Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

bekkerd

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.

Link

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.

Link

I might as well post this here because I don't think it's worth a new thread. Let's assume for the purposes of this argument that you have a suitably high confidence in cryonic revival at some future time. How much do you weigh the number of deaths as a direct consequence of electricity consumed keeping you frozen, against your irreplaceablity in the future society? I'm assuming that there is a non-trivial amount of electricity involved, and substituting the monetary costs of electricity per Folding@Home user per year, with the amount paid per person per year to purchase cryonics services.

Does this train of thought hold at all? If anyone has the time and knowledge to run some numbers, that would be great...

Liquid nitrogen is generated using electricity, so you weren't all that far off.

Liquid nitrogen is basically industrial waste that is left over after a useful industrial process, specially generating liquid oxygen. But you still have to carry it to the cryonics installation in a truck, which uses energy, even if the LN2 is free.

Cryonics storage gets cheaper at scale. The number of patients is proportional to the space, which is the cube of the length, and the boil off rate is proportional to the surface which is the square of the length. So boil off per pa... (read more)

1[anonymous]14y

Cryonics storage doesn't consume even a visible fraction of industrially produced liquid nitrogen. And it won't for ten-thousands of patients to come.

9

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

9

9

9

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

9

9