X-Message-Number: 2394
Date: 31 Aug 93 13:28:56 EDT
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: CRYONICS: Greg Benford Article
Here is a treat: an article on the workability of Cryonics from
this month's science column in the Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction. The author is physicist Gregory Benford, who
took over half of the regular column when Isaac Asimov died, and
this month's offering by Dr. Benford is based (with full credit
given) on an article of mine which is available in reprint from
Alcor, titled "Will Cryonics Work?" This is how I'd have written
it if I wrote better <g>.
A SCIENTIST'S NOTEBOOK
Gregory Benford
CALCULATING THE FUTURE
4000 words
Copyright 1993 by Abbenford Associates
Only the past is truly knowable. Sometimes, though, not even the
past is available--seldom do we preserve good records of people and
events. The present is a millisecond wide, the future a fog.
Or is it better to say that there is no single future? Rather,
we can best regard the future as a set of possibilities. Science
fiction is an entertaining game, aiming to make us aware of the vast
ocean of potentiality we face. As fiction, it strives harder to
entertain than to instruct. Is there a more orderly way to discuss the
range of the probable?
This goal is not scientific, in the sense that the results
cannot be checked right now. This is not the same as unscientific
statements--those which have been tested and have failed.
Rather, ideas of the future are nonscientific. However
systematically arrived at, they cannot be tested today. Someday they
will be either disproved or not. But of course, like a tip about a
horse race, they are most useful before you know whether they are
right.
Consider cryonics. This idea, that properly freezing people
immediately after they have crossed the threshold we call 'death' may
allow them to be later reanimated, is an assertion about the future.
It first figured in a Neil R. Jones sf story in the 1931 Amazing
Stories, inspiring Dr. Robert Ettinger to propose the idea eventually
in detail in The Prospect of Immortality (1964).
It has since been explored in Clifford Simak's Why Call Them
Back From Heaven? (1967), Fred Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969),
and in innumerable space flight stories (such as 2001: A Space
Odyssey) which use cryonics for long term storage of the crew. Fred
Pohl became a strong advocate of cryonics, even appearing on the
Johnny Carson show to discuss it. Robert Heinlein used cryonics as
part of a time-traveling plot in The Door Into Summer. Larry Niven
coined "corpsicle" to describe such "deanimated" folk. All these
stories considered the long term aspects.
Sterling Blake's Chiller, which should appear this summer, is
different. It treats cryonics as the field exists today, in a more
mainstream, suspenseful plot structure. Chiller's armature is the
adventures of a beleaguered band facing the present opposition to the
idea. It is based on the three existing cryonics organizations and the
considerable antagonism they face, much of it quite emotional.
This fervently felt resistance suggests a deep underlying
uneasiness about death in our society. Imagine a scientist today being
rejected from a scientific society because he wants to present
research relevant to long-term preservation of whole organisms, not
necessarily humans. Yet this continues, as well as widespread views
that cryonics is inherently wrong, greedy, or else the work of con
men. (This last assumption is universal among physicians.)
Of course, cryonics is a huge gamble. And many thoughtful people
discount cryonics because they simply consider it fantastically
implausible. This, despite the fact that Canadian painted turtles and
four species of frogs routinely make it through the winter by
freezing, then reviving. They respond to low temperatures by making up
a cocktail of glucose, amino acids and a kind of naturally produced
antifreeze, glycerol. They manage to move water out of their cells, so
that ice crystals form outside delicate membranes. While these animals
have special adaptations, their body chemistries are not bizarre.
Their methods could be extended artificially to mammals, like us.
Based on such reasoning, cryonics has gathered momentum, largely
unnoticed by the world. The number of people who invest in cryonics as
a rational gamble is increasing exponentially. Over forty are now
suspended in liquid nitrogen, with hundreds signed up to be.
