Category Archives: Cryonics

Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero will undertake the first human head transplant later this year in China, the doctor told German magazineOoomin an article published Thursday. And, following that effort, he will revive a cryogenically frozen brain and transplant it into a donor body within the next three years.

The plans, completely disconnected from reality and the state of modern medicine, are at least in line with his previous outlandish goals and dubious animal research.

Canavero made headlines in the past few years by claiming that transplanting the whole head of a human onto a donor body is currently possible. A Russian man, suffering from a spinal muscular atrophy malady called Werdnig-Hoffmann Disease, even publicly volunteered for the procedure.

As proof that the transplant could work, Canavero published gruesome experiments in 2016, said to have repaired the severely injured spinal cords of mice, rats, and a dog. The experiments came complete with cringe-worthy video of recovering animals struggling to drag their limp bodies around. Yet, the study lacked controls, detailed methods, and data on the injuries and recoveries. Canavero claimed to perform a head transplant on a monkey but did not publish the experiment.

Mouse limping after experimental spinal cord repair.

Sergio Canavero giving a TEDX talk.

Sergio Canavero with his Chinese partner, Dr. Xiaoping Ren, who will lead the operation team onsite during an attempted head transplant procedure.

Experts decidedly consider his research on spinal cord repair, let alone whole head transplants, unconvincing. A medical ethicist dubbed Canavero out of his mind for sweeping past the currently insurmountable challenges of such feats. These include intricately repairing and reattaching thousands of delicate nerves and restoring function. Right now, doctors cant even convince the immune system to accept far simpler transplants consistently. Theres also the completely unknown effects of such a transplant on the powerful human psyche.

Canavero is carrying on, undeterred it seems. In his Ooom interview, he not only glided through the idea of successfully transplanting a head, he made an even more absurd claim: that he would revive a cryogenically frozen brain and transplant it into a donor body. Canavero said he would obtain a preserved brain from Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company located in Scottsdale, Arizona, according to Gizmodo.

There is currently no way to revive and molecularly repair a frozen human brain. And such transplants havent even been attempted in animals. Thus, the surgical procedure is decades if not centuries away.

As Gizmodo also reports, Alcor said that Canavera hadnt even contacted the company. It distanced itself from the doctor, as did other cryonics leaders, and noted that his efforts are not realistic or even a shared goal.

In a statement, the company said:

The Alcor Life Extension has had no contact with Dr. Canavero. It is not yet possible to revive human brains cryopreserved with present methods. Revival of todays cryonics patients will require future repair by highly advanced future technology, such as molecular nanotechnology. Technology that is advanced enough to repair a cryopreserved brain would by its nature also be able to regrow new tissues, organs, and a healthy body for the revived person. Therefore Alcor does not expect body donations or transplants to ever be necessary for revival of cryonics patients. Until advanced tissue regeneration technology is developed, we wish Dr. Canavero well in his development of body transplant surgery for living patients today who might benefit.

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Out of his mind surgeon plans human head transplant, revival of frozen brain - Ars Technica

Financial Times

The 'fortress' designed to help people live forever Financial Times Valentine was commissioned to design Timeship in 1997. He had just returned to New York, having worked on the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. He began attending meetings on cryonics because they seemed like cool gatherings. He met ...

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The 'fortress' designed to help people live forever - Financial Times

A peculiar kind of cognitive dissonance grips most people who talk about death. On one hand, death is awful: It is the most tragic fate that can befall somebody, murderers are the lowest of the low, and the death of a loved one, even an elderly loved one who has lived a long life, clogs us with sadness.

On the other hand, any intimation that we might wish to, I dont know, abolish death is met with deep suspicion. Everyones time comes eventually, I have been told. Or: Itd be unnatural any other way. Even: But would you really want to live forever?

Yes, actually. Yes I would. I have wanted to live forever for as long as I can remember. My instinctive response when asked why is, well, why not? Life is a self-evident good to me. Justifying that seems absurd dont you like happiness? And love? And experiencing things? Dont you like being alive? Peoples tendency to reply, Well yes, but and trail off, looking vaguely concerned for my mental wellbeing, continues to mystify me.

Like large swathes of secular ethics, I suspect that this hesitancy is, in some sense, a hangover from Christianity. Christians, of course, might reasonably shun the idea of earthly immortality, but the basic impulse underlying Christianitys doctrine of life and death that one must endure an imperfect and pious life on Earth before rejoicing in the eternity of the empyrean is the same one that motivates me. I just have less faith that death brings anything other than an ineffable and everlasting nothingness.

Immortality is no longer, however, as niche an aspiration as it was even five, ten years ago. Tad Friend recently published a (highly recommended) piece in The New Yorker that documents the recent anti-aging buzz that has overcome Silicon Valley. Iconoclastic tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, ever ahead of the zeitgeist, wrote in 2009 that he stand[s] against the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.

