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.

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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

Mine was also just an off-the-cuff "guesstimate."

I am skeptical that it is possible to estimate the chances of cryonics working in a rigorous quantitative way. There's no way to know what technical hurdles are actually involved to make it work. How can you estimate your chances of success when you have no information about the difficulty of the problem?

Um...there is quite a bit of information. For instance, one major hurdle was ice crystal formation, which has been overcome - but at the price of toxicity (currently unspecified, but - in my moderately informed guesstimate - likely to be related to protein misfolding and membrane distortion).

We also have quite a bit of knowledge of synaptic structure and physiology. I can make a pretty good guess at some of the problems. There are likely many others (many more problems that I cannot predict), but the ones I can are pretty daunting.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

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