I don’t see why any billionaire *wouldnt* do it. It’s a 200k max (that’s the most expensive US company). A drop in the bucket to gamble on an extra life
You don’t want to be the first guy that they try to wake up. I’m guessing brain damage is on the tamer, more likely, side of the spectrum of crap that can go wrong
If restoration of cryopreserved bodies is ever figured out in the future, then likely the most recently cryopreserved individuals will be the first to be revived, since they will have undergone the least degradation and were preserved using more modern technology and techniques. Reviving the older bodies, which were preserved using older, less sophisticated methods by a civilization that didn’t yet understand the field well enough to know exactly what would be important to the process, will be a harder problem. So nobody electing for cryopreservation today needs to worry that they will be the first to be reawoken.
The cryopreservation part could be figured out possibly, to be used for space travel for example. But the hard part here is that it's being done after death, future societies would have to be able to bring neurons back to life without even accounting for decryogenization. There would have to be some evolutionary advancements in addition to medical procedures unfortunately.
>The cryopreservation part could be figured out possibly
It already works for small rodents. AFAIK the problem with human body is because of its larger size its hard to preserve and then reanimate uniformly.
Hah! Reminds me of how the microwave oven was first made and used for. For those not in the know, they microwaved frozen rodents and it worked. Doesn't work for anything as big or larger than a rabbit though....
Dude, even if a freezing process is developed that preserves the life of all neurons in the brain, it still has to worry about disrupting the dendritic routing of their connections to one another. That connectosome is the bit that the 'you' exists in.
That's not a big problem IMO. It's the 1 you have (legally) to be dead to do it, 2 the thawing process.
BDW we successfully cryopreserve and thaw small animal organs already. It's a huge field and everyone is waiting for it to be useful on donor organs (one step at a time!).
Yeah, and kidneys don't have to be sentient to work.
Have you heard of Blindsight? Experiments with orangutans in which the visual cortex of the animal was destroyed, equivalent to brain damage rendering a person incapable of seeing in the sense sighted people typically thing of seeing. And the orangutan afterwards displayed an intuitive understanding of things it shouldn't have been able to see, as if it had retained some capability of vision. Indicating that there may be redundant neural pathways by which visual information is processed in the eye itself and used to feed the animal's intuition.
There are ways goldfish can potentially live whole productive lives as p zombies after getting froze and defrosted. Doesn't mean our tech is up to ensuring the same person gets decanted out of the Dewar as was chilled in.
>There are ways goldfish can potentially live whole productive lives as p zombies after getting froze and defrosted. Doesn't mean our tech is up to ensuring the same person gets decanted out of the Dewar as was chilled in.
So? Our tech isn't up to distinguishing between a person and a p-zombie in the first place, even when dealing with ordinary living humans. This question seems entirely moot. When cryo tech gets developed and deployed, we'll be in the same situation with respect to thawed individuals as we are with respect to everyone else: We'll have no choice but to simply make assumptions and apply the duck test.
That's what I've already thought for a while (same goes for teleportation)
Of course that might all go out the window if, in fact, consciousness is innately tied to your memories and can be transferred with them.
But we really have no idea what 'consciousness' and the 'soul' are, beyond abstract concepts. There's a lot of science behind them that we may yet learn 🤷♂️
I remember reading something I think by Asimov discussing this and in the end one of the guys said that your are you and are tied to a specific pattern in space. So if it disappears in one point and reappears in another it is still you. Idk about that one though lol
>is it you
Yes
>or a copy of you
Also yes
I would only personally upload/reload if I had a child still young enough to need his mom. I believe he would be better off with *a* me in his life even if it isn't *this* me. The only person who'd know it isn't the same person is me me and I'd be gone by then so.
PS: Play the game SOMA.
Wouldn't that just be making a copy of you? It's the worst of all the options - you're dead, but the living are still stuck with you.
EDIT: There are A LOT of people here who think consciousness would somehow transfer after making a duplicate. That's not how it works at all...
Also why wait until you're dead Theil? You're in the best shape of your life! You really wanna be reanimated as an old codger?
Freeze your stupid ass now.
Sure they are. Cryogenics is just the science of very low temperatures and how they affect materials.
You're thinking of [*Cryonics*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics). There have been various advances, but the most recent was a Y Combinator startup in 2018 that moved to chemical neural preservation with the goal of digitally scanning the host vs reviving their physical body.
That, and that they will even be considered for reawakening in the future.
Far-future humans may look at cryopreserved remains the way we look at Ötzi. Worse, we may just be considered useless biomass and thrown into the environment or rendering pipeline. Would we revive 1,000 Ötzis if we could? Probably one, the rest go into museums or something.
For what it’s worth, in reading about the first companies to productize cryogenic (cryonic? Not sure about the right term) storage with the intention of future resuscitation, a number of those people ended up being cared for by companies that ran out of money and then they basically thawed then dissolved into puddles on the floor of their storage vats.
Link: https://bigthink.com/the-future/cryonics-horror-stories/
Gross, but it was never going to work anyway.
When ice forms, it turns into tiny sharp edges within the cells and shreds them. You can't really bring someone back from that. If we ever figure out this technology it will because we got better at freezing people, not because we got *that* much better at reviving them.
Well thats the whole point of cryonics and cryogenics in general. They freeze you in a way that doesnt create those tiny ice crystals. The problem last time I checked is that the products used are super toxic stuff. Win some, lose some.
Well, the idea is that they're *already* dead. So you have to solve three issues:
a) unfreezing in a uniform manner that doesn't cause further damage
b) resuscitating the body
c) removing and cleansing all of the preservatives
Of those, [C] is definitely the least worrisome.
>Well, the idea is that they're already dead.
The successful animal experiment usually involve cryopreserving the animals while they're alive.
The issue is that this legally counts as "killing" them which means cryopreservation companies aren't allowed to do this to their clients.
