As to having someone around who wants to restore you decades hence, well, best not to leave that to chance. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible to leave to chance because of the quirk of the preservation process we’re using, namely that it requires a lot of vigilance and effort in addition to the countless and continuous input of joules of energy in the form of LN2. If it were possible to simply shut a patient away in some presumably safe and remote place, then this would be less of a concern. But, as it is, the job of keeping things going is on each of us, and on each of those who will come after us. It a dynamic process from start to finish – or it fails.

And tank time is risk time. That’s something I think is largely lost on most cryonicists. They see just GETTING cryopreserved as the equivalent of having made it to heaven. Arguably, that’s the easy part, and the hard part may be staying cryopreserved long enough. Recently, a longtime cryonicist named Brook Norton, has created a “cryonics calculator” http://www.cryonicscalculator.com which allows you to input the chances of various things going wrong over a given period of time, and then calculates your chances of surviving. At first glance, it seems just a toy, another Internet distraction to waste time, or to amuse. It features some unlikely risks, such as fire, because most industrial buildings are sprinklered – and that is an incredibly effective defense against fire. But, regardless of what risks are on the spreadsheet as it is, you can always plug your own risk set in. The (to me)unexpectedly valuable thing about this tool is that it demonstrates rigorously what I’ve long suffered great angst over intuitively, and that is that your time under refrigeration must either be brief – less than a century or so – or your risks had better be very, very, very small. Otherwise, you don’t make it. Cumulative risk is every bit as powerful as cumulative interest… So, this a useful tool to help people decide just how important it is to them to improve the quality of human cryopreservation techniques. — Mike Darwin

Thanks for that very thorough reply. My reservations about reading your website are basically cleared up now. I agree far more than I disagree with your viewpoint, to the extent that I really understand it.

Where do you get the time to write so profusely? I am a student at UTD and work part time.

Anyway, I am primarily interested in the biophysics of personality, consciousness and qualia (at an amateur level – and who isn’t at this stage?!). Anyway, I really want to continue reading your website and look into the science of subjective experience and its restoration with increasing precision.

I believe the other part of the equation — having someone around that wants to restore you — is the most uncertain part, so I don’t have a clue why Hanson believes it’s 5%! He is a fan of bayes…

There is still a huge gap in our knowledge. And sadly, what matters far more right now (for me) is money, not knowledge. But I will bookmark your site and continue to read. Thanks!

I believe that another material factor in this attitude, and the positive behavior it generated, was that it was apparent that both my colleagues and I genuinely believed not only in what we were doing vis a vis cryonics, but that we also believed that it was a good and moral thing to do.

To answer your question more directly and succinctly: an enemy is someone who has made it their task not merely to disagree, but to systematically, and employing the tactics of warfare, attack cryonics and its practitioners. What are the tactics of warfare? They are the systematic use of force and/or fraud against your opponent. Just because someone thinks cryonics is a bad idea, says so, and mocks or criticizes it publicly, doesn’t make them an enemy. Rather, they are just one of probably billions of people who disagree with our position – or who even think cryonics is bad or evil, and should be stopped. While I was raised a Roman Catholic, and the Jesuits had their time with (and influence) on me, I do not believe that ‘impure thoughts’ :-) are sins equivalent to deeds. Nor do I believe that a man who has murder in heart and on his mind, day and night for 20 years, is a murderer. You can hate cryonics, you can speak out reasonably against its practice, and that does not make you an enemy.

When you cross the line into actions employing tactics like theft, slander, libel, false police reports, gross ethical violations of medical confidentiality and personal privacy – THEN you’ve become an enemy. Those are the tactics of both disturbed individuals, and of warfare. In war, anything goes, unless the parties involved set and keep to agreed limits. The various proxy wars between the US and the USSR during the Cold War are the best examples that to come mind of this; both had thermonuclear weapons, and yet both carefully prosecuted wars with each other with the tacit understanding that they were not going to use them.

Do I believe that war is ever justified? Yes, of course I do. It would be impossible to propose to survive for more than a very brief period of time (hours, days, weeks?) without being willing to prosecute a war. And people who believe otherwise are merely shifting the burden of fighting and dying onto others, who, willingly or otherwise, do it for them. Any clear-eyed look at the natural world will confirm that reality: plants are especially vicious if you watch them on time lapse photography, or can sense their biochemical attacks on each other.

Having said that, I prefer to avoid it at almost all costs – but not at all costs. I think it likely that this current (and unprecedented) round of truly vicious attacks on cryonics, and on cryonics patients, is in part due to a lack of understanding of just how important cryonics is to us. In part, that’s our fault, but it still does not excuse the attacks.

I have no idea of what the chances are of cryonics ‘working’ largely because there are different, interacting elements that will determine its probability of success. From a purely biophysical standpoint, there are the issues of whether sufficient information remains in the cryopreserved corpus to allows for recovery of the individual, and whether it is physically possible to access, manipulate, and then configure that data into a functioning person? If those things are answered in the affirmative, there are then myriad other issues, such as whether it is socially, politically or practically possible to recover the cryopreserved person. If it is economically impossible, it is illegal, or if technological civilization is interrupted, or ends – well, these are a different set of considerations.