Since then, a steadily growing number of futurists have become interested in abolishing aging in one form or another. Donald Trump considered appointing Jim ONeill, a man who considers aging a disease to be overcome, to head the FDA, before, disappointingly, settling on the more establishment, Big Pharma-friendly Scott Gottlieb. Cryonics (freezing ones corpse in the hope that future technology may breathe life into it anew), once dismissed as mere science fiction, has slowly but surely gained popularity among Silicon Valleys elite. Futurist and AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, a man unafraid of polemical positions (he once argued on utilitarian grounds that a single person being tortured for fifty years was preferable to a sufficiently large number of people getting dust specks in their eyes), wrote in a post on the website Less Wrong that If you dont sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent. Thinking about cryonics reminds me of an H.P. Lovecraft line from the fictional text The Necronomicon, an esoteric book filled with secrets so vast in their cosmic implications that readers are sent insane merely by reading it. One of the few lines that Lovecraft reveals from the book goes like so: That is not dead which can eternal lie,/And with strange aeons even death may die. Strange aeons indeed, but perhaps ones not so far away.

I find this exhilarating. The world especially outside of Silicon Valley is starved of the kind of grand projects that can inspire a nation. Something like the space race would be nigh-unthinkable today (just ask Newt Gingrich). Even political projects like the New Deal or the Great Society, whatever you think of their outcomes, had an idealistic flavor to them that neither side of mainstream politics except, arguably, parts of Trumpism and Sanders-esque social democracy is really willing to embrace anymore. The prospect of seizing a truly fundamental part of human destiny the inevitability of death and forging it into a shape that befits our will is intoxicating in its grandiosity.

I think that one day the idea that death was so readily embraced, and that there was resistance against a project to eliminate it, will be incomprehensible to people. Life, and as much life as possible, will simply be taken for granted as a wonderful thing. Perhaps thats naive of me.

Tell you what, if Im still wrong in a thousand years, Ill write an apology column.

Contact Sam Wolfe at swolfe2 at stanford.edu.

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The technologist's stone - The Stanford Daily

When Philip Rhoades' parents died he put their brains on ice. Journalist SHERELE MOODY finds out what he plans to do with his own body after death.

IN an ideal world, Philip Rhoades will die peacefully and pain-free, his body will be put on ice and he will be brought back to life in a time when illness does not exist and people live forever.

And when he does come back, the cryonics expert will have his deceased mum and dad for company.

After Gerald and Dorothy Rhoades died in May of 2016, Philip placed their brains in a commercial cryogenic facility - the kind that stores animal semen for artificial insemination and human eggs for IVF.

Philip froze his parents' brains because it only costs about $35,000 to keep each organ for perpetuity compared to $200,000 each to have their bodies frozen, transported and stored in cryonics facilities overseas.

"The key thing is being able to download the information in the brain," Philip said of keeping his mum and dad's neurological remains on ice.

"In the case of a neural archive, we're not concerned about reviving the body's cells, we're concerned with the neural architecture that has the information in it.

"It's likely that we will be able to in the next 10 or 20 years be able to extract that information with high-resolution brain scans.

"We'd then dump the information into a super computer."

When a cryonics candidate dies, a team of medical experts prepares them for transport to a storage facility by stabilising their body, packing it with ice, lacing the blood with an anti-coagulant and feeding oxygen to the brain.

When the body arrives at its final destination the blood is drained and the water in the cells is replaced by a liquid "anti-freeze" that ensures the organs and tissues do not shatter when ice crystals form during the freezing process.

The body is then cooled by dry ice to minus 130 degrees before being placed in a protective body bag and lowered, head first, into a metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen that is kept at minus 196 degrees.

Bodies are stored upside down to ensure the brains are the last thing to thaw if the tank leaks.

While Philip could only afford to freeze his parents' brains, he hopes to have his entire body put on ice for re-animation "as soon as possible" but he acknowledged he could be waiting around for quite a while.

"Trying to revive a whole human being is a difficult operation," he said of the process that some scientists say won't work because of the damage extreme temperatures cause to human cells.

"If you're getting a cryonic suspension then the intention is that modern scientific technology will allow the body to be thawed out, completely revived and rejuvenated so you look like you're 25 and you feel like you're 25 again.

"Life is too short - it shouldn't be three score and 10 years, it should be thousands of years."

Philip hopes he does not get Alzheimer's disease like his father had in the years before he died.

If he does end up with the same illness, Philip is considering what he calls "pre-mortal suspension" before the dementia renders him unable to make his own decisions.

His plan is to end his own life while connected to machinery that will prepare his body for the cryonics process.

Philip is currently working on a way to remove the need for human intervention when he dies and the process of initiating the cryonic state because of the potential legal implications for anyone seen to be assisting in his death.