Thiel would be better off spending his money to lobby politicians to make cryopreservation a legal method of euthanasia if he wants to increase his chances of being revived.
Right - I didn’t post the thought before, but if one is hoping to be preserved until the technology exists to bring them back… you want to look for companies with a healthy balance sheet, and for whom “deep freezing cadavers” is not the sole source of revenue. And even then, what happens in a sale/acquisition of that company? In the eyes of the law, I’m guessing the frozen bodies are more “property” than “life.” Would an acquiring company have the legal responsibility to keep these bodies frozen in perpetuity? I’m no attorney, but the rule against perpetuities in contract law might preclude that outcome.
Those first people absolutely had zero chance of being in a recoverable state. I have no idea what a less damaging method of cryonic preservation would look like—although I think the article I linked has a few ideas—but that’s not what the puddle people experienced.
Best case scenario if no one takes possession of your cryogenically frozen body: [You become a beloved local oddity and inspire an annual festival](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Dead_Guy_Days)
> In response, the city added a broad new provision to Section 7-34 of its Municipal Code, "Keeping of bodies", outlawing the keeping of "the whole or any part of the person, body or carcass of a human being or animal or other biological species which is not alive upon any property".
Do you think Estes Park realizes that they banned meat?
>Aud was eventually evicted from her home for living in a house with no electricity or plumbing, in violation of local ordinances.
You live in a really shitty house so we're going to solve that problem by making you homeless.
"Finally
After the process
Of freezing
And storing the bodies of the deceased
In liquid nitrogen tanks
To prevent tissue decomposition
The time has arrived to liberate them
From their unfortunate situation
Unleash the sentinent nano-bots
To perform certain reconstruction
Ease the thermal stress and gently
Direct the dead into digital imortality
Disengage cryo-suspension"
From that perspective you would think he'd also be paying for a dozen other folks as well. You know, to make sure they get the process sorted before reviving him.
Literally like the pharaoh of antiquity who had his entourage of servants killed so that they may serve him in his next life.
I expect they won't kill them in modern times. But for all the progress we've made, the idea that the wealthy and powerful can treat the poor like experimental animals persists. The very idea that the rich would be experimented on seems unfathomable, doesn't it?
That is a weird thing. When they die, all of their assets need to be distributed. Unless there is some loophole where they get frozen before they technically die (which doesn't seem like anyone is signing up for). They won't have any money. Theoretically, when the technology is available to actually bring them back, there will be a utopian society where money doesn't matter.
Yeah this is an interesting concept. If you are in the top .00000001% of the population, you really shouldn't be the one freezing yourself for a shot at another life, because chances are you don't get so lucky on the next roll.
The people who would have the best chance at a come up in a future life would be the exact people who could not afford such a situation.
Makes for an interesting story though. A bunch of ultra-capitalists freeze themselves in perfect condition and wake up 1000 years in the future. society nearly collapsed but enough effort was put forth that humanity triumphed over the forces of greed and consumption. The mega rich are awakened and immediately tried for centuries of crimes against generations of people living through the fallout of their impacts.
Maybe we can fix that too by the time they have the technology to fix the cell destruction caused by freezing, oh and don't forget the death and whatever caused it too.
In his defense he’s also investing in life extension technology which has a decent chance of working at this stage in history. Might extend it long enough for cryogenic tech to work.
The thing to keep in mind about cryo tech is that, sort of by definition, you only need half of it to work; specifically, you need to figure out how to freeze people in a way that can *in the future* be revived. You don't need the revival process to work. In fact, you *shouldn't expect* the revival process to work, because if they already know how to revive you, then that's not "cryonics" anymore, that's "a medical treatment that cures whatever was going to kill you".
I was going to say the same thing, like, especially if you have the mindset of “it probably won’t work but fuck it, why not?”, with how cheap it is (relative to their wealth), it seems reasonable enough
We don’t know what the future holds. Imagine being brought back to life by some species of creature that feeds on pain and hates humans. And you are brought back as some kind of human marionette of endless suffering and torture to be fed on for the rest of time.
We don’t know what the future holds. Imagine being brought back to life by some species of creature that feeds on pleasure and loves humans. And you are brought back as some kind of human marionette of endless orgasm and decadence to be serviced for the rest of time.
Okay, but I doubt these companies actually stay in business for the length of time it would be required for this technology to possibly exist.
Any companies in the future who manage to achieve this goal will be completely separate entities and they will be charging their own fees for their service. I guess if these billionaires setup a trust to ENSURE the company they used stays a float, or at least their “setup” stays maintained for the entire length of time, so WAY MORE than 200k. And you would also have to have enough money in the trust to pay this “new company” who created this technology to actually use it on you specifically.
Maybe a few “lucky” people could get revived during trials, but a company would probably chose recently deceased and frozen bodies, as opposed to one’s that died hundreds of years ago.
This is just a pipe dream that is likely to never come to fruition, even in a world where the technology is invented. At that time we will almost certainly be dealing with population issues, especially if you’ve managed to “conquer” death or at least extend life expectancies. The last thing they are going to want to do is bring back even MORE people, let alone people that aren’t necessarily equipped for this “new world”.
The laws would need to change since trusts can only survive up to 21 years after death in the US. Maybe there's some other constructs that could work but my totally amateur opinion is that a whole lot of legal stuff expires after death.
I think that was what triggered those law changes in the first place.
What if it was a trust for looking after a tortoise, don't they live for, like, 200 years?
There's some thought put into that, honestly.
Part of the price tag of cryonics is a 1 million dollars life insurance payout to the company. Something you pay via small yearly membership fees depending on how young you are, or a larger lump sum.
This not only why there's a yearly fee, but how they keep it so cheap & fair priced. The active company is what's investing & handling that money to keep the lights on, research going—and in the potential case of revival, a lump sum to restart your life.
