Accelerating Future

Mike Darwin, a cryonics figure who led Alcor 1983 to 1988 and acted as Research Director until 1992, apparently kept an eight-year log (1978 to 1986) of incidents where hostile girlfriends or wives “prevented, reduced or reversed the involvement of their male partner in cryonics”. In a blog post on Depressed Metabolism, Is That What Love is? The Hostile Wife Phenomenon in Cryonics, Darwin and cryonics experts Chana de Wolf and Aschwin de Wolf summarize the phenomenon and the history behind it. They point out that the hostility reaches back to the very dawn of the idea in 1968.

Hostility to cryonics is not always all harmless or in fun: it can lead to divorce or even contribute to accidental death via carbon monoxide poisoning. (See the blog post for details.)

Why are women more traditionally hostile than men to cryonics? I don’t think the answer is rocket science: it’s just that men are more familiar with, skilled in, and comfortable with technology than women. For better or for worse, that’s the average case. This is changing, but still, the average man is more comfortable with technology than the average woman. The flip-side of this, in my eyes, is that women are more likely to express a reasonable degree of skepticism about the ability of new technologies to improve our lives whereas men are more likely to be naively enthusiastic. (Engadget, anyone?)

Thankfully, in my own case, my girlfriend supports cryonics and is signed up for cryonics with me, so I was able to avoid all the nastiness described in the article.

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Here’s the link to the November article. H/t to Roko.

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At Depressed Metabolism, there is an excellent post on the realities of embalming and other post-death practices by licensed funeral director William Faloon. He reveals that the embalming process involves stabbing the body cavities with a “hollow sword” which is then used to suck out the liquid contents, to keep them from putrefying.

This article is especially appropriate in light of the recent absurd allegations against Alcor circulating in the international media. I especially thought CNN did a responsible job covering the story, with the reporter telling the accuser, “Admit it. You’re a profiteer. You’re doing this for profit.” Even people who know nothing about cryonics can see that the allegations are fabricated specifically for maximum tabloid shock value. Other “allegations” simply portray the necessary processes of cryonics (such as head removal, as in neurosuspensions) in a gruesome light, even though they’re less gruesome than rotting in a box.

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While we’re on the topic of cryonics, I am reminded of a letter I wrote to Alcor a while back:

Hello,

I’m a cryonicist and life extension advocate. To help promote the idea of
cryonics, I think it would be a good idea to have available on the Internet
micrograph images of frozen and unfrozen brain tissue, to show the
difference. Do you have any available, or know where I could get some?

Thank you,
Michael

Dr. Brian Wowk kindly responded:

Hi Michael. There are lots of cryopreserved brain micrographs
on the Alcor website. Some of them are after rewarming, and others
were obtained actually in the cryopreserved state by a technique
called freeze-substitution.

http://www.alcor.org/AboutCryonics/index.html

http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.html

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/cambridge.html

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/annals.html

http://www.alcor.org/notablequotes.html

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/biology.html

Regards,
Brian

From the quotes page, here is an image of vitrified hippocampus:

(Click for larger.) The page says, “This is “your brain on cryonics”: Transmission electron micrograph of tissue rewarmed from -130°C after in-situ vitrification of a whole mammalian brain. This is essentially normal looking brain tissue (hippocampal region). Not only is there no “intracellular goo,” no “hamburger,” and no “pulverization and destruction,” there is no ice damage whatsoever!”

So, in Dale’s post on cryonics, when he talks about the brain being “hamburgerized” — he is making no sense. Vitrified brains don’t get “hamburgerized”. Dale probably knows about vitrification, so he is just forwarding propaganda because he is politically and morally uncomfortable with cryonics. That is because cryonics symbolizes the affirmation of the individual and potential avoidance of death in a way that can be offensive to hyper-socialistic, here-and-now-and-nothing-else politics. Well, too bad.

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H/t Dale Carrico. Laugh tracks make my skin crawl.

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Apparently Michael Jackson was interested in cryonics, but never signed up.

This is sort of sad, because the structure of the brain holds one’s personality and a lifetime of memories. Even if you don’t believe in the potential of future revival, preserving the structure of the brain would still be incredibly interesting, because future analysis could allow us to read memories and other cognitive features. Already, neuroscientists can read basic thoughts via brain scanning.

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See Ben Best’s page on the subject. If I randomly drop dead, it would be nice to get shoved in the freezer, post haste.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky once said, “it still looks to me like it would be better to just chop off the head and drop it into a bucket of liquid nitrogen as fast as possible.” (I’m actually going for full body because it barely costs more.)

For more cryonics enjoyment, see this page of “Who Are We?”

