Friday, December 12, 2008

Cryonics scam

It's amazing how many smart people fall prey for the Cryonics scam.

Here're my reasons why cryonics is a scam.

1) The chances of successful revival are extremely slim.
The process of reviving frozen people was never tested.
That means that most likely something would almost definitely go wrong:
Either freezing process, or maintaining frozen body, or unfreezing.
Most likely failures would be in every step.
I'd say that the chances of successful revival of the dead body are well below one in one thousand.

2) The cost of maintaining frozen body for several hundred years is pretty high. The chance that frozen body would never be heated up to unacceptable temperature during these these hundred years is pretty low.
In fact such accidents have been reported already. We should assume that many more accidents like that were never reported, because it's not in the interests of Cryonics companies to report them.

3) Even if it would be possible to revive your frozen body -- what would be the motivation to unfreeze you? In 25th century it would be much more productive to clone genetically modified super-humans (or better yet -- silicon AGIs) than revive hardly functional brain of person who was frozen with terminal decease in 21st century.


What causes people to believe in Cryonics?
I guess it's the same reason that pushes people toward religion -- they're terrified by their own death.

The catch is that Cryonics makes people die even earlier than they would die otherwise.

Enjoy Penn and Teller take on Cryonics:


Cryonics competes for people's money on the same level as any other religions do. I think that eventually Cryonics will be fully transformed into religion (like it happened with Scientology).
Scientology and Cryonics might even merge with each other
:-)