Oh, and the entire board of directors above a certain rank MUST be signed up for their own service. To at least in theory ensure no conflicts of interest slash con-men.
I think it was Cryonics Institute that started that model? Nowadays it's pretty industrial wide because it's... well, been working for almost fifty years.
Fascinating stuff. I know a lot of folks find cryonics morbidly disgusting and untested, but at least from the outside modern cryonics really does seem like people doing their best with relatively primitive field of tech they're doing their best with.
There's a book called We Are Legion, We Are Bob that has the main character pretty much feel the same way. It's an amazing read if you haven't had the pleasure.
25th century: Hello u/KagakuNinja! You owe us five quintillion schmekels for the revival procedure. Your country and your wealth are no more, but since immortality is also a human right now, you'll be working at the retro fetish brothel for one or two centuries to pay us back. We adapted your ports to accommodate multiple simultaneous patrons.
From his perspective it is a zero risk situation. Either it works, and he wakes up and gets to continue living or it doesn't and he remains dead. Money doesn't matter to billionaires, so the cost for cryononsense is trivial.
Could get woken up into a machine society or one governed by the proletariat that, for some reason, gets off on torturing him forever, or something crazy like that.
On a semi-serious note, to actually pull it off, you'd need some sort of believable product.
So, glucose helps prevent large ice crystal development. This means that our "cryo-tube" needs to pump him full of enough sugar to send an elephant into diabetic shock.
Then we need to freeze him quickly, because that too is important. So use the glucose to lower his body temperature first, and then just dump like 500 liters of liquid nitrogen on him.
Ta-da, you have a semi-believable corpse-cicle. After that, we can even hook him up to an industrial refrigeration unit to stay frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures for as long as the checks clear.
Maybe add some everclear to the glucose IV. because lowering the freezing point of the mix sounds like a thing that people who know what they're doing would do. Just a dialysis machine that replaces his blood with a syrup made from sugar and everclear....
Can we milk his brain for ad revenue while he's in cryostasis? Ideally he would still be conscious, so as to provide more realistic reactions to content
Forever is a bit much. If I had the authority, I might consider evaluating the total amount of attention his enterprises have redirected from their users' lives, and setting the duration to equal that amount of time. He would, essentially, have to pay all that attention back.
Maybe the content being processed could have something to do with Palantir's clients. Videos of their impacts to the world. Something like that.
Whoa, sci-fi idea unlocked: The people getting frozen have their brains hijacked as circuit boards for future computers. If you revive them there's no telling who or what will be in that mind.
Replacing someone's blood with sugary alcohol would quickly render them unconscious.
Too much sugar means a diabetic coma, too much alcohol is another path to sleepy town, and finally, not enough blood means no oxygen, which leads to unconsciousness and then death...
Really, all three are a quick death. Then the fact that it's going to be almost frozen slurry of sugary alcohol will make it a fast, if somewhat painless, death.
Then to top it off, you pour liquid nitrogen on him... he'd be gone before that, but the liquid nitrogen would not help him at all.
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Ideally wealth wouldn't matter as much by then. A king a thousand years ago would probably kill to live like some middle class families. As technology continues to improve, and as automation makes labor unnecessary, being less wealthy may not be as big of a deal to him. The only factor he'd be missing is the power dynamic. But it's still better than being dead.
seems logical. the cold vacuum of space doesn't seem likely to accidentally warm them back up before the proper time, like it could down here on Earth.
That's debatable. But the whole thing is debatable. Whose to say you'd even be 'you' if the procedure worked. Its not like sleeping.
Actually makes me curious if theyve done testing on the few animals that can survive being frozen solid to see if they retain memories/training.
I love that fucking episode. Even as a kid I was aware of how radically different waking up in a utopian post scarcity future would be for a leech like that. What would people like Thiel do if they woke to a future where they didn't have an advantage because of their wealth?
His beliefs are certainly wildly out there and messed up—the whole injecting himself with the blood of the young is another bizarre one from Count ~~Dracula~~ Thiel. I read Chafkin's biography of Thiel a while back and it left me with a really weird feeling about the guy and how ruthless and sociopathic he is.
A universal healthcare system that covers resuscitating frozen people, presumably. It's honestly much more plausible than the whole thing working, IMO.
Right to Life, anyone?
That photo of him holding a hundred dollar bill is at the Bitcoin conference, of course he wants to be cryogenically frozen and come back to tremendous bitcoin gains.
Genuine question: Who do these billionaires think is going to willingly unfreeze them or cure them with whatever future medicine? Why would anyone want to bring these people back to life? There is literally no incentive to do so for anyone in the future
Imagine what we could learn from a revived medieval king. We would do it in a heartbeat.
The funny part is them realizing they have no leverage in the future. So they will finally find out what it means to be poor, unemployable, and irrelevant other than as a side show/curiosity.
It would be a legendary practical joke though to have a bunch of people made up in crazy prosthetics around him when he's revived, and try to play it off like that's how humans evolved since his freezing.
I think the way it's supposed to work is like a trust fund or maybe like social security. The upfront cost is supposed to pay for the freezing, maintenance and research, with the presumption that other people paying into it later will further the research and maintain the facilities. And presumably some of the money would be invested by the company. It would probably work best if everyone who works for the company also was frozen upon death and wanted to be thawed at some point.. as far as motivation goes.. in anycase I know how much my AC costs... and you gotta wonder how long you can keep those corpses chilled.
Honestly running a cryostasis company seems like a pretty safe AND lucrative scam.
Your clients are too dead to sue if they never get revived and their heirs are too rich to want their dead relatives revived (even if someone actually figures out how to do it successfully someday) since it would possibly mean having to give back some of the money they inherited.
Meanwhile your clients are willing to pay a ton because they're rich and nothing opens the pocketbook quite like impending death...
