X-Message-Number: 19763 Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 12:39:35 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeff Davis <> Subject: Fwd: [Fwd: E-SKEPTIC: CRYONICS REDUX] --0-1234415883-1029094775=:34630 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Note: forwarded message attached. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com --0-1234415883-1029094775=:34630 Content-Type: message/rfc822 X-Apparently-To: via -40.-120.-81.86; 11 Aug 2002 08:11:41 -0700 (PDT) X-Track: 1: 100 Return-Path: <> Received: from 209.115.169.3 (EHLO tick.javien.com) (209.115.169.3) by mta419.mail.yahoo.com with SMTP; 11 Aug 2002 08:11:38 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from ) by tick.javien.com (8.11.6/8.11.2) id g7BF0Qh16664 for extropians-outgoing; Sun, 11 Aug 2002 09:00:26 -0600 X-Authentication-Warning: tick.javien.com: majordom set sender to using -f Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 10:57:37 -0400 From: Sabine Atkins <> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: CC: transhumantech <> Subject: [Fwd: E-SKEPTIC: CRYONICS REDUX] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Content-Length: 6717 Just FYI. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: E-SKEPTIC: CRYONICS REDUX Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 07:18:09 -0700 From: E-Skeptic <> Reply-To: E-Skeptic <> To: "Skeptics Society" <> E-SKEPTIC FOR AUGUST 11, 2002 Copyright 2002 Michael Shermer, Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, e-Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com and ). Permission to print, distribute, and post with proper citation and acknowledgment. We encourage you to broadcast e-Skeptic to new potential subscribers. Newcomers can subscribe to e-Skeptic for free by sending an e-mail to: --------------------------------- CRYONICS REDUX With the death of Ted Williams and the subsequent brouhaha over his son spiriting the body away to the cryonics orgranization Alcor where he now "resides" in a frozen state as a "patient" awaiting "reanimation" in the future, I gave a number of interviews because of my Scientific American column I wrote last year on cryonics (and nanotechnology). Because of the nature of interviews (and the limited space of only 800 words I get in Scientific American), much of what I wrote and said got boiled down to my analogy of defrosting frozen strawberries: "this is your brain on cryonics." Naturally the cryonics folks were none too pleased with my flippant remarks (sometimes I generate such responses by following H.L. Mencken's quip that a good horselaugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms). I received a number of rather hostile letters, but I did get a very thoughtful e-mail from my friend and colleague (and Skeptic board member) Steve Harris, who is both a good skeptic and a supporter of (and signed up for) cryonics (based on a purely probability argument), so I thought it might be constructive to present my original Scientific column below (this is my original version that is slightly longer than the original published piece that includes my acknowledgment of their new technique of vitrification), plus Steve's letter, which I think is very well reasoned and properly nuanced. -------------------- STEVE HARRIS ON CRYONICS Michael: I have heard from numerous cryonicists irked that you took a flip public stance about cryonics rather than a probabilistic one. This is particularly ironic inasmuch as you take a probabilistic view of SETI in your recent column discussing the Drake equation. FYI, the Drake equation is just a simple Markov probability chain calculation, applicable to any future event estimation, from whether or not the space shuttle will blow up, to whether or not cryonics will work. In fact, physicist Brian Wowk and I more than a decade ago actually *used* a sort of Drake equation to estimate in a Markovian way the chances that cryonics would "work" for somebody signed up to do it. It used probabilities like: P1: Probability that your memories will survive your cardiac arrest until the cryonics organization can reach your side and get your brain cool. P2: Probability that your memories will then survive cryoprotectant solution and vitrification in liquid nitrogen. P3: Probability that eventually molecular repair technology will be invented that is capable of restoring humans, memory intact, when damaged this badly. P4: Probability that society will survive development of that technology. P5: Probability that your cryonics organization will survive that long, as well as you with it (these can be slip into sub probabilities if you like). P6: Probability that anybody in the best of futures, will be