked by frost so uhh does sound like that second thing.
Therefore, ice cream is impossible.
Did they get their money back? I didn’t read the article.
Forbidden soup
If anyone is actually interested in learning how this works, this is a great blog post, from an author convinced like many that it’s a stupid thing for the rich, until… Well have a read: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
Very interesting article. Reminds me of when I read We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
The author tries to disprove that cryonics isn’t limited to rich people, while also pointing our the $200,000 upfront cost. Sure, a middle class American could probably swing the $300 annual fees, but most would be hard pressed for the $200k upfront cost.
The $300/year annual fees would be for a life insurance policy that already covers the main fee. There isn’t a 200k to pay in that case.
So just to expand upon the article author’s one possible future of it being overwhelming which he briefly glosses over, please enjoy this animated reading of one of my favourite graphic novels: Transmetropolitan
They paid good money for those soup tubes.
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I have the urge to absolutely make sure I dont accidentally increase the odds of my survival.
Tho being turned into a fine smooth soup of heavy metal(s) and plastics sounds kind of a funny last request (but especially then I would have def ran out of fucks, you know, a compostable trash bag is fine).
Here’s a link to the article in the screenshot, in case anyone else was interested in reading it like I was: https://www.freethink.com/futurology/cryogenically-frozen-humans
Thanks for this. Quite gruesome, but not at all unexpected. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine a while back, where I made the argument that water expands when frozen and, since humans are mostly water, freezing a human would crack every vital organ. I’m actually upset to discover I was right.
This is true, which is why preservation does not involve freezing, except for the bad attempts in the 70s the article talks about, which could never work. The bodies are vitrified, not frozen.
Which still doesn’t mean it will work, the technology to revive them doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t have any freezing issue.
That actually doesn’t sound much better to me, but my understanding of vitrification is minimal, at best. Still cool, though.
there could be a way maybe, by freezing water while keeping it extremely pressurized (extremely), you can make “efficient ice” that occupies less space, called ice VII, I’m not kidding. It would cost literally billions of dollars so not yet feasible, but it keeps my sci-fi loving mind at ease.
Cryoprotectants also do this pretty efficiently – they prevent crystallization, which leads to “vitreous” ice, which has more or less the same structure as liquid water and so doesn’t expand much. I think they do use that when freezing people, but the problem is that even if you fill the blood vessels with pure ethylene glycol, it diffuses very slowly, and it takes hours to get into cells which are far from large blood vessels. They dont diffuse the cryoprotectant in that thoroughly, though, because that’d take so long the body would have started to decay too much.
Edit: oops, the article talks about vitrifying agents. They make it sound like they’re not effective, but as I said above, they’re very effective if you can get them in every nook and cranny of every cell, which is a losing battle.
It’s fine, as long as the temperature stays stable and no further damage is done. We’re not going to revive their flesh. Instead we’re going to chop them off in large chunks. Suspend them in a kind of agar. Then laser off 2nanometer at a time. Scan the surface with 1nm resolution PiFM or better method. That’s going to yield many terabytes of image data that you can turms into a neural map of the entire nervous system. Even mapping this data to today’s LLM would get something roughly able to speak like the corpse. The better this data processing gets the more real the resurrected sentiences will be.
This sounds pretty amazing. Do you have any sources (or process names that I can search)? I would love to read more into the LLM part of your statement. Seriously sounds like scifi, and I’m loving it.
Visible human project for the 1993 first experiment 2013 slice culture modeling of central nervous system 2019 visible human body slice segmentation method 2022 scalable mapping of myelin and neuron density inthe human brain with micrometer resolution
In fiction We are legion, we are Bob Fun book but novice writer
Probably covered by futurist youtuber isaac arthur, probably part of the mind upload episode
I’m familiar with some of those, but they don’t digitally map thought and then read that map. At least not the last time I looked into them… Do they now?
Here is something close to tge cutting edge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSG3_JvnCkU
What they are creating is a connectome. A list of all neurons and their connection.
They are down to 34nm slices.
I said 2nm because the smallest features are 5nm inside the gap between neurons called synapses.
Presumably, there are no features enconding information smaller than that in the brain.
But just the connectome might be enough to replicate a consciousness.
Very interesting! Maybe once we understand the structure, we can recreate what’s behind the structure. Not sure if that’s a good thing, but it certainly is intriguing.
Gazpacho, non-vegan.
But eating the rich is vegan, no?
Normally yes, because you can’t do more for nature & people than that.
But in this case it’s just too late, the rich already turned into regular (tho toxic) meat as it neared the end of its life.
Now, if you get a regular not-about-to-die rich and turn it into a smoothie, then yes, vegan gazpacho.
Theoretically with consent, assuming the consent based veganism.
They consented by being there, just how we’ve consented to the state and capitalism.
That’s good enough for me.
Is it an expensive thing to do ? Can only rich people do it ? I want to buy freezers and sell people into being cryogenically frozen, but affordable
Everybody wants to be a Bob
Anyway they were already dead when they were frozen