"It will involve technology that will drain my blood, undertake the automatic perfusion and all of that," Philip said.

- ARM NEWSDESK

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Brains on ice: The Aussie man planning to live forever - Northern Star

Dead of the world, unite! Appearing in a manifesto published in Petrograd in 1920, this arresting slogan encapsulated the philosophy of cosmism, which promoted interplanetary exploration as a path to immortality. Mixing scientific futurism with ideas derived from the 19th-century Russian Orthodox mystic Nikolai Fedorov, cosmism was summed up by the rocket engineer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) as the perfection of man and the liquidation of all imperfect forms of life. Liberated from the Earth, human beings would become pure ether, bodiless and undying. The belief that death could be conquered by science was embraced by a renegade section of the Bolshevik intelligentsia, including Maxim Gorky, and informed the decision to immortalise Lenins cadaver first by refrigeration, in an early experiment in what would later be called cryonic suspension, and then by embalming when freezing failed. Cosmist thinking went on to find a home in the Soviet space programme and continues to influence Russian science to this day.

Nearly a century after the cosmist manifesto, a group of transhumanists gathered outside Googles corporate headquarters in Mountain View, California, carrying placards reading Immortality now! and Google, please, solve death. Death could be solved, the group believed, by the development of cyber-consciousness a task requiring new technologies for uploading the contents of the human brain into cyberspace, which the group called on the tech company to fund. Google was already investing substantial resources in life-extension techniques and, in 2012, the companyhired Ray Kurzweil, long associated with programmes aiming to achieve immortality through cryonic suspension, artificial intelligence and mind uploading, as its director of engineering.

History continues by being forgotten. Mark OConnell, in recalling the February 2014 demonstration outside Google HQ, reported as the first ever transhumanist street action in the US, says little about the longer antecedents of contemporary transhumanism in his engaging and at times very funny book. This is an exploration of our time, conducted by an observer who is very much of our time. OConnell presents the reader with a gallery of diverting characters, including an Oxford-educated extropian philosopher who goes by the name of Max More, who aims to achieve more life, more intelligence, more freedom by replacing the human body with a robot controlled by an uploaded mind, and Zoltan Istvan, the transhumanist candidate for the US presidency in 2016, who conducted his campaign from an immortality bus decked out as a coffin.

The weird mixture of science and religion that typifies much of contemporary culture is illustrated in questing, faintly sad figures who blend transhumanist anti-deathism with Buddhism, Mormonism, Wicca or the UFO cult Ralism, whose members believe the human species was created by aliens. We learn of the LSD guru Timothy Learys late-life engagement with transhumanism, which included membership of the cryonic suspension organisation Alcor, and that when the time came for him to have his body frozen, he opted instead to have his cremated ashes shot into space from a cannon. OConnell reports that Learys last act is still a sore point within the cryonics community, which views his capitulation to deathism as a significant tragedy.

OConnells impressions of the lost souls who have drifted into transhumanism arevivid and memorable. Yet he sees them from a distance that is never explained. Like many of the people he interviews, he seems to think that a report of his feelings is all that is needed to validate his beliefs and hisdoubts. He cites transhumanists expressing disgust with the process of ageing, in themselves and in others, and he tells usthat he is not a transhumanist. But he never gives any reasons why he rejects their attitudes, nor does he offer an alternative view of his own.

The book is a succession of vignettes in which fundamental questions about the transhumanist enterprise are not explored. If the bodies of the followers of the cult are retrieved from their icy tombs, will the dead be reborn, or will what emerges be clones of human beings who had died for ever? Is information uploaded from the brain into cyberspace the essence of the human mind, or only a dim ghost of a mind that no longer exists? Is being embodied an accidental feature of the mind, or an integral part of what it means to be human?

Discussing A Letter to Mother Nature, a transhumanist manifesto in which Max More sets out his proposals for amending the human species, OConnell summarises the authors proposals:

We would no longer consent to live under the tyranny of ageing and death, but would use the tools of biotechnology to endow ourselves with enduring vitality and remove our expiration date. We would augment our powers of perception and cognition through technological enhancements of our sense organs and our neural capacities. We would no longer submit to being the products of blind evolution . . . And we would no longer be content to limit our physical, intellectual and emotional capacities by remaining confined to carbon-based biological forms.

OConnell writes that the letter captured something crucial about what made the movement so strange and compelling to me it was direct, and audacious, and it pushed the project of Enlightenment humanism to such radical extremes . . . There was, I felt, a whiff of madness about the whole enterprise, but it was a madness that revealed something fundamental about what we thought of as reason.

As a description of the simple-minded devotion of transhumanists to an unexamined idea of reason, this is well observed. But what is the something fundamental that the author has learned? He considers the possibility that transhumanism is a displaced passion for miracle and mystery, citing D H Lawrence: Today man gets his sense of the miraculous from science and machinery, radio, airplanes, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish mans sense of the miraculous as magic did in the past. But if Lawrences observation is well founded (as I think), what follows for the idea that human beings are or could ever be rational animals? These are questions that OConnell does not ask, or leaves hanging in the air.