interested, resourceful, and nice enough to use the technology on you. P7: Probability that you'll then be allowed to live a life that would be more acceptable to you than being dead. Multiply them all together (we presume that the probabilities are independent of each other, which is maybe a big assumption) and there you are. Just as with the Drake equation there are many unknowns, and many places where you get to extrapolate. For example: I argue in the Krell essay [PUBLISHED IN SKEPTIC 9-3, JUST MAILED THIS PAST WEEK TO SUBSCRIBERS] that the timeline is somewhere between 50 to 100 years to get to the Ultimate Technologies. What's the probability that a cryonics organization will survive the necessary 50 to 100 years? You can look at the survival record of similar investment organizations, funds, churches and (my favorite) cemeteries that are still in upkeep. Stats are available as to the fraction of all humans ever to go into liquid nitrogen, that are still there now, and how long for each--and you could in theory figure a Weibull failure curve for that. (The first guy ever to be frozen in 1967, BTW, is still in just as good a shape, and is still frozen. But some aren't). Do memories survive hours of clinical death? We don't know, but you can culture living cells from human brains after 8 hours of death in the morgue, even without any special attempt to cool rapidly. That's a clue. We think that memories are in synapses, and synapses are reasonably (but not perfectly!) intact in cryopreparations of brain. It's not the perfect strawberry, but not mush either. Some fraction of cryonicists don't get their brains saved (we had one go down in the Twin Towers on 9/11 for example). But there are numbers for that, too. And so on. In any case, you see the point. There's no more reason to be snotty about this than SETI, or anything else in the future. Just put down your reasons, and your estimates. So long as no physics is being proposed violated, the probabilities should never be really close to zero. I personally think the memories are there in freshly (a few hours) "dead" people, and that the development of the ultimate biorepair technology to get them out is inevitable. Whether our organizations or indeed our civilization will survive that time or that technology, is another matter. If they do, I can't think of anything more fascinating than resurrecting people from the past-- heck they do it with old dinosaur bones. How much neater with a historical person? Steve Harris P.S. Keats' refrain of woe in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is "The sedge has withered from the lake,/ And no birds sing." I recently ran across a somewhat parallel thought in Steinbeck's _East of Eden_: "Oh but strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch." That's the one I thought of when I read your cryonics comments. Perhaps you were just having a bad day? --------------------- SKEPTIC, Scientific American, September, 2001 Nano-nonsense and Cryonics Nanotechnology as the Savior for the Sin of Death in the Religious Scientism of Cryonics Michael Shermer Timothy Leary's dead. "No...he's outside looking in," sang the Moody Blues in their haunting 1960's ballad in words that would prove prophetic--after his 1996 death seven grams of Leary's ashes were launched into orbit in a nine-by-twelve inch canister where they circled the earth before burning up in a fiery finale befitting the man who had spent most of his life tripping out of this world by looking inward. But according to documentary producer Paul Davids, whose graphic film _Timothy Leary's Dead_ ends with a gruesome scene of Leary's head being hacked off, he isn't dead at all. He is cryonically frozen awaiting reanimation. The Leary family emphatically denies it and Davids isn't talking. Both cryonics companies that Leary contacted in his final years--Alcor and Cyrocare--assure me that Leary has gone the way of all flesh. No matter, since even cryonics proponents admit that anyone frozen to date will never be reanimated, unless.... The problem is obvious to anyone who has thawed out a can of frozen strawberries. When they are frozen the water within each cell expands, crystallizes and shatters the cell wall. The overall structure remains in tact while frozen, but when defrosted all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics. If even cryonicists recognize this detriment to the "suspension" of their "patients" (as they say in their optimistically-worded lexicon), why would anyone bother spending $120,000 for a full-body freeze or $50,000 for just the "neural unit" (the head, to be reattached later to a cloned body), even if payment can be arranged through an insurance policy with the