It seems much easier to ignore it than making cryonics work! Though apparently not as easy as scamming nerds who skew to their late 30s, male and tend to work in technology out of their life insurance payouts.
Gah! This is a tragedy, although not as much of a tragedy as getting hit by a Cryonics R US company van after writing them into my will as the life insurance beneficiary.
Dont worry, they will just scoop up your brain matter and put it in a freezing bin, acausalrobotgod (praised be its name) can just eventually put you back together by running simulations of your digital footprint and the universe.
Right off the bat, this idea is already kind of ridiculous:
Emil Kendziorra has his death all planned out.
In the event that his life is cut short, a team of medical professionals
will supply the man’s recently-deceased body with oxygen until it can be
transported to a suspension facility.
I guess that works if you’re somehow sure that you’ll die in your own
home or in a hospital room with your loving family around to carry out
your last wishes, but what happens if your death occurs somewhere where
you can’t be easily and quickly connected with these medical
professionals - say, while hiking in the woods, traveling in a foreign
country, or heck, just in a heart attack in your sleep but no one’s
around and the body’s not discovered for a day or two?
Then again, they wouldn’t be into cryonics if they weren’t willing to
spend way too much money on ideas that will only succeed if a bunch of
things they have no control over happen the right way.
> I guess that works if you're somehow sure that you'll die in your own home or in a hospital room with your loving family around to carry out your last wishes, but what happens if your death occurs somewhere where you can't be easily and quickly connected with these medical professionals
A plot point in the comic series The Transmetropolitan, where a couple signs up for cryonics and she dies normally and he dies somewhere in asia shitting his guts out and shouting racist shit (Which I doubt Warren Ellis meant to be racist shit and instead it was meant to be edgy, but yeah... (Not that comics cannot have racists in them, but that line about them not washing toilets or something hits differently when you read it now. The whole comic reads differently after everything re the abuse came out from Ellis of course, but that is a bit offtopic)) and then she awakes alone, in an uncaring future who only revived her out of weak contractual obligation and she then gets dumped on the street, where the new world instantly overloads her and drives her slightly mad.
Unrelated to the OP: It’s been a long time, but one part in TM that gave me bad vibes was when a woman was coerced/brain fucked into doing porn? Spider was somehow involved with that, and it just got glossed over/ignored. It didn’t sit well with me. Now it feels even skeevier, assuming I’m remembering it correctly.
Can't exactly remember that part but a lot of the setting was intentionally dystopian with horrible parts being so normalized people didn't even blink at it anymore. Spider was the only one who saw this and fixed this, so I'm not sure if Spider was involved in that. When I rethink about the series the things Spider does (or more like the way he is written as a genius writer but incel followed around by two young women (who say they don't want to fuck him buttttt....)) weird me out (and lampshading this in the comic via the cartoon episode doesn't make it better). So you could be right about Spider doing the brain porn thing (I just don't recall it). Spider of course also had a big element of 'I think these things are bad, unless I do them to my enemies then it is karmic justice or something', which is a bit of a bad sign (I remember the sword of truth series also doing this and making me eyeroll massively (one of the books goes: if we pillage and rape their farmers it is fine and rational and just we only do it to defend ourselves from them raping and pillaging us (in traditional libertarian fashion btw, so this message is given in a long speech)).
this isn't gotcha! moment. Advance medical directive/ living wills / durable medical POAs are a thing. No one thinks "what if SAR doesn't read them?" is a serious objection.
I'd argue there's a big difference here! Most decisions about your corpse (or even your body in a vegetative state) aren't exactly as time-sensitive as "get this body into the deep-freeze, fast". It just strikes me as a scenario where you're really counting on a lot of things going right in a very specific way, or on being able to exert a lot of control from beyond the grave.
The funny part of this isnt that "following advance directives isn't always possible," rather his end-game is scientifically silly and not possible. It is pretty trite to say "it is possible these directions are not followed!"
Advance directives are for time-sensitive, life-or-death decisions. That is a DNR or "don't perform CPR." Those are both very common terms, to the point of being one of the main form categories. (N/b you often have to expressly say it applies for emergency response. For example, https://afmnoco.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Colorado-MOST.pdf.)
Or if it said "if I have a TBI and am non-responsive, don't do brain surgery." Now, if they didn't have time to read it, I have to live life with a brain injury when I expressly said otherwise with a very reduced QOL, burden on my family, etc. Let me tell you, this isn't fun! That's why mine now says "if I have a second bad tbi, pls let me die." If they do because it is possible they don't have my living will available, now I am alive against my wishes.
Estate law allows people to "exert a lot of control from beyond the grave." (I mean, does the rule against perpituities apply to your body? If so, lol)
Meh. If people were just spending a lot of money on something that worked but might prove impossible to do if they got unlucky, there wouldn't be very much to talk about. A pretty significant chunk of the population dies in hospitals anyway, and a lot of the population that dies at home has a good idea their death is coming. For someone who can afford it, $60,000 for a fifty percent chance of an extra one hundred years or whatever isn't that bad a trade. If the only problem with cryonics, or even the main problem, was that I might not die in a hospital, I'd shell out for it.
It's just that, you know, it doesn't work and they might as well be lighting it (their money *or* their corpse) on fire.
Come on, it's not like there have been _multiple_ incidents where Alcor has been alleged to, um, speed things along their somewhat inevitable course... give the ol' Charon's boat a gentle push off the bank, that kind of thing.
(in the interest of complete fairness I don't think any beneficiaries of this alleged assistance _that we know of_ were paying via life insurance, so there is at least that)
I don’t know how Alcor customers pay for their services, but the article said that Biostasis GmbH customers pay a monthly fee plus a $100,000 life insurance policy that covers the cost of storing their preserved body or brain for potentially decades. Maybe Alcor folks just pay a large lump sum themselves.
Alcor also has a life insurance option, but I don't know if they had it decades ago. They also might expect more legal scrutiny in such cases and behave more carefully.
Dora Kent case is famous enough to have a [wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_Kent), not to mention a [damage control piece](https://www.alcor.org/library/dora-kent-case/) from Alcor themselves. There was also the [2009 exposé](https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/alcor-employee-makes-harsh-allegations-cryonics-foundation/story?id=8764331) relating to another incident involving a male "patient".
Archive link
Ah yes, a “Bloomberg opinion” article that largely quotes an enthusiastic brain freezer who (completely incidentally) also runs a brain freezing firm.
Right off the bat, this idea is already kind of ridiculous:
I guess that works if you’re somehow sure that you’ll die in your own home or in a hospital room with your loving family around to carry out your last wishes, but what happens if your death occurs somewhere where you can’t be easily and quickly connected with these medical professionals - say, while hiking in the woods, traveling in a foreign country, or heck, just in a heart attack in your sleep but no one’s around and the body’s not discovered for a day or two?
Then again, they wouldn’t be into cryonics if they weren’t willing to spend way too much money on ideas that will only succeed if a bunch of things they have no control over happen the right way.
I’d be a bit concerned to let a company take out a 00,000 life insurance policy on me haha.
I’ve never seen the rats talk about the non-Alcor operation up in the midwest…
(They have an in-house cryoprotectant guy from Russia - you’d think Alcor and co would do this too…).