Read as a kind of travelogue, To Be a Machine contains much that is interesting and entertaining. OConnell perceptively observes how transhumanism fits with Silicon Valleys world-view. He describes a conference at Google HQ, attended by the billionaire entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, which brought together those who want to liberate themselves from death and exponents of effective altruism, who aim to improve the world by using reason. There are some intriguing crossovers between the two movements.

Philosophically speaking, effective altruism is not much more than a reheated version of Jeremy Benthams utilitarianism. The early-19th-century thinker wanted to supplant ethical reasoning as it had been practised in the past with what he called moral arithmetic a type of calculation aiming at maximising pleasure, happiness or want-satisfaction (there are many variations). Implying that every moral quandary has a rational solution, this is a project that fits well with the transhumanist belief thatthe evils of human life are, in essence, technical difficulties.

The idea that moral reasoning should be a type of calculation seems to have influenced Thiel and Musk when they donated to research on the risks of artificial intelligence. Some of those who attended the conference (including the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, a former transhumanist who has become critical of the movement) believed that AI could even pose a risk to human survival. A super-intelligent machine could be programmed to serve human beings. But, as Bostrom, Stephen Hawking and others have pointed out, such a machine might slip free from its programming and begin topursue ends of its own that have nothing to do with human well-being.

Such an artificial super-intelligence need not be hostile to humans; it could simply be indifferent to whether humankind survives or not. Investing large sums into research that might prevent the disappearance of humankind might seem the most rational way of allocating resources more so than spending money helping people deal with disability, for instance. But why is reducing a hypothetical risk to the species more rational than increasing the happiness of living human beings? Utilitarian moral arithmetic prompts this question along with many others in ethics.

Both transhumanism and effective altruism claim to be rationalist philosophies and the two movements have offices in the same building in Oxford. But, like effective altruism, transhumanism is not as rational as it seems. Transhumanists believe that we are in essence sparks of consciousness which can escape mortality by detaching themselves from the decaying flesh in which they happen to be embodied. Deriving from mystical philosophies such as Platonism and gnosticism, it is an idea at odds with scientific materialism.

For a genuine materialist say, the ancient Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius there can be no question of the human mind severing its linkage with the material world. The mind is material and dies when the body dies. Transhumanists will reply that technologies not available in Lucretiuss time will allow the mind to be uploaded into cyberspace. Yet it is unclear whether what will be uploaded will be a conscious mind, or just a spectral app spun off from the contents of the brain.

Even if consciousness can be detached from the human body, the mind will still require a substratum of matter. The rejuvenated cadavers that emerge from cryonic suspension will be physical things, as will the cyborgs to which some transhumanists imagine their minds being transferred. Minds floating in cyberspace would not escape this dependency. Cyberspace is an artefact of physical objects computers and the networked facilities they need not an ontologically separate reality. If the material basis of cyberspace were destroyed or severely disrupted, any minds that had been uploaded would be snuffed out.

Every technology requires a physical infrastructure in order to operate. But this infrastructure depends on social institutions, which are frequently subject to breakdown. I made this point when I bumped into some ardent advocates of cryonic suspension in California in the 1980s. How long would it take to develop the technologies that were needed to resurrect frozen cadavers as living organisms, I wondered. Not much more than a century, I was told. I asked these techno-futurists to consider the events of the past hundred years or so a devastating civil war and two world wars, a ruinous stock-market crash and the Great Depression, for example. Given this history, how could they be confident that their refrigerated cadavers would remain intact for anothercentury? The companies that stored them would surely go bust, wars and civil disturbances would lead to power failures, and the legal system that protected the cadavers could disappear. The United States might no longer exist in a recognisable form.The cryonicists looked at me blankly. These were scenarios that they hadnot considered and could not process. Such upheavals might have happened in the past,but the future was going to be quite different. For these believers in technological resurrection, American society was already immortal.

At bottom, the transhumanist movement is a modern variant of the mystical dream of transcending contingency the vulnerability that comes with being subject to accident and the power of events that possessed many in ancient times. These mystics wanted to be absorbed in a timeless, impersonal absolute, a refuge from the ugly conflicts of the human world. They understood that this refuge could only be entered if they shed their individuality and practised asceticism and contemplation in an effort to erase their personal identity and desires. Less intelligent than their ancient precursors, contemporary transhumanists imagine that they can become immortal on terms of their own choosing.

Pondering a conversation he had with one of the techno-mystics, OConnell worries that only the extremely wealthy could afford to be uploaded to a virtual world. The rest of us would have to struggle on, bombarded by messages from cyberspace trying to sell us some product for which we have become targets through our use of the internet. But, to my mind, the super-wealthy few would not be much better off.