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While talking to my insurance agent (basically: cryonics agent) Rudi Hoffman, he mentioned something I hadn’t heard of before — intermediate temperature storage. Instead of lowering the temperature of the patient to -196 C, the idea is to lower the temperature only to -140 C or thereabouts. This temperature is low enough to freeze everything solid but warm enough that it avoids microfracturing throughout the tissue. The idea would be that it would destroy less neural information.

I hear that Alcor has been working on this approach for a while. The reason that Rudi mentioned it to me is that intermediate temperature storage, which is not yet available, may cost a bit more than conventional storage when it eventually does become available. Full body currently costs $150K. (See “The Case for Full-Body Suspension” by Michael B. O’Neal.) Intermediate temperature storage, which may be available in a few years, would require electricity and a little more maintenance to keep it going. To cover all the bases, I applied for a $250K life insurance policy, which at my age is only $26/month.

It seems difficult to find info on intermediate temperature storage on the Internet. Depressed Metabolism, the only blog I’m aware of that focuses on technical issues in cryonics, only has a couple posts on it. It looks like Cryonics Institute President Ben Best has done some research on it and wrote up his thoughts in a page “Molecular Mobility at Low Temperature” which tentatively cautions against intermediate temperature storage, mentioning the need for further research:

For Intermediate Storage Temperature (−135ºC , ~138K) the typical distance a water molecule will have been displaced over the course of a century is about 40 nanometers, whereas for −165ºC (~108K) the displacement is about one nanometer and at liquid nitrogen temperature (−196ºC ,~77K) the distance is about one-and-a-half picometers. All of these values would seem acceptable in a cryonics patient if the typical linear distance traveled by the water molecule were the same as the total distance. But the actual total linear distance (path length) traveled by the water molecule due to Brownian motion will be vastly greater than the typical displacement from the point of origin. Doing the same calculation for a water molecule at room temperature (25ºC , about 298K) using the viscosity of ethylene glycol (0.0161 Pa·s) gives a typical distance of about 1.4 meters. A water molecule at room temperature would travel a vastly greater path-length than 1.4 meters over the course of a century.

Also worrisome is the possiblility of ions within the glass that are far more mobile than the molecules constituting the glass. An ionic species (probably protons) in trimethylammonium dihydrogen phosphate glass is nine orders of magnitude more mobile than the glass molecules — and sodium ions in sodium disilicate glass are twelve orders of magnitude more mobile than the glass molecules. Water molecules can be quite mobile when in polydextrose glass, and carbon dioxide is mobile in polyvinyl alcohol (same reference).

But, molecular mobility is not lethal for northern wood frogs that can spend weeks to months in a semi-frozen state. The most damaging effects of molecular mobility at temperatures below T_g should be either from water molecules forming crystals or from mobile free radicals. Concerning the latter, cryobiologist Peter Mazur was quoted at the beginning of this piece as saying: “…there is no confirmed case of cell death ascribed to storage at −196ºC for some 2-15 years and none even when cells are exposed to levels of ionizing radiation some 100 times background for up to 5 yr.”

More experiments exposing tissues to ionizing radiation could be helpful in assessing the safety for cryonics patients of various sub−T_g temperatures above liquid nitrogen temperature. Experiments should also be done to determine the possibility of ice formation at cryogenic temperatures over long periods. More information is needed before it can be stated with certainty that damage due to molecular mobility at Intermediate Storage Temperature would not be worse than the effects of cracking damage.

It will be interesting to follow developments in that area. I would also be concerned about the reliability of suspension under crisis conditions, for instance a nuclear war. Obviously it might be easier to just pour in liquid nitrogen than use electricity in those circumstances.

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So easy… just sign up for a quote at Rudi Hoffman’s website. Rudi takes care of more than 90% of the life insurance for cryonics market. For most people, monthly payments for cryonics-dedicated life insurance policies are very cheap. “Less than the cost of an ice cream cone a day”, as someone recently put it in an article on cryonics in the Daily Mail.

Update: Rudi is authorized for selling life insurance in the USA only, but you can get similar low prices around the world.

I also realized that there is an amusing double meaning on the home page: “You will enjoy a sense of clarity and accomplishment as we comfortably help you crystallize and move towards your goals and dreams.” (Emphasis added.) Comfortably help us crystallize, huh?

