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taw comments on Alcor vs. Cryonics Institute - Less Wrong Discussion
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First, we need technology of living forever as a precondition before any kind of rethawing makes any sense, and this technology is so obviously centuries away. Just notice how slowly any kind of anti-aging research progresses.
I'd happily bet against any cryonics rethawing happening in the next few centuries, but there's no market for that.
Just to mention a few breaks I remember - pope was imprisoned and Rome sacked in 1527, Napoleon took over Rome and exiled the pope in 1798, and takeover of Rome by Kingdom Italian was at least highly disruptive if it didn't constitute a full break of continuity.
Their list is extremely dubious, and even cases where companies really operate since the listed date includes a lot of breaks (like Wedel's for WW2, Communist takeover etc. - only the brand really continues all that time).
I'd take no entries on their list at face value.
I'd love to bet for cryonics happening within this century, if not within 50 years. What makes this bet even more interesting is that pretty much everyone is betting against it.
Key in my estimation is the phenomenon of exponential progress, particularly since the dawn of mass internet and the unbelievable wealth and ever increasing and improving information exchange.
The technology to living forever, as you put it, is probably just around the corner (within 30 years), but yes, the chronological order makes sense, at least for old folks.
Exponential progress? Nothing has changed within the last 50 years. At all. We've always had the personal computer, smartphones, buckyball quantum entanglement, the World Wide Web, the full sequence of the human genome, a deactivated Leukemia-killing HIV strain, autostereoscopy, in vitro fertilization, OCR, GPS, LHC, 3D printing, and robotic exoskeletons for paraplegics.
And nothing will change in the next 50.
Valid points. The continuity of the Catholic Church had a lot more interruptions after the last anti-Pope. And your point about functional interruptions of old businesses is quite relevant since cryonics patients aren't going to survive just off a surviving brand name. I think you may be overestimating the amount of time it will take for cryonics to work, but I haven't thought about the time-frame that hard.
If you had Catholic Church style cryonics orgs, interruptions wouldn't be so bad - you could build vast (dare I say cathedral-sized?) underground cryonics graves with excess volume & boil-off times measured in years or decades. You could analogize to libraries: books decay and need active protection and fires are risks, but can go a few years without (probably) being destroyed. The Church has succeeded in some very long-term libraries.
This would work if one has enough people actually signing up for cryonics. As long as very few people are doing so, it isn't an option.