The greatest problem with everlasting lifein cyberspace is the prospect that it would have to be spent in the company of other cyber-immortals. As Max More and some of his fellow transhumanists have envisioned, each of these disembodied minds might design its virtual body and environments as it pleased. But might not these virtual environments somehow overlap or collide? Cyberspace is a projection of the human world, not a way out of it. What if the few who had escaped their ageing flesh found themselves side by side with an immortalised Donald Trump, his orange hair undyingly abundant, presiding over a never-ending Mar-a-Lago? It is not for nothing that the gods in some Greek myths regarded immortality as a curse.

Mark OConnell appears at the Cambridge Literary Festival on 23 April, 7pm (see left)

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John Gray: Dear Google, please solve death - New Statesman

When Philip Rhoades' parents died he put their brains on ice. Journalist SHERELE MOODY finds out what he plans to do with his own body after death.

IN an ideal world, Philip Rhoades will die peacefully and pain-free, his body will be put on ice and he will be brought back to life in a time when illness does not exist and people live forever.

And when he does come back, the cryonics expert will have his deceased mum and dad for company.

After Gerald and Dorothy Rhoades died in May of 2016, Philip placed their brains in a commercial cryogenic facility - the kind that stores animal semen for artificial insemination and human eggs for IVF.

Philip froze his parents' brains because it only costs about $35,000 to keep each organ for perpetuity compared to $200,000 each to have their bodies frozen, transported and stored in cryonics facilities overseas.

"The key thing is being able to download the information in the brain," Philip said of keeping his mum and dad's neurological remains on ice.

"In the case of a neural archive, we're not concerned about reviving the body's cells, we're concerned with the neural architecture that has the information in it.

"It's likely that we will be able to in the next 10 or 20 years be able to extract that information with high-resolution brain scans.

"We'd then dump the information into a super computer."

When a cryonics candidate dies, a team of medical experts prepares them for transport to a storage facility by stabilising their body, packing it with ice, lacing the blood with an anti-coagulant and feeding oxygen to the brain.

When the body arrives at its final destination the blood is drained and the water in the cells is replaced by a liquid "anti-freeze" that ensures the organs and tissues do not shatter when ice crystals form during the freezing process.

The body is then cooled by dry ice to minus 130 degrees before being placed in a protective body bag and lowered, head first, into a metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen that is kept at minus 196 degrees.

Bodies are stored upside down to ensure the brains are the last thing to thaw if the tank leaks.

While Philip could only afford to freeze his parents' brains, he hopes to have his entire body put on ice for re-animation "as soon as possible" but he acknowledged he could be waiting around for quite a while.

"Trying to revive a whole human being is a difficult operation," he said of the process that some scientists say won't work because of the damage extreme temperatures cause to human cells.

"If you're getting a cryonic suspension then the intention is that modern scientific technology will allow the body to be thawed out, completely revived and rejuvenated so you look like you're 25 and you feel like you're 25 again.

"Life is too short - it shouldn't be three score and 10 years, it should be thousands of years."

Philip hopes he does not get Alzheimer's disease like his father had in the years before he died.

If he does end up with the same illness, Philip is considering what he calls "pre-mortal suspension" before the dementia renders him unable to make his own decisions.

His plan is to end his own life while connected to machinery that will prepare his body for the cryonics process.

Philip is currently working on a way to remove the need for human intervention when he dies and the process of initiating the cryonic state because of the potential legal implications for anyone seen to be assisting in his death.

"It will involve technology that will drain my blood, undertake the automatic perfusion and all of that," Philip said.

- ARM NEWSDESK

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Brains on ice: The Aussie man planning to live forever - Mackay Daily Mercury

Transhumanists think that bodies are obsolete technology

Yves Gellie/picturetank

By Brendan Byrne

THERE was a lot of futuristic hype surrounding cryonics company Alcor. When Dublin-based journalist Mark OConnell travelled to its facility in Arizona, he found himself surrounded by corpses in an office park, between a tile showroom and a place called Big Ds Covering Supplies.

In his book To Be a Machine, new father OConnell invokes the twin spectres of death and child-bearing in an attempt to make sense of his subject but he also manages to be staggeringly funny. He explores the intersecting practices of body modification, cryonics, machine learning, whole brain emulation and AI disaster-forecasting.

The transhumanist world view, OConnell writes, casts our minds and bodies as obsolete technologies, outmoded formats in need of complete overhaul. He worries more about the collateral damage such a future will inflict, less on the world views of the supposed visionaries who supply the ideas. Not that the two can be separated.

Throughout the text, it is difficult to ignore Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire and an adviser to Donald Trump. While Thiel, who takes human growth hormone daily and has signed up for cryonic freezing, is not featured directly, the longevity start-ups he funded are, including Halcyon Molecular, 3Scan, MIRI, the Longevity Fund and Aubrey de Greys Methuselah Foundation.