Many others regard cryonics as creepy and pointless. Even
science fiction writers fascinated by its long-term aspects (Simak,
Heinlein) never made arrangements to be "suspended", as the
cryonicists say. I know of no sf writer who has publicly endorsed
cryonics as a plausible possibility, with the exception of a
deposition Arthur C. Clarke made several years ago to support a court
case.
Of course the notion calls up images of the cold grave, zombies,
etc. Still, as eerie ideas go, being frozen strikes me as less
horrific than turning into food for worms, or being cremated. (When
cremation started out commercially, bodies were burned during a church
service. The businesses quickly added organ music, because mourners
wondered about the loud bang that often interrupted the funeral. It
was the skull of the deceased, exploding.)
So if not especially creepy, is it none the less pointless? That
is, are cryonicists making a reasonable bet?
That depends on many factors. Any vision of the future does. To
analyze them in more than an arm-waving way, I'll work out here a
simple method for quantitatively thinking about future possibility.
The simplest way to consider any proposed idea is to separate it
into smaller, better-defined puzzles. This atomizing of issues is
crucial to science, since it is easier to ponder one problem at a
time. This approach has been applied to nonscientific questions, many
closely allied to science.
The central question of SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial
Intelligence, is the calculation of how many technological
civilizations may exist in our galaxy now. Estimating this factors out
such issues as how likely it is that a star has livable planets, and
how long a civilization lasts, on average. Nobody expects the estimate
to be a hard, concrete result. It is really a way of discussing the
elements which entered into the past, not the future, to yield the
present density of radio-using aliens.
The same techniques can be applied to future possibilities. This
was first done for cryonics by Dale Warren, an engineer, and sharpened
by a UCLA physician, Steve Harris.
I'm going to have to use equations here, but they'll be simple.
So will my method. If every issue I raise is independent of the other
questions, then we can simply multiply all the probability estimates
together at the end to get the total likelihood of cryonics working.
What kind of concerns enter here? I'll break them down into
three categories--the metaphysical, the social, and the technical.
Most sf has dealt with the social aspects, because that generates the
most interesting stories, but the other matters are equally vexing.
First, the metaphysical. To preserve people's minds, we
naturally think of saving their brains. What are the chances that the
brain carries the mind? This is the materialistic world view, and the
chances that it is correct I'll label with a probability M. I'm a
solid materialist, so I'd say that M=.99, i.e., 99% chance that some
vital soul does not leave the body when metabolism stops. There is
evidence for this, actually. People cooled down to a state of clinical
death on operating tables, for brain surgery, revive with their sense
of self intact.
Next, what are the odds that our brain structure tells the whole
story? That is, that your Self is not the product of continuing
electrical activity in the brain. Here, too, the cooled patients seem
to show that though their brain rhythms cease, they persist when
revived.
Further, some people have gotten jolts of heavy current which
completely swamped their delicate internal electrical circuits. This
happens to hundreds of people struck by lightning every year in the
U.S., and occurred in routine shock treatments earlier in this
century. They survived with memory intact, except for short term
recall. Our minds, then, are something like hardwired, though
rewritable programs inscribed in the cells of our brains. So I'll set
this probability that our Essence is in brain cells, not momentary
brain activity, at E=.99.
Finally, there is chance that your Self can make it through the
process of being frozen down to liquid nitrogen temperatures. The
trick is to get to the brain quickly, before it degrades. Several
years ago a boy survived drowning in a cold lake, reviving after an
hour spent clinically dead. Even if cryonically suspended immediately-
-which means being perfused with a glycerol-type solution to minimize
damage while being cooled--there lurk the huge unknowns of what this
perfusion does to your memories. Studies show that the most damage is
done when brains are rewarmed. Neuronal membranes are ripped, pierced.
Even so, experimental animals revive with memories intact. And the
perfusion technology will certainly improve. Let's be optimistic and
put the probability that the Self will persist through this Transition
process, T, at T=0.9.
Then the metaphysical factors, MET=(.99)(.99)(.9), or just about
0.9.
