scrape_r_rational/data/cache/3teiu2.md

[Challenge Companion] Cryonics

Post:

Cryopreservation sees a lot of play in mass-market science fiction, but it's rarely in a serious form; instead, you get Encino Man, Demolition Man, Sleeper, Futurama, Austin Powers, etc. The concept is great for setting up a Fish Out of Temporal Water story, but it's rarely taken beyond that; it's just a way to get someone from the past into the present, or someone from the present into the future, without asking a lot of questions that don't have that premise as their center.

The other common scifi trope is the sleeper ship, where cryopreservation is used to put people into "storage" for dozens or hundreds of years so that slower-than-light travel across interstellar distances is possible. That form of cryopreservation is usually distinct from cryonics because it assumes that a healthy person at the beginning and end.

Cryonics, meaning the freezing of the dead or dying in hopes of returning them to life with advanced technology in the future, sees a lot less play. See here for more, but I think in general it boils down to cultural norms; mass media is averse to the idea of people "cheating death" and/or living forever, so this shouldn't be surprising. I should note that cryonics is a real thing that you can currently sign up for, at a cost of something like $300 a year, which shouldn't be surprising to members of this subreddit (but you never know).

Anyway, this is the companion thread for the weekly challenge. Found a story that seems like it fits? Have some insight into the challenge topic? Post it here.

Comments:

• u/alexanderwales:

  I read [A Visit to Alcor](http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/05/29/a-visit-to-alcor/index.html) by Mike Darwin a week or so ago, which is pretty (ahem) chilling, even if it's four years old. I think the strongest takeaway I had was that cryonics in its current form is not at all feedback driven. If I wanted to buy a television, I would go look at reviews on Amazon, talk to my friends, or listen what experts had to say. If I want to buy a soda, I not only have the FDA to guard against the worst issues, but there's feedback at every single level from manufacture to distribution to me, the consumer. This isn't to say that feedback-driven structures are perfect, especially those that are profit motivated, but compare this to cryonics and you'll see that there's virtually zero feedback, mostly because there's little way to evaluate results. If the cryopreservation fails catastrophically, the patient is still frozen and there is no feedback (and the cryopreservation organization has every incentive not to relay negative information to prospective patients).
  
  I would cynically expect an organization with no feedback mechanisms to become better at *selling* their product than *providing* their product. In other words, if people were somehow buying soda for its taste *without being able to taste it*, I would expect soda manufacturers to put lots of money into convincing people that their soda tasted great instead of putting money into actually changing the taste of their soda. It's the same reason vaporware happens; a startup focuses on getting investment by producing ever-better presentations rather than making the actual product. This also helps explain why the TSA engages in security theater rather than actual security. Darwin makes the argument that cryonics must necessarily be a different sort of organization given this lack of feedback, because if they're chasing profit (or status) improvements to process are inefficient.
  
  (This is an especially concerning failure mode given that the argument in favor of cryonics is derived from "shut up and multiply". Many of the chained probabilities revolve around the cryonics organization's ability to properly do their job and to persist into the future.)
  

  • u/Sparkwitch:

    The second part of that last parenthetical sentence is just as crucial as the first (for more on that, though, I recommend assessing the variety of arrival conditions listed by [The Cryonics Institute](http://www.cryonics.org/case-reports/).)
    
    Most of the [world's oldest companies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies#1650_to_1699) either serve a local public need (restaurants, banks, hotels) are family owned (passed from generation to generation) or are operated by religious institutions. Cryonics organizations do not currently meet any of these requirements.
    
    Worse, they operate best under Ponzi conditions: Paying long term, incremental costs with fund injections in the present. [ALCOR's own assessment](http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonics.html) of their economics is chaotic and unstable. 
    
    A long economic collapse which ends the fund influx, or a few weeks of civil disturbances which disrupt electric power, and even theoretically perfect crypreservation will fail. Our past is full of such disasters, why should our future be any different?
    

    • u/Transfuturist:

      I believe a good method for ensuring cryonics institutions are incentivized properly would be to give compulsory policies to their board of directors and employees.
      

  • u/Empiricist_or_not:

    Ouch! So do you or don't you have a policy?
    