Another pervasive presence is Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher. But while Thiel wants to extend life, Bostrom is worried about its eradication. He is best known for his 2014 book Superintelligence, which brought thought experiments about AI security to public notice. OConnell finds it disquieting to see the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates effusing about this book. These dire warnings about AI were coming from what seemed like the most unlikely of sources: not from Luddites or religious catastrophists, that is, but from the very people who seemed to most personify our cultures reverence for machines.

The race to achieve AI first will be tight, pushing corporations to disregard security

Musk and Thiels recent OpenAI project attempts to address such existential threats by freely disseminating its research. This is meant to encourage the rise ofmultiple AIs, whose balance of power will keep any non-benign ones off-balance. While Bostrom agrees that this plan will decrease the threat from a world-eating singleton, he worries that winning the AI race is incompatible with using any safety method that incurs a delay or limits performance. If basic information is made public, the race to achieve AI first will be tight, pushing corporations to disregard security.

Given Musks public admission that he is trying to move Trump to the left, rumours that Mark Zuckerberg is considering a presidential run and the fact that many users are deleting the Uber app after the company broke the taxi strike at JFK Airport, Silicon Valley can no longer claim to be apolitical. And there seems to be something about transhumanism that draws out reactionaries. As OConnell observes, in one sense the whole ethos of transhumanism is such a radical extrapolation of the classically American belief in self-betterment that it obliterates the idea of the self entirely. Its liberal humanism forced to the coldest outer limits of its own paradoxical implications.

Thiel is strangely for a former libertarian a planner. In his 2014 book Zero to One, Thiel writes of the dot-com bubble as both a peak of insanity and a peak of clarity: People looked into the future, saw how much valuable new technology we would need to get there safely and judged themselves capable of creating it. Depicting how private enterprise failed to bridge the gap between aspiration and realisation, Thiel seems here to be arguing for total mobilisation of the state.

Thiel favours taking huge risks to achieve miraculous results. He champions the government-funded space race and rails against incrementalisation in scientific and civilizational achievements. At the time of writing, Jim ONeill, the managing director of Thiels Mithril Capital, is one of Trumps main candidates to head the Food and Drug Administration. ONeill thinks that drugs should be approved not by safety but by efficacy. Thiel himself has criticised the FDA for being overly cautious, stating five years ago, I dont even know if you could get the polio vaccine approved today a sentiment shared by the president.

If the low-safety moonshot approach favoured by Thiel and the futurist frat houses OConnell describes is applied on a national level, and longevity research funded by a Silicon Valley billionaire does pay huge dividends, a new question emerges: immortality for whom?

Thiel is notoriously anti-competition, writing in Zero to One that only becoming a monopoly can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival, since competitive markets destroy profits. A monopoly price for life extension suggests a future in which we will all be in monetary debt to mortality, working forever to pay off our incoming years.

During a recent public lecture, genomics pioneer Craig Venter discussed his new company that aims to use genetic sequencing to provide proactive, preventative, predictive, personalised healthcare. According to Venter, 40 per cent of people who think they are healthy are not they have undiagnosed ailments such as tumours that have not metastasised or cardiovascular conditions. And he says his method can predict Alzheimers 20 years before its onset, and a cocktail of soon-to-be-marketed drugs can prevent it. Thanks to this $25,000 genome-physical, Venter himself was diagnosed with prostate cancer and operated on.

Can any imaginable public healthcare provision pay for such speculative treatments? Or will there be a widening gap between those who can afford to stay healthy and those who will have to shoulder early-onset penury in the face of their time-limited humanity?

In response to questions about such inequality, Thiel offers little comfort. Probably the most extreme form of inequality, he told The New Yorker six years ago, is between people who are alive and people who are dead.

Jonathan Swifts satirical letter A modest proposal responded to an equally cold-blooded ideology, in his day. But a field whose pioneers sport names like T. O. Morrow (Tom Bells 1990s soubriquet), FM-2030 and Max More demands something different from OConnell an unexpected, often funny effort of restraint.

This article appeared in print under the headline In debt to mortality

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Exploring the hidden politics of the quest to live forever - New Scientist

Written by Anders Sandberg

This post was originally published onAndert II

A girl dying of cancer wanted to use cryonic preservation to have a chance at being revived in the future. While supported by her mother the father disagreed; in a recent high court ruling, the judge found that she could be cryopreserved.

As the judge noted, the verdict was not a statement on the validity of cryonics itself, but about how to make decisions about prospective orders. In many ways the case would presumably have gone the same way if there had been a disagreement about whether the daughter could have catholic last rites. However, cryonics makes things fresh and exciting (I have been in the media all day thanks to this).

