Question:
What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?
His response:
A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.
I agree with you that the enormous cost is probably not worth it, when you start thinking what else could be accomplished with the money in the context of it's low probability of success.
However, those technologies that increase human lifespan are really something entirely different than cryonics, not a replacement for it.
Even if we increase lifespan significantly, as long as we still have a lifespan cryonics would allow us to remain frozen until even more life extension technologies come about. It's also a potentially viable method for keeping people alive for long distance space travel at sub-relativistic speeds.
I'd look forward to seeing a more detailed post (or even a journal article) from you going into the biochemistry specifics of the problems with cryonics you mention in this post, and your other posts in this thread. I am particularly curious why rehydration would denature proteins which are naturally stable in water? And what sort of membrane distortions would occur that aren't reversible?
All good reason to keep working on it.
The questions you ask are very complex. The short answers (and then I'm really leaving the question at that point until a longer article is ready):