Next, the social issues. First, what are the odds that your
brain (and body, presumably--but the Self is in the brain, remember)
will make it to some far off revival time without some accident
thawing you out. Call this S, the chances for Survival of your brain.
Many issues enter here. Presently, all cryonics patients are
kept indoors, in steel containers, carefully watched. This hasn't
always been so; financial failures doomed several to thawing in the
two decades after Ettinger's pioneering book. But none have been lost
in over a decade, and the first man frozen (named Bedford,
incidentally) is still coasting along at 77 degrees above absolute
zero after 26 years. Given that cryonics is far more sturdy now, let
me set the brain survival odds S=0.9.
Sure, one can say, but what about the odds that society as a
whole will make it through for, say, a century? Call this factor O,
the Odds against civilization itself being rich enough to not make
cryonics impossible. This includes the chances that society will turn
irrational, or break down (war, economic depression), or will take a
fervent dislike to cryonics itself.
The economics of cryonics are modest. Liquid nitrogen is the
third cheapest fluid, after water and crude oil, and is widely useful,
so it will probably be available in even damaged economies. Of course,
even democracies can decide to suppress those arrogant enough to spend
their money on a chancy voyage across time into an unknown future. So
I will set the Odds of social continuity allowing cryonics at O=.8.
Ah, but what if the cryonics organizations themselves don't
last? This is a real worry, because the collapse of Cryonic Interment
Inc. in California during the mid-1970s lost those earlier suspended
patients.
The longest lived institutions in human history have been
religious, with the Catholic church arguably holding the record at
nearly 2000 years. Cryonics has some of the aura of a religion, with
deeply persuaded people sustaining a long-range hope of personal
salvation. Maybe that will help.
Still, greedy corporate directors could someday simply find it
more profitable to keep tapping the assets left behind by the
patients, rather than investing in reviving them. (See Simak's Why
Call Them Back From Heaven? for a plausible argument that this would
indeed occur.)
Or somebody could simply embezzle the funds. The more popular
cryonics becomes, the bigger will be the spoils. Call this probability
of cryonics organization failure C, and my guess is that C=0.5--a
fifty-fifty chance that the whole shebang will go under. After all, we
're talking about a wait that could be a century. How many of today's
corporations are that old? About one percent.
These social factors I estimate at SOC=(0.9)(0.8)(0.5)=0.36, or
a bit better than a third.
I can hear the tech types impatiently asking, can it be done at
all? And there's the rub. From the METaphysical to SOCial factors we
come to the issues which blend the two--is revival technically
possible, given the social and philosophical assumptions?
Cryonics began with no clear idea of how revival could be done.
That gave rise to a standard joke, about how many cryonicists it took
to screw in a light bulb. The answer was none--they just sit in the
dark and wait for the technology to improve.
The rise of nanotechnology at the hands of Eric Drexler over the
last decade has made him the patron saint of cryonics. Drexler
envisions self-replicating machines of molecular size, programmed with
orders to repair freezing damage, bind up torn membranes, and
generally knit together the sundered house of a frozen brain.
There appears to be no fundamental physical reason why such tiny
machines can't be made on the scale of a billionth (nano-) of a meter.
The rewards of developing such handy devices would be immense, a
revolution in human society (which is why the SOC issues intertwine
with the tech ones, as I'll discuss below).
Not only must this marvelous technology appear, but we must
survive its flowering. This is tricky; runaway use of nanotech could
produce virulent diseases or everything-eaters that could wipe us out.
Modern, Promethean technology, like nuclear physics, shares this
daunting property.
I suspect that we will take at least fifty years, and more
plausibly a century, to develop nanotech able to repair freezing
damage. The good thing about being frozen is that you aren't going
anywhere; you can afford to wait.
Given these immense uncertainties, I put the chances that the
Technology will arrive and we will survive it at T=0.5.