What is the ethics of parents disagreeing about the cryosuspension of their child?

One obvious principle is that parents ought to act in the best interest of their children.

If the child is morally mature and with informed consent, then they can clearly have a valid interest in taking a chance on cryonics: they might not be legally adult, but as in normal medical ethics their stated interests have strong weight. Conversely, one could imagine a case where a child would not want to be preserved, in which case I think most people would agree their preferences should dominate.

The general legal consensus in the West is that the childs welfare is so important that it can overrule the objections of parents. In UK law parents have the right and the duty to give consent for a minor. Children can consent for medical treatment, overriding their parents, at 16. However, if refusing treatment parents and court can override. This mostly comes into play in cases such as avoiding blood transfusions for religious reasons.

In this case the issue was that the parents were disagreeing and the child was not legally old enough.

If one thinks cryonics is reasonable, then one should clearly cryosuspend the child: it is in their best interest. But if one thinks cryonics is not reasonable, is it harming the interest of the child? This seems to require some theory of how cryonics is bad for the interests of the child.

As an analogy, imagine a case where one parent is a Jehovahs Witness and want to refuse a treatment involving blood transfusion: the child will die without the treatment, and it will be a close call even with it. Here the objecting parent may claim that undergoing the transfusion harms the child in an important spiritual way and refuse consent. The other parent disagrees. Here the law would come down on the side of the pro-transfusion parent.

On this account and if we agree the cases are similar, we might say that parents have a legal duty to consent to cryonics.

In practice the controversialness of cryonics may speak against this: many people disagree about cryonics being good for ones welfare. However, most such arguments usually seem to be based on various farfetched scenarios about how the future could be a bad place to end up in. Others bring up loss of social connections or that personal identity would be disrupted. A more rational argument is that it is an unproven treatment of dubious efficacy, which would make it irrational to undertake if there was an alternative; however since there isnt any alternative this argument has little power. The same goes for the risk of loss of social connection or identity: had there been an alternative to death (which definitely severs connections and dissolves identity) that may have been preferable. If one seriously thinks that the future would be so dark that it is better not to get there, one should probably not have children.

In practice it is likely that the status of cryonics as nonstandard treatment would make the law hesitate to overrule parents. We know blood transfusions work, and while spiritual badness might be a respectable as a private view we as a society do not accept it as a sufficient reason to have somebody die. But in the case of cryonics the unprovenness of the treatment means that hope for revival is on nearly the same epistemic level as spiritual badness: a respectable private view, but not strong enough to be a valid public reason. Cryonicists are doing their best to produce scientific evidence tissue scans, memory experiments, protocols that move the reasons to believe in cryonics from the personal faith level to the public evidence level. They already have some relevant evidence. As soon as lab mice are revived or people become convinced the process saves the connectome the reasons would be strengthened and cryonics becomes more akin blood transfusion.

The key difference is that weak private reasons are enough to allow an experimental treatment where there is no alternative but death, but they are generally not enough to go for an experimental treatment when there is some better treatment. When disallowing a treatment weak reasons may work well against unproven or uncertain treatments, but not when it is proven. However, disallowing a treatment with no alternative is equivalent to selecting death.

When two parents disagree about cryonics (and the child does not have a voice) it hence seems that they both have weak reasons, but the asymmetry between having a chance and dying tilts in favor of cryonics. If it was purely a matter of aesthetics or value (for example, arguing about the right kind of last rites) there would be no societal or ethical constraint. But here there is some public evidence, making it at least possible that the interests of the child might be served by cryonics. Better safe than sorry.

When the child also has a voice and can express its desires, then it becomes obvious which way to go.

King Solomon might have solved the question by cryosuspending the child straight away, promising the dissenting parent not to allow revival until they either changed their mind or there was enough public evidence to convince anybodythat it would be in the childs interest to be revived. The nicest thing about cryonics is that it buys you time to think things through.

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Cross Post: Solomon's frozen judgement - Practical Ethics (blog)

The ability to freeze things is our greatest weapon against the passage of time. To a frozen fish fillet or chicken nugget, physical aging is barely a threat: the cold protects them indefinitely against the hot degradation of bacterial death. Better still, when they are finally thawed, they are practically as good as new. Cryonics, a hypothetical science cited as a human preservation technique in sci-fi movies like Passengers and Austin Powers, is a proposition that our bodies, like meat, will be eternally preserved by turning them into ice.

The problem is, a frozen body isnt so easily defrosted.

Cryonics biggest obstacle is our physical composition. Two-thirds of the human body is water, which means that some 66 percent of the human bodys cells will turn into ice if its not frozen correctly. And ice, as anyone with a freezer knows, takes up more space than water in its liquid form. Theres no way our fragile cell walls and veins could contain waters rapid expansion, driven by the formation of crystal lattices of H2O, once our bodies are dropped into a freezer. If the point of cryonics (thats the process of freezing entire bodies; cryogenics is the study of biology at low temperatures as a whole) is to someday unfreeze a human, maintaining the bodys integrity is key. Thats why cryonics researchers put all of their efforts into perfecting a process that stops our fluids from freezing into ice, turning them instead to glass.