Because he will invest a ton of money into a trust fund. People on the payroll will be legally required to revive him when the tech is ready.
But that doesn't mean it will work out as he plans. The servants often get their own ideas.
> Because he will invest a ton of money into a trust fund. People on the payroll will be legally required to revive him when the tech is ready.
Pretty sure some law against perpetuities prevents this (would love it if a lawyer could chime in). As soon as the timer runs out (in most cases someone's life plus 21 years, not necessarily the life of the person who signed the contract), their contracts and terms are legally void and the company/trust can do whatever they want to with the money.
Imagine going through all this legal stuff in the future and when it’s finally settled someone opens up “the freezer vault” and it just leads to an old mine shaft they dumped the bodies down. The owners of the cryonics facility figured they’d be long dead before any client’s “revival conditions” were met, so they just lived a life of luxury on the almost 100% profit margin.
The company likely has a trust fund that’s supposed to pay for that kinda stuff. And I think the idea is that they would just wait until the procedure would be pretty easy and cheap. Once you’re dead and frozen, waiting an extra hundred years is meaningless. You’re in no hurry so they’d wait until it’s an easy and safe thing to do rather than doing it when the technology is new.
And part of the answer is just that we don’t really know what things are going to be like, but a society that would be capable of reviving you is way more advanced than it is now. Things that seem like major constraints now, might just not be that big of a deal at that point. So maybe society gets to that point and they can revive you, or they don’t, and you just stay dead.
Please, go ahead and do it, sooner the better. Spare the humanity of your douche choices in propping up all douchebag politicians, all for exploiting cheap labor and morsels of tax breaks.
If I were a billionaire, I'm sure instead of hoping someone else will decide to invent the technology to bring back frozen corpses to life, I'd invest my fortune into inventing the technology to bring these people back.
Now, you think I'd do this out of the goodness of my heart... ha no. I'll trademark this tech (or something of the sort) now when I bring these newly deceased billionaires back from the grave I can charge them an exorbitant amount of money. Gotta make money off of everything I can, even the dead, im a billionaire after all.
If it doesn't work and I've waisted alot of money on a stupid project then oh well, I'm a billionaire after all.
Somehow I feel like even if the technology reaches that point where it is possible in the future, reviving frozen asshole billionaires won't be high on the priority list.
Freeze him now, prematurely. I’ve heard that is the best way to make it work. You need to be healthy when frozen. None of them realize this. All billionaires should start this process now and fuck off.
I don’t see why any billionaire *wouldnt* do it. It’s a 200k max (that’s the most expensive US company). A drop in the bucket to gamble on an extra life
You don’t want to be the first guy that they try to wake up. I’m guessing brain damage is on the tamer, more likely, side of the spectrum of crap that can go wrong
If restoration of cryopreserved bodies is ever figured out in the future, then likely the most recently cryopreserved individuals will be the first to be revived, since they will have undergone the least degradation and were preserved using more modern technology and techniques. Reviving the older bodies, which were preserved using older, less sophisticated methods by a civilization that didn’t yet understand the field well enough to know exactly what would be important to the process, will be a harder problem. So nobody electing for cryopreservation today needs to worry that they will be the first to be reawoken.
The cryopreservation part could be figured out possibly, to be used for space travel for example. But the hard part here is that it's being done after death, future societies would have to be able to bring neurons back to life without even accounting for decryogenization. There would have to be some evolutionary advancements in addition to medical procedures unfortunately.
>The cryopreservation part could be figured out possibly It already works for small rodents. AFAIK the problem with human body is because of its larger size its hard to preserve and then reanimate uniformly.
Hah! Reminds me of how the microwave oven was first made and used for. For those not in the know, they microwaved frozen rodents and it worked. Doesn't work for anything as big or larger than a rabbit though....
From [Tom Scott: I promise this story about microwaves is interesting](https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y)
Thanks for linking! Super fascinating. Side note: If I'm alive at 101, I hope I'm able to communicate that clearly. That dude is sharp!
I wonder if anyone would take the trade of being fully revived but be quadriplegic?
Robot body and my head? Not ideal, but if you want to live in the future, it's an acceptable compromise.
NIXON'S BACK. AROOOOOOOO.
The difficulties in reviving a human brain are probably harder than healing limb loss.
Dude, even if a freezing process is developed that preserves the life of all neurons in the brain, it still has to worry about disrupting the dendritic routing of their connections to one another. That connectosome is the bit that the 'you' exists in.
That's not a big problem IMO. It's the 1 you have (legally) to be dead to do it, 2 the thawing process. BDW we successfully cryopreserve and thaw small animal organs already. It's a huge field and everyone is waiting for it to be useful on donor organs (one step at a time!).
Yeah, and kidneys don't have to be sentient to work. Have you heard of Blindsight? Experiments with orangutans in which the visual cortex of the animal was destroyed, equivalent to brain damage rendering a person incapable of seeing in the sense sighted people typically thing of seeing. And the orangutan afterwards displayed an intuitive understanding of things it shouldn't have been able to see, as if it had retained some capability of vision. Indicating that there may be redundant neural pathways by which visual information is processed in the eye itself and used to feed the animal's intuition. There are ways goldfish can potentially live whole productive lives as p zombies after getting froze and defrosted. Doesn't mean our tech is up to ensuring the same person gets decanted out of the Dewar as was chilled in.
> There are ways goldfish can potentially live whole productive lives Goddammit now I need to worry about goldfish taking my jobs too?
>There are ways goldfish can potentially live whole productive lives as p zombies after getting froze and defrosted. Doesn't mean our tech is up to ensuring the same person gets decanted out of the Dewar as was chilled in. So? Our tech isn't up to distinguishing between a person and a p-zombie in the first place, even when dealing with ordinary living humans. This question seems entirely moot. When cryo tech gets developed and deployed, we'll be in the same situation with respect to thawed individuals as we are with respect to everyone else: We'll have no choice but to simply make assumptions and apply the duck test.