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The Daily Mail, a UK tabloid legendary on the Internet for its dense celebrity reporting, has finally taken on the coolest topic of all — cryonics. Like many articles about freezing yourself solid to be revived in the future, this one is negative, and the question is not what exactly they will say (I’ve heard all the criticisms a hundred times), but whether there will be any funny/juicy quotes along the lines of Smalley’s “You and people around you have scared our children” (directed towards Eric Drexler) or from that time Aubrey went on some talk show and the hosts were worried about Christmas being ruined by life extension. The Daily Mail has frequently proven itself to be one of the most giggle-worthy tabloids on the Internet in the last decade, so I hope they don’t let us down.

The first thing I notice with this article is a good thing — they point out that cryonics costs no more than a slice of pizza per day! The title of the article is, “Please freeze me! How scores of middle-class British couples are hoping to buy immortality for just £10 a week”. The intro sentence then says, “It sounds like the loopiest science fiction, but - like Simon Cowell - scores of middle-class couples are paying £10 a week for their bodies to be frozen when they die. So can you really buy immortality for the price of a pizza?”

No Daily Mail article about an edgy international phenomenon would be complete without a dig at the Americans, and we predictably find that here:

“The Americans, unsurprisingly, have been doing it for years, setting up the first ’storage facility’ for frozen corpses in the Seventies. Over here, the notion has taken a bit longer to catch on, but while no British firm offers the technology to store bodies, a growing number of Britons have made arrangements to be flown to the U.S. when they die to await the next leg of their eternal journey.”

Interestingly, even Russia has founded a cryonics company before the UK.

Then, they review the concept a little more:

Quite what they are signing up for still makes for mind-boggling reading. The process involves cooling, and then maintaining, a dead body in liquid nitrogen in the hope future scientific procedures will be able to revive the corpse and restore it to youth and good health.

It all sounds a bit terrifying, not to mention slightly gruesome - although not to Adele. As a full-time science-fiction writer, she has long dabbled in the boundaries of human possibility, and believes it to be no more sinister than any other life-saving medical procedure.

What I am slightly surprised about is — are there really people out there who haven’t heard of cryonics at all yet? I mean, there’s Austin Powers, the rumor of Disney getting his head frozen, the Ted Williams saga being covered by all the major networks… maybe it’s just the shock of this article writer finding it for the first time, and cryonics isn’t as well known in England as it is in the United States?

Next is something quite heart-warming — the story of Mark Walker, a friend of mine, convincing his fiance to get signed up:

At least Karen Marshall knows her fiancè is in her corner on the issue. Mark Walker, 47, is a cryonics old-hand, having signed up with the Cryonics Institute in Michigan nine years ago.

Today, he is one of the founders of Cryonics UK, a British support group for those interested in the process, which also offers facilities to be temporarily ’suspended’ over here pending transfer across the Atlantic.

He has certainly persuaded his 38-year-old fiancèe, who is in the final stages of sorting out her own cryonics contract. She probably didn’t stand a chance, given they even spent their first date discussing it.

‘Mark and I had worked together for a computer company in Leicester for a few months before we started seeing each other romantically. During our first date we chatted about everything from work to the weather,’ she recalls.

‘Then talk turned to hobbies, and as I wittered on about my love of football and motorsports I noticed Mark was starting to look a little bit edgy. I must admit I started to get nervous and was imagining all sorts. I honestly thought he was about to tell me he liked dressing in women’s clothing. Instead, he told me about his interest in cryonics.’

Some might have preferred cross-dressing to a desire to be suspended in liquid nitrogen, but Karen wasn’t put off.

‘It actually wasn’t half as scary as the other possibilities I had been imagining,’ she says. ‘And after that, I didn’t really think about it again - we continued dating and then, about six months into our relationship, Mark asked if I wanted to go along to one of the quarterly Cryonics UK meetings in Brighton.

‘I agreed, although I had no idea what to expect and was fully prepared to be a bit bored for the day.’

Instead, she found a number of ‘normal’ like-minded people - and the more she discussed things with them the more she was won over.

Some cryonics fans are more “normal” than others — but I’m happy that the people she found were sufficiently normal as to inspire her to sign up! Whether or not people who are involved in cryonics are normal, there’s a major difference between letting your neurological patterns getting eaten by worms or preserving them in ice.

Next in the article is a cute photo of two young Brits who want to be frozen, and how they think about what to tell their children. Then, there’s a pic of another couple, the woman being a sci-fi writer who wants to be frozen and says “cryogenics [is] no more sinister than any other life-saving medical procedure”.

I’m at the end of the article, and there has been no weird negative quotes aside from a few at the beginning — the main thing I take away from it is that cute couples in the UK are signing up to be frozen at Alcor or the Cryonics Institute. Definitely a market in the UK for cryonics if someone wants to start a company!

