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ChristianKl comments on [Open Thread] Stupid Questions (2014-02-17) - Less Wrong
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Okay, I believe I have a very stupid question I need to ask:
Why isn't there more research in progress on how to wake up people from cryonics? Or, rather, why aren't more people sticking hamsters and dogs under liquid nitrogen*, then trying to revive them and bring them back to "full life", and seeing if dear ole Spot remembers all the tricks we taught him?
If such things are underway, why aren't there more news and data on this?
*gross oversimplification is funny
Because cryonics is not simply about putting people under liquid oxygen.
It also involve given people a highly toxic substance that prevent ice crystals from forming inside their brains. The substance does no harm if you are frozen is ice but if you would just try to revive people the substance would kill them. You need nanotech to remove it.
Cryonics needs nanotech to revive patients. Currently there no good nanotech for doing so. It makes more sense to wait till we have good nanobots and then attempt to revive organisms.
Well, but for sufficiently small things one may be able to get by without too toxic cryopreservants? Famously, things like embryos and even rabbit kidneys have been frozen and then "revived". If this could be scaled up to e.g. a mouse (something which is big enough to have nontrivial memories), that would resolve lots of worries about there not being enough information preserved in a vitrified brain.
You can freeze nematodes and water bears fairly easily. Notably both of these are evolved to survive dessication and freezing in their normal life cycle and have their largest dimension on the order of one mm. Its a bit of a stretch to call what some frogs can do naturally in the outdoors 'freezing' but again, massive evolutionary pressure.
If you try to freeze a complicated structure bigger than a few cubic centimeters that isn't the ridiculously vascularized and quite small and very homogenous in terms of water content rabbit kidney, you come up with something that is so damaged by the freezing process that it falls apart physically and chemically upon unfreezing. The unfreezing part is not the limiting factor, because there just isn't a paused functional organism left behind by the freezing process.
What about the wood frog?