This is very important news for anyone who is currently cryocrastinating. It means that you can drastically increase your chances of survival without filling out any forms. All you have to do is tell a loved one you want to be frozen upon death, and that you would like them to take responsibility for making sure this happens. This takes literally 30 seconds. Do it now!
Geez. My take: cryonics as it is very probably does not work, consequently the desire to sign up for cryonics is frequently coincident with otherwise low functioning, including the inability to deal with forms.
With regards to dry ice and slow freezing in general: that totally mashes up everything by ice crystals. At the scales involved, you are dealing with positioning of single molecules and very small, identical molecular complexes, and that positioning and state information gets irreversibly lost during freezing. A problem which is yet to be resolved for the whole volume of the human brain, as it is difficult to get vitrification enabling compounds everywhere. edit2: and with regards to dropping heads into buckets of liquid nitrogen or the like, that is still slow freezing. Only micrometre thick slices can be glassified without ice formation. Liquid nitrogen is at -196 Celsius. Think of oil at +200 Celsius, it doesn't flash-cook a big piece of frozen fish, and neither does liquid nitrogen flash freeze a big piece of fish. Even the absolute zero is not very far from room temperature. If you set up a guillotine with a bucket of liquid nitrogen for the head, what's going to happen is that not even the skin would be well preserved.
A problem which is yet to be resolved for the whole volume of the human brain, as it is difficult to get vitrification enabling compounds everywhere.
So, I think this is why they use perfusion- everywhere important in the brain is going to be near to blood vessels, because otherwise it would die (and thus can't be important). If you deliver cryoprotectants through blood vessels, and then lower the temperature with some liquid delivered through blood vessels, you can have relatively uniform relatively protected freezing.
(I get the sense, though, that if s...
In the past, the Cryonics Institute has had a policy that said that they would not accept anyone who is not a member. This has changed. The policy now is that someone who has full legal authority over your body can sign you up after you die. It costs $36,250 to be frozen if you are not signed up, which is more expensive. They also will not do anything until you have been on dry ice for 2 weeks after they have been contacted, so not being a member is more risky.
This is very important news for anyone who is currently cryocrastinating. It means that you can drastically increase your chances of survival without filling out any forms. All you have to do is tell a loved one you want to be frozen upon death, and that you would like them to take responsibility for making sure this happens. This takes literally 30 seconds. Do it now!
This news might also be a reason to not sign up right away, if you think something better (like radical life extension or uploading) will come along in your lifetime. We should discuss this in the comments.
Edit: The general consensus of this discussion is that this is a really bad reason not to sign up for cryonics.