    • u/alexanderwales:

      I don't have a policy. While I think that cryonics can work in principle, the advice I was given was, "break down the chained probabilities then shut up and multiply". When I did that, it didn't seem like it was worth the money (even assuming as low as $25 per month). But I'm also not a big believer in the Singularity, so my probabilities for successful revival are much lower than they'd be if I believed perfect nanotechnology was just around the corner.
      

  • u/None:

    Cynically?  But if it can't be evaluated scientifically, how do *they* know what they're offering?
    

    • u/alexanderwales:

      It *can* be evaluated *somewhat* scientifically, just at a step or two removed from seeing whether it actually works. To take analogy of a soda company selling great-tasting soda to people who cannot taste it a bit further, the executives within the company can choose to devote their time and money to the theoretical basis for taste, they can employ people who have expertise in the field of chemical analysis, etc. They wouldn't *actually* know how it tastes, but they might be able to do some cogent analysis and come to an approximation.
      
      *Or* they could see that the only real income that this provides them with is from people who are willing to *also* undertake the self-education necessary to understand their theoretical results, which means that while they might get closer to "good flavor" it doesn't really get them good income. They can spend money on research which they then use in marketing, or they can just (more efficiently) spend money on marketing.
      
      The company might do this without knowing that they're doing it, or they might do it with the full knowledge that far future outcomes don't really matter for the health of their organization or the security of their jobs. That's a very realistic failure mode for any organization that's divorced from feedback of its products.
      
      (I recommend reading Mike Darwin's articles on the subject, including the one that I linked above. He was President of Alcor for about five years and Research Director for something like ten years.)
      

  • u/None:

    Do we know anyone who can help us interpret [this new paper](http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2014.1636) purporting to show that long-term memories were retained in a vitrified and resuscitated *C. elegans*, aka nematode?  I feel like if this is real, it should definitely make me update, but I'm nowhere near enough of a biologist to know *how much*.
    

• u/gryfft:

  It might require a little digging to get one's hands on since there seems to be no legitimate place to read it online (maybe it's on Kindle?), but the Transmetropolitan issue #8 story "Another Cold Morning" is a pretty fantastic exploration of the sociological impact of reviving cryonically-preserved persons in a world that doesn't care about them. The (un)lucky souls are essentially refugees from the past, unwanted, unloved, and unuseful to modern (trans)humanity. 
  
  Highly recommend.
  

  • u/Sparkwitch:

    As you imply, there are present day immigrants and refugees (unwanted, unloved, and unuseful). They figure out how to live productively in more technologically-advanced societies than the ones from which they came. A few of them thrive. The vast majority believe their lives are better than they would have been if they hadn't moved.
    
    The story Warren Ellis tells is essentially a common immigrant's story, a tale older than writing.
    

• u/Sparkwitch:

  I'm full of [sour grapes](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3o3wv0/d_friday_offtopic_thread/cvu5pij) when it comes to cryonics, so the urge to write a short and depressing science fiction story about it is pretty tepid.
  
  That said, I love bald speculation.
  
  What is a human mind worth? There are billions of them available right now, and while producing new ones is energy and time intensive, people have been doing it casually and more-or-less by default for hundreds of thousands of years. There's such a glut of supply that demand only enters the equation in the rarest of circumstances. Outside of close friends, family, or (extremely rarely) loyal followers... who would want to revive a sick adult damaged by age (probably to the point of death) when there's an enormous stock of children available instead? They're cuter and their brains have a lot more natural potential for neural plasticity.
  
  Writing prompt: What sort of society has to exist in order that raising children is more difficult and less desired than raising the dead?
  
  So far as I can tell it requires the same sort of economic situations that encourages slavery. Regular citizens are unwilling to work a particular class of job or in a particular location.  They and their children have the ability to refuse subsistence wages, possibly because an equivalent lifestyle is available to them from the state.
  
  Which means that even a post-scarcity dystopia isn't going to raise the dead unless there's no other source of cheap labor: A legally oppressed caste, illegal immigrants, foreigners overseas, robots.
  
  What would ever make it more worthwhile to spend resources raising the dead than to spend those same resources enriching the lives of the living and their progeny?
  

  • u/alexanderwales:

    One of the arguments I've heard (from cryonicists) is that you might get revived as a novelty or source of history. That seems like it's ripe for a short story, though I doubt that I could write it as anything but a tragedy or horror story.
    
