Cryonics And the History of the Human Race

[AeonLan 0]

Cryonics and Cloning

 

Cryonics is a way of preserving the human body or living things in a suspended animation. It is promised that this scientific advancement will bring forth certain solutions to man, like molecular repairing of the Human body or Preserving the brain entirely with its contents in it.

 

Cryonics is now available in certain countries for a very high price. What does it do for you? You can apply for a Cryonics insurance. If ever something happened to you, your body or your head will be stored. What is important is your preserved memory and DNA structure.

 

If you chose a specific year and cloning is now legalized, you will then be cloned and if possible, your memory will be transfered to the new body. Provided that brain memory advancements are applicable.

 

But certain ethics and laws violate some ways in Cryonics, like cloning.

 

What are your views regarding this?

 

But in general this is pretty

Edited September 23, 2006 by AeonLan (see edit history)

[sylenzednuke 0]

Well, yeah it is cool, I saw a show on this Cryonics thing on Discovery and it was pretty cool, they like made a dead frog and cow alive again and they retained the same habits and also verified their owners... So basically they haven't yet tried it on humans like making someone alive again..

[salamangkero 0]

Well, probably one of the issues concerning such a use of cryonic technology is not purely scientific, but also philosophical in nature.

 

It's about the topic whether man has a "soul" or not. See, this is what happens:

1. Grandpa, hereafter known as Gramps, dies today. However, he's got cryonic insurance, just in case they have the cure for cancer several years fro now.

2. Gramps' head is chopped off and hied off to a cryonic storage facility, "to preserve his memory"

3. 30 years from now, scientists synthesize a healthy body for Gramps and, what, transplants his brain or configures the host's memory to match that of Gramps.

 

Such a scenario is open to a multitude of outcomes:

1. The new Gramps will be alive, retaining his memories up until his death. This is probably the ideal outcome; the goal scientists were aiming for.

2. The new Gramps will be alive but dead to the world, no different from a patient in coma. That's because Gramps' "soul" was released the moment his old body expired.

3. The new Gramps will have an unpredictable mental condition. Apparently, the memory transferrence process was transferring the wrong memory. In other words, in the case of a brain transplant, the mere molecular configuration of grey matter is not enough to define a person's memory.

 

Well, whether or not future revived cryonic patients remembers who they originally were is just one of the issues to be resolved. Even if experiments with animals have been successful, it is not enough. For one, frog and cow brains are quite different from humans.

 

Still, it is a lucrative business. Imagine, "We ressurect your beloved pets."

 

Pah! Capitalism!

[ishwar 0]

Why do we even want to live forever? We are on this time to complete a given period of time.Anyways, it will be a while (couple of centuries) before cryonics for humans is available. The human body is more complex than a frogs. If the brain is starved of oxygen for than a minute, brain damage is inevitable. And you can't freeze the whole body at once, using any freezing techniques, as different parts of the body will freeze at different temperatures.

[rahul_rules22 0]

Personally I dont think by freezing someone's brain you can hold their memories in a way you can use them later. Even if we consider that the so called 'retrieved memories' might be used further but it doesnt necessarily indicate that it would allow the resurrected person to be quite ''himself'

[lindsaybernsen 0]

I don't believe that anyone would simply chop off someone's head for the sake of retaining their brain and dna. It's more likely that dying man would stumble into the cryonics agency and ask to be frozen just as his body was beginning to stop working.I do agree that there are major ethical issues involved though, as well as practical ones.What if we never find a cure for X disease or master cloning (Dolly the sheep took 276 tries and so far the future doesnt look that much brighter, it takes many attempts to create a clone and usually they suffer from diseases or dna mutations), even though you paid cryonics insurance? Will they keep the bodies (or heads) indefinitely, or will they dispose of them eventually? Where would they be stored?What if they revive the wrong body?What if they can't make your neurons connect identically again?What if you had brain damage initially?What if you had insurance but your spouse didnt?What if your brain continued aging?What if, like in as in Demolition Man, you awake in the distant future and dont understand it? What if you wish you were dead? What if your children were still alive and older than you?And then there is the question of overpopulation. If cryonics became a pragmatic solution to death, the overwhelming majority of people would cling to it with desperate hope. The world can only hold so many people, and the dead were never intended to be among them. All of the extra mouths to feed will strain our agriculture to the point where many people could end up starving.

[Plenoptic 0]

We already have overpopulation today in some areas so Cryonics would indeed make things worse. That's not my problem though. I never really thought about it but if someone gives birth to a human body and then put Gramps head on it then that means they are killing the other person or taking a life. Of course that could be avoided if they could figure out a way to clone without going through birth again. It's really a complicated scenario. I like the idea personally but there could be many problems with it. Have they ever been able to have successful transplants before?

[Kioku 0]

Although how very, very awesome cryonics might sound it is not natural and philospical questions of conciousness such as a soul that was previously stated. One has to understand these kinds of things before peering into such risky things, because it may not be the golden promise of immortality after all. Nobody truly knows. I wouldn't be afraid of waking up in a future I do not understand. It is the fact that my conciousness might not pass on, as it might be an entirely different person all together. If we do not understand what conciousness is, how could one possibly risk such a thing? Until such things are figured out, I would not place such a high gamble on this, despite the lucrative payout it may or may not have. Ethics is only the smallest bit of what my concerns are.