cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23784896
The interesting thing about this is that these people never stop to think that the future they dream off might never happen. Aside from the fact that their cryo company might just go under, they don’t ever consider that in 200 years they might just wake up under a dystopia.
You don’t consider the cryonic process of freezing and reanimating insects, amphibians and fish established?
Even though they literally freeze and then come back to life?
No large animals that have been cryonically frozen have been whole-body reanimated as far as I know, they’re focusing on reanimating whole organs and specifically brains first.
A group called 21st century medicine froze and brought back a rabbit brain with " the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures all intact* back in 2016.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-mammal-s-brain-has-been-cryonically-frozen-and-recovered-for-the-first-time.
If the process is freezing and then reviving a dead human, then no. The (interesting, valuable) research on living fish, rabbit brains, and invertebrates is not that, and quite different from the product companies are asking tens of thousands of dollars for.
I also think it’s important not to conflate suspended-animation-type cryonics that involve freezing and reviving a living creature with what this is originally about, i.e., freezing a dead creature to preserve it for resurrection using unspecified, hypothetical technology. As far as I’m aware, all cryonics companies freeze people upon death, and none are freezing living humans.
Why do you think the process is different?
It’s literally lowering the temperature of different tissues and then raising the temperature of those tissues while keeping the structures intact.
It’s the same process.
Brain death doesn’t immediately occur upon the declaration of medical death, so they have several minutes to lower the temperature into a state of suspended animation, which is the same process that natural organisms regularly participate in.
It all depends on how you understand death.
Humans seem to think death is the same across the board and immutable.
But people’s hearts stop and you can give them an adrenaline shot to bring them back to life.
People stop breathing and you can open up a vent straight into their lungs.
Coma.patients spontaneously reanimate.
After the heart stops and someone has declared dead, you have 3 to 4 minutes of brain structures still being viable.
That isn’t magic, each case is physiological process that is not yet understood as well as it could be.
Like shocking a heart to stop arrhythmia used to be misunderstood as “nothing to be done, the heart is broken”.
Raising the temperature of tissue after lowering The temperature and preserving tissue structure is a technical physiological hurdle that regularly occurs in nature.
Cryonic institutes and organizations want to bring that process to larger mammals and humans.