    I think a lot of the people who advocate for cryonics are the same sort of people who think that being tortured indefinitely is better than death (which is a legitimate position to hold, but not one that I agree with).
    

    • u/Sparkwitch:

      We're actually experiencing the centenary of [just such a tragedy.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi#Walking_into_the_modern_world) As the War Nerd put it, they made him into a museum diorama while he was still alive.
      
      How rare cases like Ishi's were makes it clear how little demand there is for such novel historical curiosities.
      

      • u/None:

        [deleted]
        

    • u/Empiricist_or_not:

      >What is a human mind worth? There are billions of them available right now, and while producing new ones is energy and time intensive, people have been doing it casually and more-or-less by default for hundreds of thousands of years. There's such a glut of supply that demand only enters the equation in the rarest of circumstances. Outside of close friends, family, or (extretime mely rarely) loyal followers... who would want to revive a sick adult damaged by age (probably to the point of death) when there's an enormous stock of children available instead? They're cuter and their brains have a lot more natural potential for neural plasticity.
      
      A mind is  worth what it knows how to do minus the over head of the mind, note knowing how to do includes learning.  This is already a truth that can abstracted from the performance measured society ( vice meritocracy) of corporate life.
      
      Have you read the flower prince series, alternately [Load bear's Instrument of precommitment](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nRSRWbAqtC48rPv5NG6kzggL3HXSJ1O93jFn3fgu0Rs/edit)?  A mature human mind contains a wealth of deep learning that, depending on the price of training a custom network, which is troublesome, even with today's simple networks; it would likely , bec heaper in time, and in memory space (RAM) to load an old instance which has a high overhead (sapience) vs setting up engineering and training a new network, or (time expensive) training a child to become an expert.
      

  • u/DataPacRat:

    > What sort of society has to exist in order that raising children is more difficult and less desired than raising the dead?
    
    For 'less desired', then you don't need /all/ of society to be part of the resurrection decision-making process. Instead, a small group of people, each of whom is hoping to eventually be resurrected after their own deaths, may suffice to provide motivation to resurrect every corpsicle in their care.
    

    • u/Sparkwitch:

      Once it is a proven biological possibility (that is, once somebody has been brought back to life from cryopreservation) I'm sure that it will be much more popular and organizations like the sort you describe will be a going concern. Unfortunately, as the world conquers death, there will be fewer and fewer people who still die... and they'll likely be the poor and unloved rather than the rich and connected.
      
      So, again, why raise people from the past that nobody cares about instead of focusing medical attention on people dying in the present?
      

      • u/Empiricist_or_not:

        Because you can wait till people stop dying and then you nead to start with the recoverable dead before you figure out how to remove the : "un" from the un-recoverable dead.
        
        Note:  This is itself a light moral  warm-up for generating sufficient neg-entropy to sustain reality
        

      • u/DataPacRat:

        Because people's compassionate behaviour doesn't follow optimal maximization criteria, but tends to be predictably irrational.
        

    • u/Empiricist_or_not:

      Well said.
      

  • u/MultipartiteMind:

    Prompted speculation:  Ethically/Morally speaking (depending on system), healing/helping a sick person is a positive act, if not an ethical/moral imperative.  Creating new lives from scratch, by contrast, has to be justified.  Once a cryonically frozen body is a patient that you can heal, there are ethical/moral reasons to improve that patient's quality of existence which don't come into play when talking about potential lives not created during menstruation.
    

    • u/Empiricist_or_not:

      [Potentially offensive question](#s " I'm sorry, but have you ever tried to talk rationally with someone who wants kids?")
      

  • u/None:

    Holy shit.  And here I thought *I* had a dark worldview.  Dear fucking... "welcome the embrace of death"...  You know we're going to discourage that kind of talk here, right?
    
    Are you on /r/suicidewatch?  You should PM me.  I swear I can at least try to help you with your depression.  It might be chemical, in which case talking won't help, but in which case chemical intervention will.  And if it's not chemical, than talking can help.
    

  • u/None:

    > What sort of society has to exist in order that raising children is more difficult and less desired than raising the dead?
    
