Comment Re:Hasn't this been proven to be junk science? (Score 1) 313
I can remember reading several articles which stated that cryonics doesn't work because the freezing process is not perfect - it does not stop decomposition, which older frozen specimens were starting to show. Why do people still spend money on this?
Why is this modded up? A thing does not have to be perfect to be good enough. Vinyl records, CDs, flash memory, magnetic memory, none of these is perfect and all decompose over time, yet they work well enough. The question is merely whether the brain's important data is preserved long enough for technology to advance to the point the person can be recovered. You ask why people would spend money on the best chance anyone has ever gotten of living? Perhaps a better question would be why people spend so much effort and resources on things like diet, exercise, end-of-life medicine, or religion, all with a guaranteed mortality rate of 100%.
Cryonics works, it is survivable. It works for sperm, eggs, embryos, small mammalian organs, all of which can be thawed and remain undamaged. Things are more complicated for large, recently deceased organs like a dead brain -- but your odds of surviving are immeasurably higher with cryonics than as compost. Perhaps it will be necessary to scan the frozen brain molecule by molecule, and 3D print a new body (like they are now beginning to print organs), or perhaps upload as a simulation.
I think the odds are pretty good that we can acquire the necessary technology before cryogenically slowed decomposition destroys the vital information. Perhaps a better question is not whether you can be revived, but rather whether anyone will want to. It probably depends on whether the world's population is still growing like in developing countries, or whether it is declining like in developed countries.