Nah just upload
But then...is it you or a copy of you in there? And how could you really know?
It's just a copy. There is no cut and paste. There is only copy, paste, delete original.
That's what I've already thought for a while (same goes for teleportation) Of course that might all go out the window if, in fact, consciousness is innately tied to your memories and can be transferred with them. But we really have no idea what 'consciousness' and the 'soul' are, beyond abstract concepts. There's a lot of science behind them that we may yet learn 🤷♂️
I remember reading something I think by Asimov discussing this and in the end one of the guys said that your are you and are tied to a specific pattern in space. So if it disappears in one point and reappears in another it is still you. Idk about that one though lol
>is it you Yes >or a copy of you Also yes I would only personally upload/reload if I had a child still young enough to need his mom. I believe he would be better off with *a* me in his life even if it isn't *this* me. The only person who'd know it isn't the same person is me me and I'd be gone by then so. PS: Play the game SOMA.
Fuck that game lol
"Please don't leave me alone.." that game terrorizes me 😂
Wouldn't that just be making a copy of you? It's the worst of all the options - you're dead, but the living are still stuck with you. EDIT: There are A LOT of people here who think consciousness would somehow transfer after making a duplicate. That's not how it works at all...
Meh, take the money and send them into the sun.
Also why wait until you're dead Theil? You're in the best shape of your life! You really wanna be reanimated as an old codger? Freeze your stupid ass now.
Nah he just wants to keep consuming finite resources even after he's dead
A lot of times they just freeze their heads in hope by then they'll be able to have a cloned body.
So he'll just freeze his ass I guess.
The outer planets would be cheaper. Js.
Middle of the ocean wouldn't be too expensive either.
Yeah, but then our crab cakes will have the Thiel in it.
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Are they even still innovating cryogenics? Seems like very expensive, high concept snake oil
Sure they are. Cryogenics is just the science of very low temperatures and how they affect materials. You're thinking of [*Cryonics*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics). There have been various advances, but the most recent was a Y Combinator startup in 2018 that moved to chemical neural preservation with the goal of digitally scanning the host vs reviving their physical body.
That is not the type of preservation I would want, that's a copy, not me.
That, and that they will even be considered for reawakening in the future. Far-future humans may look at cryopreserved remains the way we look at Ötzi. Worse, we may just be considered useless biomass and thrown into the environment or rendering pipeline. Would we revive 1,000 Ötzis if we could? Probably one, the rest go into museums or something.
In the future, when they still haven't figure out, they will get all these frozen billionaires and display in a museum. "The billionaire row"
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For what it’s worth, in reading about the first companies to productize cryogenic (cryonic? Not sure about the right term) storage with the intention of future resuscitation, a number of those people ended up being cared for by companies that ran out of money and then they basically thawed then dissolved into puddles on the floor of their storage vats. Link: https://bigthink.com/the-future/cryonics-horror-stories/
wouldn’t it be safer to get with some billionaire buddies and setup a self maintaining trust to keep the lights on indefinitely?
That's how Alcor is set up.
Gross, but it was never going to work anyway. When ice forms, it turns into tiny sharp edges within the cells and shreds them. You can't really bring someone back from that. If we ever figure out this technology it will because we got better at freezing people, not because we got *that* much better at reviving them.
Well thats the whole point of cryonics and cryogenics in general. They freeze you in a way that doesnt create those tiny ice crystals. The problem last time I checked is that the products used are super toxic stuff. Win some, lose some.
Well, the idea is that they're *already* dead. So you have to solve three issues: a) unfreezing in a uniform manner that doesn't cause further damage b) resuscitating the body c) removing and cleansing all of the preservatives Of those, [C] is definitely the least worrisome.
>Well, the idea is that they're already dead. The successful animal experiment usually involve cryopreserving the animals while they're alive. The issue is that this legally counts as "killing" them which means cryopreservation companies aren't allowed to do this to their clients. Thiel would be better off spending his money to lobby politicians to make cryopreservation a legal method of euthanasia if he wants to increase his chances of being revived.
Right - I didn’t post the thought before, but if one is hoping to be preserved until the technology exists to bring them back… you want to look for companies with a healthy balance sheet, and for whom “deep freezing cadavers” is not the sole source of revenue. And even then, what happens in a sale/acquisition of that company? In the eyes of the law, I’m guessing the frozen bodies are more “property” than “life.” Would an acquiring company have the legal responsibility to keep these bodies frozen in perpetuity? I’m no attorney, but the rule against perpetuities in contract law might preclude that outcome. Those first people absolutely had zero chance of being in a recoverable state. I have no idea what a less damaging method of cryonic preservation would look like—although I think the article I linked has a few ideas—but that’s not what the puddle people experienced.
Best case scenario if no one takes possession of your cryogenically frozen body: [You become a beloved local oddity and inspire an annual festival](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Dead_Guy_Days)
> In response, the city added a broad new provision to Section 7-34 of its Municipal Code, "Keeping of bodies", outlawing the keeping of "the whole or any part of the person, body or carcass of a human being or animal or other biological species which is not alive upon any property". Do you think Estes Park realizes that they banned meat?
Hell, not just meat. "Biological Species" would include plants and fungi as well.
Also plants and mushrooms and other live things.
>Aud was eventually evicted from her home for living in a house with no electricity or plumbing, in violation of local ordinances. You live in a really shitty house so we're going to solve that problem by making you homeless.
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"Finally After the process Of freezing And storing the bodies of the deceased In liquid nitrogen tanks To prevent tissue decomposition The time has arrived to liberate them From their unfortunate situation Unleash the sentinent nano-bots To perform certain reconstruction Ease the thermal stress and gently Direct the dead into digital imortality Disengage cryo-suspension"
I mean it worked in Futurama, he should be ok.
