X-Message-Number: 19739
From: "Steve Harris" <>
References: <>
Subject: Re: Shermer and Cryonics
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2002 21:54:55 -0600

Rudi Hoffman says:

>BTW, when we were discussing cryonics, in the pool at Ft. Lauderdale,
Shermer
indicated he knew several intelligent and scientific cryonicists. Among
them, I believe, was Steve Harris. (A more articulate spokesperson for life
extension is hard to imagine.)<

COMMENT:

How nice of you to say so!  Actually, in the early 90's Michael Shermer
published in SKEPTIC pieces by both myself and Mike Darwin about cryonics,
and a lot of this material had previously appeared in CRYONICS magazine.
That was when SKEPTIC was just getting started. So he knows a lot about it,
indeed-- though not clear if he knew the latest on vitrification. And yes,
he knows me. I've written about this and other things in SKEPTIC and
actually am a contributing editor. And yes, I did chide him for the
strawberry comment when it came out in Scientific American. I think he let
his public "respectable skeptic" persona get the better of him there.

It's all the more a shame, since he's out in respectable public discussing
other ideas about the future just as wild. And there's a certain irony in
that his last column in Scientific American is about the Drake equation, and
estimating chances of succeeding in SETI. But the Drake equation is just a
simple Markov probability chain calculation, applicable to any future event
estimation, from whether or not the space shuttle will blow up, to whether
or not cryonics will work. In fact--- physicist Brian Wowk and I, more than
a decade ago actually *used* a version of the Drake equation to estimate in
a Markovian way the chances that cryonics would "work" for somebody signed
up to do it. It used probabilities like:

P1: Probability that your memories will survive your cardiac arrest until
the cryonics organization can reach your side and get your brain cool.

P2: Probability that your memories will then survive cryoprotectant solution
and vitrification in liquid nitrogen.

P3: Probability that eventually molecular repair technology will be invented
that is capable of restoring humans, memory intact, when damaged this badly

P4: Probability that society will survive development of that technology

P5: Probability that your cryonics organization will survive that long, as
well as you with it (these can be slip into sub probabilities if you like).

P6: Probability that anybody in the best of futures, will be interested,
resourceful, and nice enough to use the technology on you.

P7: Probability that you'll then be allowed to live a live that would be
more acceptable to you than being dead.

Multiply them all together (we presume that the probabilities are
independent of each other, which is maybe a big assumption) and there you
are.  Just as with the Drake equation there are many unknowns, and many
places where you get to extrapolate.

For example: I argue in the Krell essay that the timeline is somewhere
between 50 to 100 years to get to the Ultimate Technologies. What's the
probability that a cryonics organization will survive the necessary 50 to
100 years? You can look at the survival record of similar investment
organizations, funds, churches and (my favorite) cemeteries that are still
in upkeep. Stats are available as to the fraction of all humans ever to go
into liquid nitrogen, that are still there now, and how long for each-- and
you could in theory figure a Weibull failure curve for that. (The first guy
ever to be frozen in 1967, BTW, is still in just as good a shape, and is
still frozen. But some aren't). Do memories survive hours of clinical death?
We don't know, but you can culture living cells from human brains after 8
hours of death in the morgue, even without any special attempt to cool
rapidly. That's a clue. We think that memories are in synapses, and synapses
are reasonably (but not perfectly!) intact in cryopreparations of brain. It'
s not the perfect strawberry, but not mush either. Some fraction of
cryonicists don't get their brains saved (we had one go down in the Twin
Towers on 9/11 for example). But there are numbers for that, too. And so on.

In any case, I wrote Shermer that I hope he sees the point.  There's no more
reason to be snotty about this than SETI, or anything else in the future.
Just put down your reasons, and your estimates. So long as no physics is
being proposed violated, the probabilities should never be really close to
zero. I personally think that memories are present in freshly (a few hours)
"dead" people, and that the development of the ultimate biorepair technology
to get them out, is inevitable. Whether our organizations or indeed our
civilization will survive that time, or that technology, is another matter.
If they do, I can't think of anything more fascinating than resurrecting
people from the past-- heck, look how hard they work restoring and mounting
old dinosaur bones. How much neater to do Jurassic Park, if you could? Or a
historical person (which should be a lot easier if you start with a
cryopreserved one)?

Steve Harris

P.S. Keats' refrain of woe in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is "The sedge has
withered from the lake,/ And no birds sing." I recently ran across a
somewhat parallel thought in Steinbeck's _East of Eden_: "Oh but
strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost
their clutch." That's the one I thought of when I read Shermer's cryonics
comments. Perhaps he was just having a bad day?

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