this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 186 points 6 months ago (25 children)

You know I love the idea of cryostasis, and the idea of reanimating people after death is great.

But why the fuck would future humans bother bringing all these people back, even if they could? Even if they have a utopian society free of scarcity and inequality, they would be bringing back mostly rich people who lived in a super different and bad time and have literally nothing positive to contribute to the utopian future, since they were a large part of the problems of today in the first place. Plus the vast majority of them are almost certainly elitist assholes who nobody in a utopia would want to be around.

Maybe it would be a humanitarian thing, but if these people are dead and frozen there’s no real imperative to do this to end suffering or something. Or I guess maybe bringing them back to try and figure out what the hell their damage is that they felt ruining everything was a better option than working toward the betterment of all.. but they’d only need a few brains in vats for that, no bodies, so sucks to suck, cryofolks.

If future humans don’t have a utopian society, the only real use for people from so long ago that I can come up with would be research subjects or slaves. And frankly there are easier ways to go about getting those..

So I see no possible future where people who cryopreserve get brought back en masse. Even if it’s entirely possible to surmount the technical hurdles.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 6 months ago (1 children)

To answer the questions of archeologists, obviously

[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 74 points 6 months ago

why would future humans bother bringing all these people back

i think it's worth reminding why doctors treat people now, in this time and space. they do it mostly because they want to save people. maybe a few do it for money, but past a certain point, the money isn't why you do it. i think it's a safe bet that doctors of a future would see these corpses as patients, and act accordingly. an analogy - think how we see heart attack victims as patients, and not how our medieval ancestors would have seen them (as corpses)

...literally nothing positive to contribute to the utopian future...

true, but, a good chunk of patients in hopsital today have nothing to contribute to society, and cannot contribute any more, whatsoever. we treat them anyway, because that's what we do. humans have consistently cared for others that are sick and have "nothing to contribute" throughout history, and that shows no sign of going away anytime soon

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Lmao, remember that revived 80's douchbag business man on star trek TNG?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

He actually appeared ~~again in a later episode~~ in a couple TNG novelizations.

He managed to adapt and fit in to Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, but eventually was called on to use his 1900s business prowess in ~~negotiations~~ becoming Earth's Ambassador to Ferenginar, and then eventually was named the Secretary of Commerce for at least two different Earth Presidents.

*edit, I lied. I'm sorry for misleading you all, you gave me your trust and I squandered it.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago

Medical research from before whatever plague or virus infects everybody.

Don’t they have problems today studying effects of microplastics because they can’t find a control group of humans who don’t have microplastics in them?

Though that’s a pretty grim future for the rich frozen elite.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Ever read Transmetropolitan? It has a whole sub-arc on just the absolute lack of concern that a future society would have for this resurrection obligation/burden imposed on them.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (5 children)

But why the fuck would future humans bother bringing all these people back, even if they could?

Because they don't have rights, so no one will care when we upload their brains into street sweeping robots. If you're lucky, you'll get uploaded into an interstellar probe.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (2 children)

we'd do it cause it'd be funny even if they weren't tortured or nothing. can you imagine a little asshole running around the utopia being like "no, no, I'm supposed to own things, where are my stocks, where are my numbers, no!". probably it'd suck that all their friends are deade though. I'm sure you thaw a couple cause the have rare diseases or certain kinds of DNA though.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago

That's because you're thinking in term of a society that views most people as a burdensome and undesirable liability. Something we wish we could get rid of faster if possible. It might be tgat in the future, human minds aren't as poisoned by clubofrome population omb neoliberal billionaire thinking.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Soon as those hurdles are surmounted, armies will train then freeze conscripts. Only thawing when they need meat for the grinder, or when better weapons come out that need more training.

That's the only way they get brought back en masse.

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[–] [email protected] 106 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Is that what Walt Gisnep is right now?

[–] [email protected] 85 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Disney will soon announce the new movie Soup in an attempt to take over the top search results of “Disney Soup”.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 6 months ago (2 children)

So that's why it's called Frozen!

[–] [email protected] 63 points 6 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (10 children)

Gisnep

Is this a thing I'm not aware of, or just a very strange typo?

[–] [email protected] 51 points 6 months ago (11 children)
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago

Well, that's what their logo says, I don't know what to tell you

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 6 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 62 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Humans are particularly difficult to preserve because of the delicate structure in (most of) our heads.