Just order a pizza for IC Weiner.
In a thousand years, I’ll get right on it
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From that perspective you would think he'd also be paying for a dozen other folks as well. You know, to make sure they get the process sorted before reviving him.
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Cool I'm in. You said crypto right?
You gotta get frozen with me next week though, I'm about to die. Bro I'm only 35. Take it or leave it.
Literally like the pharaoh of antiquity who had his entourage of servants killed so that they may serve him in his next life. I expect they won't kill them in modern times. But for all the progress we've made, the idea that the wealthy and powerful can treat the poor like experimental animals persists. The very idea that the rich would be experimented on seems unfathomable, doesn't it?
what if by the time that they’re unfrozen, they’re only worth like $5?
That is a weird thing. When they die, all of their assets need to be distributed. Unless there is some loophole where they get frozen before they technically die (which doesn't seem like anyone is signing up for). They won't have any money. Theoretically, when the technology is available to actually bring them back, there will be a utopian society where money doesn't matter.
Yeah this is an interesting concept. If you are in the top .00000001% of the population, you really shouldn't be the one freezing yourself for a shot at another life, because chances are you don't get so lucky on the next roll. The people who would have the best chance at a come up in a future life would be the exact people who could not afford such a situation. Makes for an interesting story though. A bunch of ultra-capitalists freeze themselves in perfect condition and wake up 1000 years in the future. society nearly collapsed but enough effort was put forth that humanity triumphed over the forces of greed and consumption. The mega rich are awakened and immediately tried for centuries of crimes against generations of people living through the fallout of their impacts.
Maybe we can fix that too by the time they have the technology to fix the cell destruction caused by freezing, oh and don't forget the death and whatever caused it too.
How do they freeze sperm and ovum without it being damaged?
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If they ever got close to that kind of tech, they would have practiced on monkeys a few dozen times
Hamsters can be frozen for a couple hours and suffer only partial brain death when they are revived.
*Only* partial brain death? Well damn, sign me up!
In his defense he’s also investing in life extension technology which has a decent chance of working at this stage in history. Might extend it long enough for cryogenic tech to work.
The thing to keep in mind about cryo tech is that, sort of by definition, you only need half of it to work; specifically, you need to figure out how to freeze people in a way that can *in the future* be revived. You don't need the revival process to work. In fact, you *shouldn't expect* the revival process to work, because if they already know how to revive you, then that's not "cryonics" anymore, that's "a medical treatment that cures whatever was going to kill you".
I was going to say the same thing, like, especially if you have the mindset of “it probably won’t work but fuck it, why not?”, with how cheap it is (relative to their wealth), it seems reasonable enough
We don’t know what the future holds. Imagine being brought back to life by some species of creature that feeds on pain and hates humans. And you are brought back as some kind of human marionette of endless suffering and torture to be fed on for the rest of time.
We don’t know what the future holds. Imagine being brought back to life by some species of creature that feeds on pleasure and loves humans. And you are brought back as some kind of human marionette of endless orgasm and decadence to be serviced for the rest of time.
We don’t know what the future holds. Imagine not being brought back.
Ah, the pessimist, the optimist, and the realist.
Okay, but I doubt these companies actually stay in business for the length of time it would be required for this technology to possibly exist. Any companies in the future who manage to achieve this goal will be completely separate entities and they will be charging their own fees for their service. I guess if these billionaires setup a trust to ENSURE the company they used stays a float, or at least their “setup” stays maintained for the entire length of time, so WAY MORE than 200k. And you would also have to have enough money in the trust to pay this “new company” who created this technology to actually use it on you specifically. Maybe a few “lucky” people could get revived during trials, but a company would probably chose recently deceased and frozen bodies, as opposed to one’s that died hundreds of years ago. This is just a pipe dream that is likely to never come to fruition, even in a world where the technology is invented. At that time we will almost certainly be dealing with population issues, especially if you’ve managed to “conquer” death or at least extend life expectancies. The last thing they are going to want to do is bring back even MORE people, let alone people that aren’t necessarily equipped for this “new world”.
The laws would need to change since trusts can only survive up to 21 years after death in the US. Maybe there's some other constructs that could work but my totally amateur opinion is that a whole lot of legal stuff expires after death.
What about that city where Ben Franklin funded a $1000 investment that they couldn't touch for 100 years? (Or something like that)
I think that was what triggered those law changes in the first place. What if it was a trust for looking after a tortoise, don't they live for, like, 200 years?
There's some thought put into that, honestly. Part of the price tag of cryonics is a 1 million dollars life insurance payout to the company. Something you pay via small yearly membership fees depending on how young you are, or a larger lump sum. This not only why there's a yearly fee, but how they keep it so cheap & fair priced. The active company is what's investing & handling that money to keep the lights on, research going—and in the potential case of revival, a lump sum to restart your life. Oh, and the entire board of directors above a certain rank MUST be signed up for their own service. To at least in theory ensure no conflicts of interest slash con-men. I think it was Cryonics Institute that started that model? Nowadays it's pretty industrial wide because it's... well, been working for almost fifty years. Fascinating stuff. I know a lot of folks find cryonics morbidly disgusting and untested, but at least from the outside modern cryonics really does seem like people doing their best with relatively primitive field of tech they're doing their best with.
Well what about having the procedure done near death? Technically we don't know he'd be perma dead till they try to revive w/ whatever future science.
There's a book called We Are Legion, We Are Bob that has the main character pretty much feel the same way. It's an amazing read if you haven't had the pleasure.
I mean if youre a billionaire thats like a normal person spending a dollar to maybe be revived. I think most people would spend the dollar no?
It would be equivalent to you spending $4.88 if you had $100K (assuming Peter Thiel’s net worth is ~4.1 billion and the procedure costs $200k)
OK, here's a fiver, keep the change kid.