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From the Miami Herald:

Cryonics movement leader `deanimates’

The Plantation psychologist was a funny guy who was serious about life after death.

Dr. Steven P. Rievman, a Plantation psychologist, believed in a better world to come and figured his best shot at being part of it was putting himself on ice.

So after he ”deanimated” on May 12 at North Broward Medical Center — as cryonics proponents call dying — technicians pumped anti-clotting drugs into his body, cold-packed it and shipped it to Arizona.

Rievman, 64, who co-founded the Cryonics Society of South Florida in the 1960s, now resides in a deep-freeze capsule at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, awaiting the day when medical science can ”re-animate” him and cure his ills: lupus and Type I diabetes, which afflicted him starting at age 17.

He had undergone cardiac surgery twice in nine weeks and died of a heart attack, friends said. A life insurance policy is paying the $150,000 perpetual-care tab at Alcor.

Cryonics ”fascinated him from the first time he heard of the concept,” said Deborah Rievman, his wife of 30 years. He was born Jewish, but “cryonics was his religion.”

Austin Tupler, who owns a Davie-based trucking company, met Rievman in the 1960s when both were involved in a fledgling cryonics group.

”Over a period of time we formed the society and established our own little clinic equipped to freeze a person,” in a Davie warehouse, Tupler said. “We bought a lot of equipment but we never used it. We didn’t have enough members and they were not dying fast enough.”

The group merged with Alcor in the 1980s. Among its frozen clients: the head of baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams.

Continue.

In my opinion, you’re not “dead” until the neural patterns that correspond to your knowledge and personality are irreversibly rearranged. In cryonics, these structures are frozen in time, and the scientific knowledge of the indefinite future can be brought to bear on revitalizing them. (Unless we destroy ourselves through nuclear war or some other global catastrophe, an issue that life extensionists need to start paying more attention to immediately.)

Sad, but not nearly as sad as becoming worm food, like Arthur C. Clarke or Timothy Leary. I’d say “rest in piece”, but they aren’t resting, they’re annihilated, never to come back.

Old transhumanists never die… they just get frozen in Scottsdale, Arizona.

There, our friends like Tanya make sure that everyone gets their regular dose of liquid nitrogen. It’s a slow way to live, but hey, at least those microorganisms aren’t all up in your brain consuming all the knowledge you built up throughout your life.

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No joke! This is big news. Paris Hilton is going to be cryopreserved. I never thought I’d be posting about Hilton on Accelerating Future, but there you go. This news is via Eliezer Yudkowsky on Overcoming Bias, who broke it as follows:

“Anyone not signed up for cryonics has now lost the right to make fun of Paris Hilton, because no matter what else she does wrong, and what else you do right, all of it together can’t outweigh the life consequences of that one little decision.

Congratulations, Paris. I look forward to meeting you someday.”

I totally agree. You can make fun of Ms. Hilton all you want, but if in 100 years you’re rotting in the ground, and she has her frozen cells repaired and remetabolized by nanomedicine, guess who’s laughing now?

Here is the article from FemaleFirst:

“Paris Hilton wants to be frozen with her beloved pets when she dies.

The hotel heiress is keen to live forever and has invested a large sum of money in the world’s biggest suspended animation cemetery, Cryonics Institute.

She wants her body to be preserved and then brought back to life, along with her favourite pets, including her famous Chihuahua Tinkerbell and new mutt, Yorkshire Terrier Cinderella.

‘The Simple Life’ star said: “It’s so cool. Almost all the cells in the body are still alive when death is pronounced.

“And if you’re immediately cooled, you can be perfectly preserved.

“My life could be extended by hundreds and thousands of years.”

Earlier this week, Paris revealed her partying lifestyle left her feeling “empty inside”.

The 26-year-old blonde - who spent 23 days in jail for driving offences in June - is now determined to turn her life around and do worthy things instead of being seen falling out of nightclubs.

Paris - who is planning a visit to Rwanda - said: “Before, my life was about having fun, going to parties - it was a fantasy. But when I had time to reflect, I felt empty inside. I want to leave a mark on the world.”

Whether she’s serious or not, I don’t know, but signing up for cryonics isn’t the sort of PR stunt to do for popular support — so it was obviously her personal decision. I myself associate signing up with cryonics with long-term thinking about the future of humanity, but maybe some see it as selfishness. Your mileage may vary.

In the comments, Carl Shulman pointed out that she might have gotten the idea from a magician she worked with on The Simple Life. They have signed up for different companies, however — Hilton with Cryonics Institute, and the magician with American Cryonics.

Immortalism marches forward, now with Paris Hilton’s support. Who’s signing up next?

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