Unlike ice, glass contains no crystals that might fracture or stab the other contents in the liquid. The idea behind vitrification named for the French verb for converting things into glass, vitrifier is that the formation of ice crystals in our cells, which would inevitably puncture or deform the machinery inside them, can be prevented by adding the right types of antifreeze to our bodies. While we associate antifreeze with the blue stuff we put in cars in the winter, it really refers to any molecule that can be mixed into a solution with water to disrupt the crystal-forming process. It is a lot harder for water molecules to find each other and form a solid lattice when other, bigger molecules are getting in their way. In the same way a slushy alcoholic cocktail or a fruit sorbet never form a solid mass of ice because they contain substances other than water, the fluids in a body filled with antifreeze molecules or cryoprotectants will turn much more viscous, but never quite solid.

This phenomenon already happens in nature: certain species of frogs, for example, produce glycerol or glucose tiny, natural sugars that wedge between water molecules, keeping their fluids running, albeit slowly, at subzero temperatures. Scientists trying to make cryonics work have struggled to find substances that can do the same under even colder conditions without killing us. As of right now, options are limited: as a review of cryoprotectants in Rejuvenation Research noted in 2015, our best bets are on molecules like ethylene glycol and propylene glycol literally those used in cars and other known preservatives like methanol, formamide, and butanediol. All of these are pretty toxic, and especially so at high concentrations.

A person that undergoes cryonic preservation begins the vitrification process almost immediately after they are declared brain dead. As the body is rapidly cooled to a temperature just slightly above the freezing point, the heartbeat and respiration is artificially maintained as heparin is injected to prevent coagulation and cryoprotectants are perfused into the body. When vitrification is complete full glassiness occurs at around 196C, according to a 2015 report in the journal Neuroethics the body is then fully submerged in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of 196C.

Then, we wait.

Tests on frozen organs have shown that cryonic freezing with cryoprotectants works to a certain extent, depending on the organ, but damage still results from the toxicity of the antifreeze or from errant ice crystals that manage to form.

Despite these setbacks, cryonics companies like the Cryonics Foundation and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which just froze its 148th patient in August 2015, are already using techniques like vitrification in the hopes that future researchers will have figured out how to bring bodies back to life. Only time will tell if this experimental technique actually works.

Photos via Passengers

Yasmin is a writer and former biologist living in New York. A Toronto girl at heart, her writing also appears in The Last Magazine and SciArt in America. You might recognize her as a past host of Scientific American's YouTube series.

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Cryonics Experts Want to Freeze Human Blood Into Glass - Inverse

NEDERLAND, Colo. -- The16thannual Frozen Dead Guy Days begins Friday in Nederland, inspired by the bizarre tale of the town's most famous -- albeit deceased -- resident.

For 27 years, "The Frozen Dead Guy's" body has, in theory, been cryogenically preserved on dry ice in the mountains overlooking the town, and the only way to see him is to go with the man paid to keep him on ice.

"I'm supposedly the only guy with keys," said Brad Wickham, opening the door to the now world-famous Tuff Shed. "I hope some day when he is reanimated, we can talk about all the fun we had bringing ice up here every two weeks."

The story goes something like this:Bredo Morstoelwas a minor public official in Norway, and when he died in 1989 his grandson, TrygveBauge, had him cryogenically preserved in the hopes he could one day be re-animated.

The body was eventually moved to Nederland, where Baugehad plans to build his own cryonics lab unit he was deported.

Now, Bauge pays Wickham $9,000 per year to buy and deliver between 900 to 1,200 pounds of dry ice every two weeks and cover his grandfather's frozen sarcophagus.

"It's basically a thin metal casket. It's been chained down to prevent theft," said Wickham, who said Bredo has never thawed out on his watch, but the previous iceman may have missed some runs. "He may have gotten pretty warm by cryonic standards, let's just put it that way. But I don't think ever over 32 degrees."

Next to the Tuff Shed, the abandoned cryonics lab is filled with boxes of notes, worthy of a mad scientist.

"I picture him sitting over a dim light bulb, Archimedesstyle, scribbling," said Wickham with a smile, pointing to the painting that was done by Bredo. "Trygve was really close to his grandfather."

And while the town fought having a frozen body in a neighborhood, it has since embraced the idea, naming an annual festival after it.

"It's not much, but I guess it suits him," said Wickham, closing the shed. "Stay cool, grandpa!"

Fore more on Frozen Dead Guy Days,click here.

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Frozen Dead Guy Days: The story behind Nederland's most famous ... - The Denver Channel