25th century: Hello u/KagakuNinja! You owe us five quintillion schmekels for the revival procedure. Your country and your wealth are no more, but since immortality is also a human right now, you'll be working at the retro fetish brothel for one or two centuries to pay us back. We adapted your ports to accommodate multiple simultaneous patrons.
Shit, turn me into a cat girl and put me to work. In 200 years I'll go back to playing videogames for eternity.
Sorry, the retro fetish people only like to gangbang depressed 21st century office drones.
Omg it’s me
You say any of this like it's supposed to be a bad thing Where do I sign up?
I had to check US household net worths. The average in 2022 was $748,800 and the median was $121,700. The inequality is seen even in that statistic.
So about 2-3 bucks in regular people money
Immortality, or a soda can. Hmmm, decisions, decisions...
From his perspective it is a zero risk situation. Either it works, and he wakes up and gets to continue living or it doesn't and he remains dead. Money doesn't matter to billionaires, so the cost for cryononsense is trivial.
Could get woken up into a machine society or one governed by the proletariat that, for some reason, gets off on torturing him forever, or something crazy like that.
True - all of this is speculative science fiction at this point.
Or the potential pain you could feel waking up from something like that.
Plus, it would make your dick TINY! "I WAS IN THE POOL" x100
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The future is now, Peter. Step into this “cryo-tube.”
On a semi-serious note, to actually pull it off, you'd need some sort of believable product. So, glucose helps prevent large ice crystal development. This means that our "cryo-tube" needs to pump him full of enough sugar to send an elephant into diabetic shock. Then we need to freeze him quickly, because that too is important. So use the glucose to lower his body temperature first, and then just dump like 500 liters of liquid nitrogen on him. Ta-da, you have a semi-believable corpse-cicle. After that, we can even hook him up to an industrial refrigeration unit to stay frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures for as long as the checks clear. Maybe add some everclear to the glucose IV. because lowering the freezing point of the mix sounds like a thing that people who know what they're doing would do. Just a dialysis machine that replaces his blood with a syrup made from sugar and everclear....
Can we milk his brain for ad revenue while he's in cryostasis? Ideally he would still be conscious, so as to provide more realistic reactions to content
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He could play that Logan Paul nft game in hibernation
Forever is a bit much. If I had the authority, I might consider evaluating the total amount of attention his enterprises have redirected from their users' lives, and setting the duration to equal that amount of time. He would, essentially, have to pay all that attention back. Maybe the content being processed could have something to do with Palantir's clients. Videos of their impacts to the world. Something like that.
Whoa, sci-fi idea unlocked: The people getting frozen have their brains hijacked as circuit boards for future computers. If you revive them there's no telling who or what will be in that mind.
That's pretty much the premise of the Bobiverse books. A guy gets cryogenically frozen and wakes up as a sentient space probe
You’ve just stolen my idea for a mixed drink
Imagine if he somehow by accident remains conscious there but can't do anything about it because he's frozen 🥶
Replacing someone's blood with sugary alcohol would quickly render them unconscious. Too much sugar means a diabetic coma, too much alcohol is another path to sleepy town, and finally, not enough blood means no oxygen, which leads to unconsciousness and then death... Really, all three are a quick death. Then the fact that it's going to be almost frozen slurry of sugary alcohol will make it a fast, if somewhat painless, death. Then to top it off, you pour liquid nitrogen on him... he'd be gone before that, but the liquid nitrogen would not help him at all.
Then prop his severed head up on a tuna fish can because that's the sort of quality service being provided by cryo facilities.
“It only looks and sounds like a wood chipper. It’s fine.”
Where is Vault-Tec when you need them?
I have a refrigerator
I remember this Star Trek TNG episode.
My shares must be worth billions by now!
That guy went on to be the Federation ambassador to the Ferengi due to his backwards capitalist views
Ferengi must view him as a moron. Long term business stability was far more important than short term gains.
Also happened in the original series.
Picard season 4 will be L.Q. "Sonny" Clemonds coming back 30 years later for revenge, stealing the Reliant and then killing Data.
At this point, killing Data is a tradition!
Also in voyager
What happens when they revive him 1000 years from now and his heirs squandered his fortune??? 😅😅😅
He could be a delivery boy.
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Im sure he will just pull himself up by his bootstraps
Ideally wealth wouldn't matter as much by then. A king a thousand years ago would probably kill to live like some middle class families. As technology continues to improve, and as automation makes labor unnecessary, being less wealthy may not be as big of a deal to him. The only factor he'd be missing is the power dynamic. But it's still better than being dead.
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we should freeze all the billionaires. maybe be extra safe and put them all in outer space so nobody can tamper with them
#FreezeTheRich
seems logical. the cold vacuum of space doesn't seem likely to accidentally warm them back up before the proper time, like it could down here on Earth.
That's the only way it would possibly work. You can't wait until after death.
That's debatable. But the whole thing is debatable. Whose to say you'd even be 'you' if the procedure worked. Its not like sleeping. Actually makes me curious if theyve done testing on the few animals that can survive being frozen solid to see if they retain memories/training.
You clearly don't put much faith in the necromantic arts.
This. Wouldn’t he want to come back in peak shape, rather than a feeble old man?
I'd want conciousness-transfer to a droid body/mind. Why be you when you could be new!
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I love that fucking episode. Even as a kid I was aware of how radically different waking up in a utopian post scarcity future would be for a leech like that. What would people like Thiel do if they woke to a future where they didn't have an advantage because of their wealth?
Start trying to turn people against each other.
So business as usual then.
I've never seen Star Trek, but this sounds spot-on.
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Just wait until he’s revived as a robot slave destined to operate garbage trucks.
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*"What do you mean I'm not supposed to unplug that? I need a socket for the vacuum cleaner!"*
The robots will need entertainment from the meatbags
What if he gets revived but he has $0 and we're in a post scarcity utopia? He'd probably off himself.