But of course, a future society must have the desire to apply
the technology to cryonics. If we do not yield to a kind of temporo-
centric insulation, and cease to be curious about representatives from
a century before, I suspect we will have the cultural Energy to work
out nanotech for cryonics purposes. (After all, much of it will be
useful in curing and repairing ordinary, living people.) So I put this
cultural Energy probability, E, at E=0.9.
Still, will they pay the bill? The first few revived cryonicists
will probably get onto the 22nd century's talk shows. Famous suspended
people, too. (Wouldn't you pay a few bucks to talk to Benjamin
Franklin? He was the first American to speculate on means for
preserving people for later revival. And the philosopher Francis Bacon
died of pneumonia caught experimenting with suspension of animals.)
But if there are ten thousand cryonicists waiting to be thawed...
This is a major, imponderable problem. Humanitarians will argue
that spending money on the living is always morally superior to
spending it on the dead-but-salvageable. Will this argument win the
day? Or, in the fullness of time, will nanotech make revival so cheap
that the cost factor, C, becomes a non-issue? You can argue it either
way--and science fiction writers already have.
Given such uncertainties, I'll guess that the cost probability
factor C=0.5.
Finally, there is the truly unknowable factor, H, which stands
for the contrariness of Humans. Some powerful social force may emerge
which makes cryonics reprehensible. After all, many think it's creepy,
a kind of Stephen King idea.
Maybe people will utterly lose interest in the past. I doubt
this, noting that the world was fascinated with the frozen man found
in the Alps in 1991. Considerable expense is going into careful
examination of this remarkably preserved inhabitant of about 4000
years ago, and his clothing and belongings will tell us much about his
era--but still, he can't speak, as a revived cryonicist could.
Or perhaps some other grand issue will captivate human society,
making cryonics and the whole problem of death irrelevant. Maybe we'll
lose interest in technology itself. Factor in also the Second Coming
of Christ, or arrival of aliens who spirit us all away--the choices
are endless.
But all rather unlikely, I suspect. I'm rather optimistic about
Humanity, so I'll take the odds that we'll still care about suspended
cryonicists to be fairly large, perhaps H=0.9.
This means that the TECH issues multiply out to
(0.5)(0.9)(0.5)(0.9)=0.2.
All this homework done, we can now savor our final result. The
probability that cryonics will work, delivering you to a high-tech
future, blinking in astonishment, is
MET x SOC x TECH = 0.07
A 7 percent chance.
Do I "believe" this number? Of course not. Such calculations are
worth while only if they sharpen our thinking, not as infallible
guides. Some decry numerical estimates as hopelessly deceptive, too
exact in matters which are slippery and qualitative. True, for some,
but the goal here is to use some simple arithmetic means of assessing,
then planning. This does not rule out emotional issues, it merely
places them in perspective.
Still, to wax numerical a bit more, suppose you regard cryonics
purely as an investment. Does it yield a good return?
Well, what's a person worth? Most Americans will work about
fifty years at a salary in the range of around $20,000 to $30,000 per
year--that is the national average today. In other words, they will
make somewhere between one and two million dollars in their lifetime.
One crude way to size up an investment is to take the
probability of success (7% in our estimate here) times the expected
return (a million dollars). Then compare with the amount you must
invest to achieve your aim. This yields $70,000, which is in the range
of what cryonics costs today. (Cryonicists buy a life insurance policy
which pays off their organization upon their death; they don't finance
it all at once.)
The goal of cryonics is not money but time--a future life.
Another way to see if cryonics is a rational gamble is to take a
person's expected life span (75 years) and divide it by the expected
gain in years if they are revived in the future. This would be at
least another 75 years, but if the technology for revival exists,
people may quite possibly live for centuries. Then the ratio of gained
years to present life span is, say, 150 years divided by 75 years, or
a factor of 2. It could be higher, of course.
