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

There, I've just caused you to scramble a vast array of concentration gradients, proteins tumbling around in a merry free-for-all.

You probably haven't actually, anymore then when you shake your hands vigorously back and forth the germs fly off. The force applied for so small a time is unlikely to have much of an effect on the cells which are dominated by chemical interactions,osmotic pressures,etc. Things don't scale the way you'd like them to. Your whole argument is just invalid.

Edit to incorporate a point made below: which is good as if you scrambled the proteins in your brain, you'd die.

False analogy; there is a change in medium going from the oiled up dermis to air.

Take a glass of water with a large number of tagged proteins. That is the model of e.g. presynaptic vesicles filled with neurotransmitters, swimming in the cytoplasmic matrix (which is mostly water). A significant amount of them is not attached to anything. I didn't say the folding structure would be scrambled, I said that the concentration gradients would be influenced, and that the orientation of non-attached proteins would change.

Shake the glass of water. What happens?

Shak... (read more)

0wedrifid13y

I'm not sure Kawoomba would really like brains to be scrambled by head shaking. I expect that all else being equal he would prefer as little disruption as possible.

9

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

9

9

9

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

9

9