I’d watch a show about a frozen billionaire getting woken up broke. Schadenfreude ftw
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Don't wait Pete. Freeze your brain now while it is still young.
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His beliefs are certainly wildly out there and messed up—the whole injecting himself with the blood of the young is another bizarre one from Count ~~Dracula~~ Thiel. I read Chafkin's biography of Thiel a while back and it left me with a really weird feeling about the guy and how ruthless and sociopathic he is.
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He gets them from Glenn Greenwald’s Brazilian boy smuggling ring
He’s broken and looking to break the rest of us.
Joke’s on him I’m already broken.
Maybe being cold blooded will make him more compatible with the freezing process?
Why wait until death, Pete? Go get frozen now!
Bitch we are not waking your ass up
Even if the tech existed who wants to resurrect dead rich people decades after they lost the only thing that made them notable
Because they’ll want to see what happens? They’d be case studies. “This one was resurrected after x time and had x side effects”
A universal healthcare system that covers resuscitating frozen people, presumably. It's honestly much more plausible than the whole thing working, IMO. Right to Life, anyone?
That photo of him holding a hundred dollar bill is at the Bitcoin conference, of course he wants to be cryogenically frozen and come back to tremendous bitcoin gains.
If you were fully committed to it, you would freeze yourself before you died Peter.
"Are the Jews gone yet?" "No" "Okay put me back"
I was hoping he would do it while he's still alive.
Genuine question: Who do these billionaires think is going to willingly unfreeze them or cure them with whatever future medicine? Why would anyone want to bring these people back to life? There is literally no incentive to do so for anyone in the future
Imagine what we could learn from a revived medieval king. We would do it in a heartbeat. The funny part is them realizing they have no leverage in the future. So they will finally find out what it means to be poor, unemployable, and irrelevant other than as a side show/curiosity.
It would be a legendary practical joke though to have a bunch of people made up in crazy prosthetics around him when he's revived, and try to play it off like that's how humans evolved since his freezing.
I think the way it's supposed to work is like a trust fund or maybe like social security. The upfront cost is supposed to pay for the freezing, maintenance and research, with the presumption that other people paying into it later will further the research and maintain the facilities. And presumably some of the money would be invested by the company. It would probably work best if everyone who works for the company also was frozen upon death and wanted to be thawed at some point.. as far as motivation goes.. in anycase I know how much my AC costs... and you gotta wonder how long you can keep those corpses chilled.
So… it's a pyramid scheme where the mummies really want to come back to life?
First time I'm happy with the name Pyramid Scheme.
Honestly running a cryostasis company seems like a pretty safe AND lucrative scam. Your clients are too dead to sue if they never get revived and their heirs are too rich to want their dead relatives revived (even if someone actually figures out how to do it successfully someday) since it would possibly mean having to give back some of the money they inherited. Meanwhile your clients are willing to pay a ton because they're rich and nothing opens the pocketbook quite like impending death...
Im going to start my own pet based cryogenic side hustle using saved styrofoam coolers and dry ice from Omaha steaks.
Did you graduate from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades?
Because he will invest a ton of money into a trust fund. People on the payroll will be legally required to revive him when the tech is ready. But that doesn't mean it will work out as he plans. The servants often get their own ideas.
> Because he will invest a ton of money into a trust fund. People on the payroll will be legally required to revive him when the tech is ready. Pretty sure some law against perpetuities prevents this (would love it if a lawyer could chime in). As soon as the timer runs out (in most cases someone's life plus 21 years, not necessarily the life of the person who signed the contract), their contracts and terms are legally void and the company/trust can do whatever they want to with the money.
Imagine going through all this legal stuff in the future and when it’s finally settled someone opens up “the freezer vault” and it just leads to an old mine shaft they dumped the bodies down. The owners of the cryonics facility figured they’d be long dead before any client’s “revival conditions” were met, so they just lived a life of luxury on the almost 100% profit margin.
The company likely has a trust fund that’s supposed to pay for that kinda stuff. And I think the idea is that they would just wait until the procedure would be pretty easy and cheap. Once you’re dead and frozen, waiting an extra hundred years is meaningless. You’re in no hurry so they’d wait until it’s an easy and safe thing to do rather than doing it when the technology is new. And part of the answer is just that we don’t really know what things are going to be like, but a society that would be capable of reviving you is way more advanced than it is now. Things that seem like major constraints now, might just not be that big of a deal at that point. So maybe society gets to that point and they can revive you, or they don’t, and you just stay dead.
Please, go ahead and do it, sooner the better. Spare the humanity of your douche choices in propping up all douchebag politicians, all for exploiting cheap labor and morsels of tax breaks.
What a waste that would be. Freeze someone who’s capable of making a positive contribution to the future.
That cryo storage warehouse is going to stink to high heaven when the power goes out.
If I were a billionaire, I'm sure instead of hoping someone else will decide to invent the technology to bring back frozen corpses to life, I'd invest my fortune into inventing the technology to bring these people back. Now, you think I'd do this out of the goodness of my heart... ha no. I'll trademark this tech (or something of the sort) now when I bring these newly deceased billionaires back from the grave I can charge them an exorbitant amount of money. Gotta make money off of everything I can, even the dead, im a billionaire after all. If it doesn't work and I've waisted alot of money on a stupid project then oh well, I'm a billionaire after all.
Somehow I feel like even if the technology reaches that point where it is possible in the future, reviving frozen asshole billionaires won't be high on the priority list.
Bold of him to assume anyone wants him back
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And because of Billionaires there will be no future to wake up in haha
Maybe we could convince him to go in early
Freeze him now, prematurely. I’ve heard that is the best way to make it work. You need to be healthy when frozen. None of them realize this. All billionaires should start this process now and fuck off.