cryonics company as the beneficiary? The answer is nanotechnology. Microscopic machines with on-board computers will be injected into the defrosting corpse--err...I mean patient--programmed to repair the body molecule by molecule, cell by cell, until the trillions of cells are restored and the patient can be resuscitated. "Freeze--Wait--Reanimate" is the catch slogan of this scientistic religion in which nanotechnology will wash away the sin of death. The Resurrection is real--for all of us. Every religion needs its gods, and cryonics has a trinity in Robert Ettinger (_The Prospect of Immortality_), Eric Drexler (_Engines of Creation_), and Ralph Merkle, whose magnum opus on "The Molecular Repair of the Brain" can be downloaded at www.merkle.com. These works include just enough empirical data and logical reasoning to give one pause. This is a feasibility study premised on the fact that if you are cremated or buried there is zero probability of being resurrected. It is a secular version of Pascal's wager on God. Since the alternative is everlasting nothingness, the nano-cryonics scenario is worth the gamble. Is it? That depends on how much time, effort, and money you are willing to invest in a program that has only a slightly higher probability than zero of succeeding. To believe in it takes a certain amount of faith in the secular religion of scientism--a blindly optimistic belief in the illimitable power of science to solve any and all problems, including death. Look how far we've come in just a century, believers argue, from the Wright brothers to Neil Armstrong in only sixty-six years. Average life expectancy has doubled, devastating diseases have been eradicated, and Moore's Law--the doubling of computer power every eighteen months (it's now down to about twelve)--continues unabated. Extrapolate these trend lines out a thousand years, or ten thousand, and immortality is virtually certain. I want to believe the nano-cryonicists. Really I do. I gave up on religion in college but I often catch myself slipping back into my former evangelical fervor now directed toward the wonders of science and nature. But this is precisely why I'm skeptical. It is too much like religion: it promises everything, delivers nothing (but hope), and is almost entirely based on faith. And if Ettinger, Drexler, and Merkle are the trinity of this scientistic sect, F.M. Esfandiary is its Saul who, on the road to his personal Damascus, became Paul when he changed his name to FM-2030 (his hundredth birthday and the year nano-cryonics is predicted to succeed) and declared "I have no age. Am born and reborn every day. I intend to live forever. Barring an accident I probably will." He forgot about cancer, a pancreatic form of which killed him on July 10, 2000, three decades shy of immortality. FM-2030--or more precisely his head--now resides in a vat of liquid nitrogen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, but his legacy lives on among his fellow "transhumanists" (they have moved beyond human) and "extropians" (they are against entropy), as his apostles Max More, Tom Morrow, and others who have reinvented themselves eagerly spread the meme of this branch of the church of scientism. Is this science? No. Is it pseudoscience? No. It is what I call borderlands science--that fuzzy area in between where scientistic-based claims reside that have yet to pass any tests but have some basis, however remote, in reality. It is not impossible for cryonics to succeed; it is just exceptionally unlikely (and new techniques are routinely developed, the latest being "vitrification," where the brain is hardened to a glass-like substance that avoids freezing damage). Here we are faced with finding that exquisite balance between being credulous enough to accept a radical new idea that may turn out to be right, and skeptical enough not to be hoodwinked into believing bunkhum. My credulity module is glad that at least a few scientists are devoting their careers to solving the problem of mortality; my skeptical module, however, indicates that transhumanistic-extropian nano-cryonics borders uncomfortably close to religion, and as such I worry, as Matthew Arnold did in his 1852 poem "Empedocles on Etna," that we will "feign a bliss of doubtful future date, And while we dream on this, Lose all our present state, And relegate to worlds--yet distant our repose?" --- You are currently subscribed to skeptics as: [] To unsubscribe, forward this message to If this message was forwarded from a friend and you'd like to join the distribution list (it's FREE), e-mail -- -- Sabine Atkins, http://www.posthuman.com/ --0-1234415883-1029094775=:34630-- Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19763