Nonsense. We are just too big to be frozen quickly enough that no ice crystals emerge. Every living thing turns to slush if frozen normally.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Yea. Turns out the biggest creature you can freeze and thaw again (in strict lab conditions) is a hamster, anything bigger just dies.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago

That was a (pardon the pun) cool read, if a bit morbid.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Nelson and the mortician then spent the entire night figuring out how to jam four people — who may or may not have suffered thaw damage — into the capsule. The arrangement of bodies in different orientations was described as a “puzzle.” After finding an arrangement that worked, the resealed capsule was lowered into an underground vault at the cemetery. Nelson claimed to have refilled it sporadically for about a year before he stopped receiving money from the relatives. After a while, he let the bodies thaw out inside the capsule and left the whole thing festering in his vault.

Grooooooooosssssss

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Reminds me of the time when I was younger, scrolling rotten.com and came across that picture of the dude who died in the bath, but had this thing that kept the water warm, so he just turned into a giant human stew.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (25 children)

What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs taking a bath?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago

The reason I couldn't eat stew for a decade?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Someone else from the old internet. I remember the post you speak of.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Reminds me of the Egyptian aristocracy, they would be pissed off if they knew their 4000 yo mummy will end up getting shown at a museum or destroyed by a tomb raider. But what would happen if they managed to revive them today, probably a temporary experiment on a lab, the pharaoh just lived in a closed environment for a couple of months and for most of modern day people it would be just some science news they scrolled by on tiktok

[–] [email protected] 49 points 6 months ago (2 children)

How about being ground up into powder and put into medicine? I'm sure they'd love that one.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago

or used for paint because the color is so nice

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

One of the more interesting aspects of history is the progression from the notion of a very limited and inaccessible resurrection of a body to the idea of a very accessible resurrection of the spirit/mind.

The latter is IMO probably best embodied (pun intended) in one of the early Christian apocrypha from a group that was known for rejecting the canonical focus on a physical resurrection of a body:

Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.

  • Gospel of Thomas saying 108

It's such a wild march of progress from kings trying to preserve their bodies to a tradition rejecting the Eucharist of consumption of a body in favor of a Eucharistic consumption of words and ideas to resurrect the essence of the individual.

And looking back from an age where we are literally seeing patents granted to trillion dollar companies around resurrecting the dead digitally, the "resurrection of words and ideas" crowd was more on to a practical tract of thinking than the "resurrect my goop" crowd.

In fact, the Egyptians when embalming themselves discarded their brains thinking it was garbage filling of the skull. Not exactly the best strategy in hindsight.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 53 points 6 months ago (3 children)

A couple days ago my milk was all chunky when I tried to pour it in my cereal, because refrigerated air that was supposed to go to the fridge got blocked.

Milk wasn't expired, just went bad due to a random mechanical issue over the course of the length of time the milk was being preserved.

Anyway, what's all this about cryogenics?

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Rich people are truly fucking insane.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Everybody's insane rich people just have the ability to act on it.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Did they get their money back? I didn’t read the article.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

If anyone is actually interested in learning how this works, this is a great blog post, from an author convinced like many that it's a stupid thing for the rich, until... Well have a read: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 6 months ago

They paid good money for those soup tubes.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Here's a link to the article in the screenshot, in case anyone else was interested in reading it like I was: https://www.freethink.com/futurology/cryogenically-frozen-humans

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (15 children)

Thanks for this. Quite gruesome, but not at all unexpected. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine a while back, where I made the argument that water expands when frozen and, since humans are mostly water, freezing a human would crack every vital organ. I'm actually upset to discover I was right.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

This is true, which is why preservation does not involve freezing, except for the bad attempts in the 70s the article talks about, which could never work. The bodies are vitrified, not frozen.

Which still doesn't mean it will work, the technology to revive them doesn't exist, but it doesn't have any freezing issue.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I remember when i was a kid hearing about people being frozen like this. Even back then i figured the only thing the richies were buying was false hope. But though it gives me a bit of schadenfreude to see it fail (if i can't be immortal too, feel me?), i get the urge to at least try to beat the odds. Even if it's only a 0.000001% chance to beat death, who wouldn't go all in if they had the means?

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (3 children)

As long as Simon Phoenix doesn't get defrosted I'm good

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (5 children)
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