Then even if the probability of success is 1%, say, the probable
yield from the investment of your time would be 2 x 1% = 2%. It would
make sense to invest 2% of your time in this gamble. Then 2% of your
lifetime earnings (a million dollars) would be at least $20,000, which
you could use to pay your cryonics fees. Or you could choose to invest
2% of your time--half an hour a day--to working for cryonics. Make it
a hobby. You would meet interesting people and might enjoy it. Most
people spend more time than that in the bathroom.
Take another angle. Probability estimates should tell us the
range of outcomes, not just an average number like 7%. To be a
flagrant optimist, I could go back and take all the loosely technical
issues to be must more probable, so that TECH=0.9, say. Then we get
29% probability.
This is just about the upper end of the plausible range, for me.
I could be a gloomy pessimist, with equal justification, and take the
social issues to be SOC=0.05, say. Then my original 7% estimate
becomes less than one percent.
So the realm of plausible probabilities, to me, is between one
percent and about 30%.
Low odds like one percent emerge because we consider many
factors, each of which is fairly probable, but the remorseless act of
multiplying them together yields a final low estimate. This is
entirely natural to us. Studies show that most people of even
temperament, considering chains of events, are invariably optimistic.
We don't atomize issues, but look for obliging conditions. This seems
to be built into us. We humans will always lose cash in crap games;
it's a habit of the species.
I've dwelled on using this simple probability estimate to show
some properties of the method. The deeper question is whether it truly
makes sense to break up any future possibility into a set of mutually
independent possibilities.
This comes powerfully into play in the SOC factors. Once the
TECH issues look good, people will begin to change their minds about
cryonics. The prospect of longer life may well make society more
stable so O gets larger. Cryonics organizations will fare better, so C
improves. The slicing up into factors assumes that the general fate of
humankind is the same for the folk of the freezers, and this may not
be so.
Cryonicists are a hard-nosed, practical lot, in my experience.
They have many technical skills. Society might even crash badly, and
they would keep their patients suspended through extraordinary effort.
They have already done so. Police raided a cryonics company in the
late 1980s (Alcor of Riverside, California--the same town where
Heinlein put his cryonics firm in The Door Into Summer) and demanded
that a recently frozen patient be handed over for autopsy. Someone
spirited away and hid the patient until Alcor could get the police and
district attorney off their back, but not before the police hauled
five staff members off to jail and ransacked the facility.
Perhaps a better way to analyze this is to note that the biggest
uncertainties lie in the intertwined SOC and TECH factors. A techno-
optimist might say that cryonics will probably work on technical
grounds, but social factors lessen the odds, maybe to the fifty-fifty
range.
Of course, numbers don't tell the whole tale. When Ray Bradbury
visited my campus (University of California at Irvine) last year to
speak, a fan asked him how he felt about cryonics. I had introduced
Ray as a forward-thinking, adventurous writer, perhaps the best known
sf author in America, so I was rather surprised by his answer.
Ray said he was interested in any chance of seeing the future,
but when he thought over cryonics, he realized that he would be torn
away from everything he loved. What would the future be worth without
his wife, his children, his friends? No, he wouldn't take the option
at any price.
When he and I were talking later, I pointed out that he had come
into this world without all those associations. And further, I asked,
why did he assume that nobody else would go with him? He looked
surprised for a moment, then answered that he doubted if any of his
friends would want to go. So his argument still stood.
This is an example of the "neighborhood" argument, which says
that mature people are so entwined with their surroundings, people and
habits of mind, that to yank them out is a trauma worse than death.
One is fond of one's own era, certainly. But it seems to me that
ordinary immigrants often face similar challenges and manage to come
through.
Still, if you truly feel this way, no arithmetic argument will
dissuade you. For many, I suspect, the future isn't open to rational
gambles, because it is too deeply embedded in emotional issues.
So it must be with any way of thinking quantitatively about our
future. We cannot see the range of possibilities without imposing our
own values and views, mired in our time, culture, and place.
Often, these are the things which we value most--our
idiosyncratic angles on the world.
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