    A society where in the interests of human rights, every person is guaranteed from birth a basic cost of living stipend that assures no person will go without food, housing, healthcare, or other necessities - a stipend provided from a trust fund that must be paid in full by the prospective parents before their time-of-puberty-mandated surgical sterilization is authorized for temporary reversal. 
    
    No human legally born after that mandate ever lacked for the basic needs of life, and none needed to find employment, though many still did to earn enough to pay for their own child, or to afford a slightly less shitty apartment. As humanity's population diminished on the backs of people who didn't care to or weren't able to afford the cost of living for their children, wealth condensed in the smaller remaining pool of people who were driven to succeed and reproduce and take jobs in order to afford children of their own.
    
    And thus, it was their genes and moral values that propagated into the next generation, producing more hard-working people who now could not have their drive to succeed quelled simply by being born with a shitty hand and unable to secure the basic needs of life. Of course, some people didn't want their own biological children, and paying an entire life expectancy is troublesome. What to do if you can only afford sixty years of stipend instead of a hundred twenty?
    
    Pay a diminished stipend, and thaw a middle-aged cryonic survivor.
    

    • u/Sparkwitch:

      Thaw a middle-aged survivor for what? For fun? Most people who can afford to be cryopreserved die at standard life expectancy. People in their 70's are unlikely to want to go back to work in order to live anywhere above subsistence... and, with the re-training they'd require, few people would be willing to hire them.
      
      Let me ballpark something:
      
      Right now the average lifetime earnings of an individual high school graduate in the US is $1.2 million and the poverty line for a single person is $13,550. Each additional person in the household adds $4780 to that assessment. I don't think $1130 per month is a bad guess at bare basement requirements housing, food, clothing, utilities, and health care and I would agree that, as things stand, housing is the biggest chunk of that so an additional $400 per month for everything else (including a bit of additional space and furniture in the home) isn't insane.
      
      The average American household is 2.58 people, so $13,550 + $4780 + ($4780 x .58) ALL divided by 2.58 = $8179.22 per person per year.
      
      $8179.22 x 120 = $981,506. Having a child would leave the average American with a little more than $200,000 or $2000 a year with which to pay their non-poverty expenses during the 100 or so years they're not living with their parents.
      
      A couple could pool their earnings towards a single child and have $14,000 left over per year together: $7000 per year apiece.
      
      Which assumes they can pay for their child in installments rather than as a lump sum. People tend to earn more money as they age, so the majority of that earning potential is in their adult years rather than their teens, 20s and 30s when (biologically) it's best to have children.
      
      If they actually have to pay the whole million at once, they'll have to live like paupers well into their forties and probably have the child using a surrogate womb and a cryopreserved embryo from their twenties.
      
      If the money can be paid in installments, what happens if parents lose their ability (or desire) to continue paying such a steep price year after year? What if they quit their jobs? Who forces them to pay?
      
      Again, this is just a ballpark so the numbers are almost certainly somewhat inaccurate, but the principle stands. I can *imagine* an authoritarian nightmare in which your mandatory reversible sterilization plan works, but I don't think I'd like to live there... "in the interest of human rights" or not.
      

      • u/None:

        Oh, did you want to take over my writing prompt assignment from me? Okay, have fun with that. I was planning on going the route where more resources being available due to underpopulation made things cheaper, where smarter people with more work ethic reproducing made things better. But if you want to write a dystopia instead, don't let me stop you.
        

        • u/Empiricist_or_not:

          Without critcism I think your viewpoint is ignoring [Hanlon's Razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)  Anyone who stops to think about it prefers an environment where intelligence is the selective pressure for the environment (ceritus parabus <and I'm not sure if tit for tat, vs modeling makes this true as modeling ability goes up, b/c do the stakes for a defection win go up too, and in what shape: n n^k N^m?> ), but simply as humans we are hard-wired against such a situation and a totalitarian environment with a high cost of procreation will be subverted ~with~ *by* those who see the high profit to be gained by circumventing procreation restrictions: i.e. steam engine time.
          
          Edit: grammar
          

• u/Yuridice:

  [The Thousand Year Romance of Clover the Clever](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/138977/1/the-thousand-year-romance-of-clover-the-clever/chapter-1) is a relevant story to the topic.
  

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