Death Penalty.

[Rusty Edge]

Yeah. I am squeamish. My wife has had 4 or 5 cadaver bone grafts in her mouth, to strengthen her jaw for implants. Unlike most people she has an acidic mouth which dissolves her teeth.


Oh, then there's the bit about the heirs and the state not wanting to wait for their share of the estate when it comes to declaring somebody dead.

[Lorizael]

Yeah, I suspect lab-grown parts will make that not a worry.

Oh, then there's the bit about the heirs and the state not wanting to wait for their share of the estate when it comes to declaring somebody dead.

Well, currently, cryonics is a joke as far as the government is concerned, so when you get preserved, you count as dead legally. In fact, the way that almost everyone pays for cryonics is by having a life insurance policy that pays out to the cryonics organization of your choice (which is part of why most people think the whole thing is a scam, honestly...). As far as the part of your estate you're hoping to still have when you wake up... my understanding is that most people create a trust that, again, is held by the people freezing you. (Last time I checked, only about 250 people are preserved by the ~3 organizations doing cryonics.)

But all of that misses the wider point for me. If I do preserve myself, I might wake up in the future. If I don't, I won't.

[Rusty Edge]

I recall seeing an episode of the Morton Downey, Jr. Show on Cryogenics. I think it was when FOX was a new broadcast TV network. One of the guests was an outstanding young doctor who went into the field. He explained that cryogenics was the ultimate cure, for in time medicine would find a cure for everything. So I started to see it as a way to treat untreatable disease rather than prolong the life of a worn out body.

In the same episode they had a guest who was signed up to be frozen, and he was described in a subtitle as a " neurological suspension candidate." That struck me as particularly funny. In fact, We might have a neurological suspension candidate or two running for president today.

[Buster's Uncle]

Neurological suspension probably means they just freeze the head.  That's a thing, I hear. ‬

[Valka]

Ben Bova uses cryogenic freeze in a few of his Grand Tour novels. People get frozen until they can be cured of whatever would have killed them... but the tradeoff is that their minds are infantilized and they have to relearn everything - walking, talking, eating, and need a lot of therapy. They also have little or no memory of their former lives.

[Lorizael]

So I started to see it as a way to treat untreatable disease rather than prolong the life of a worn out body.

Sure, but maybe aging is just a disease that everybody gets.

Neurological suspension probably means they just freeze the head.  That's a thing, I hear. ‬

Yep.

Ben Bova uses cryogenic freeze in a few of his Grand Tour novels. People get frozen until they can be cured of whatever would have killed them... but the tradeoff is that their minds are infantilized and they have to relearn everything - walking, talking, eating, and need a lot of therapy. They also have little or no memory of their former lives.

That is something that worries me. I'm not interested in preserving my body's ability to carry on; I'm interested in preserving my personal existence.

...

Also, the pedant in me is required to point out that people involved with cryonics called it that, as opposed to cryogenics. Cryogenics is just the study of cold stuff, whereas cryonics is specifically about cryopreservation.

[Rusty Edge]

Cryonics it is.
And yes, he could only afford to have his head frozen. He looked like Link from The Adams Family. I still laugh when I think about it. I guess I would have described him as a client rather than a candidate, considering he had pre-paid.

As for aging, I will allow that there may be a more perfect balance of sustainable cell renewal, somewhere between aging and cancer, and that this could be attainable through gene therapy some day.

[Buster's Uncle]

Ben Bova uses cryogenic freeze in a few of his Grand Tour novels. People get frozen until they can be cured of whatever would have killed them... but the tradeoff is that their minds are infantilized and they have to relearn everything - walking, talking, eating, and need a lot of therapy. They also have little or no memory of their former lives.

That is something that worries me. I'm not interested in preserving my body's ability to carry on; I'm interested in preserving my personal existence.

Very nearly as central an issue as surviving at all.

I reread A World Out Of Time recently, and I wouldn't have made it through the training/probation period if I woke up a slave...