About the biophysical, we can do nothing – at least not for those already cryopreserved- what will be will be – that’s the uncontrollable part of the equation. However, for people not yet cryopreserved, we have both the opportunity and the obligation to improve the odds until the biophysical part of the probability ‘calculation’ is no longer in play, but has become a certainty. As to the social, political and legal factors affecting the probability of the outcome, well, there the system is considerably more elastic, in theory. I once believed that it might be possible to carry out our business without perturbing the ‘macro-system’ we are embedded in. I tried that approach for 40 years. It won’t work.

One (of many) reason it won’t work is interesting, and it has to do with an emergent property of technological advance that I have, for many years, referred to as the “species survival veto number.” That’s the number of individual humans it takes to make a decision that will end technological civilization – or even the species. Until the advent of thermonuclear weapons, that number was very, very large – so large that the issue did not merit either consideration, or discussion. Even in a place as small as Jonestown, some people weren’t going to drink the Koolaid, period. The advent of thermonuclear weapons dropped the veto number to a disturbingly low number – perhaps a few hundred individuals. Very shortly it will get smaller still, perhaps dropping to 1 at some point.

It’s apparent on the face of it, that neither children, criminals or psychopaths can be allowed to wield volatile lethal force. In the case of children, we separate them from such resources and we supervise them. We do the same with criminals (who are in fact, mostly psychopaths) and we go further by incarcerating them. Children grow to maturity, and can be educated and mentored, and psychopaths can presumably be treated or cured, with more sophisticated technology than we currently have at our disposal. But in the meantime, we don’t let them play with guns, or have control of nuclear weapons.

The history of revolutions – both ideological/political, as well as the history of technological advance, speaks powerfully to the criticality of leverage. As my friend and mentor Curtis Henderson often used to say, “The Russian revolution consisted of two men, a dog and a printing press.” An exaggeration, but not far off the mark. Today, I would point to Tunisia and Egypt, and then say this: Wikileaks and Social Networking technology (including the mobile phone). When I was in Cairo in 2000 and 2001, I used to walk through Tahrir Square almost every day, and I knew the people and the place very well. I would have laughed at you if you had told me that what has just happened there, so far, was possible (regardless of how it turns out – and personally, I think the odds favor a bad long term outcome due to global economic problems). That’s leverage! On the dark side, consider the attacks of 9-11. I should be surprised if the dollar amount of the cost exceeded $1 million – for the attackers, that is. But my bet would be that the cost to the US and the West has been in the range of a trillion dollars – and that’s without scoring a single definitive victory in retaliation. Now, that’s really leverage! And that leaves out the socio-political havoc and long term damaging consequences of the enormous extra burden of regulation (not to mention lost time and inconvenience) that resulted. Plus, and this not trivial, there is almost nothing more satisfying than making your enemy behave like an idiot. All I will say on that subject, is that you would have to spend some serious time in the Arab world to appreciate the delicious irony of forcing all those Western men to have to take their shoes off and be groped by security screeners – some of whom are women!

I should have seen this coming years ago, when I returned from India, and remarked with wonder that even most of the lepers had mobile phones! They may be untouchable, but they cans still be useful – providing they have a phone!

Thus, my ambitions are humble, namely to leverage the values we hold sacrosanct into a controlling position over this civilization. You may begin laughing now, but while you do, consider Lenin, and consider Cairo.

And, its not like we have any choice. – Mike Darwin

Leaf, JD, Darwin, M, Hixon, H. A mannitol-based perfusate for reversible 5-hour asanguineous ultraprofound hypothermia in canines: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/tbwcanine.html

Darwin, M. Report on the use of the Cordis-Dow hollow fiber dialyzer as a membrane oxygenator in profound hypothermia. Cryonics. 4(9);3-5:1983: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8309.txt

Leaf, JD, Federowicz, M, Hixon, H. Hemodialyzers as experimental hollow fiber oxygenators for biological research: a preliminary report. Cryonics. 5(5);10-19:1984: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8405.txt

Darwin, M, Hixon, H. Evaluation of heat exchange media for use in human cryonic suspensions. Cryonics. 5(7);17-36:1984 http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8407.txt

Darwin, M. Post mortem results: some perspectives. Cryonics. 5(9);1-4:1984: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8409.txt

Darwin, MG. Cryopreservation case report: Arlene Francis Fried, A-1049: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/fried.html

Federowicz, M, et al. Treatment or prevention of anoxic or ischemic brain injury with melatonin-containing compositions. United States Patent 5,700,828 filed December 7, 1995, issued December 23, 1997: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=18&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&p=1&p=1&S1=5,700,828&OS=5,700,828&RS=5,700,828

Federowicz , et al. Mixed-mode liquid ventilation gas and heat exchange. United States Patent 6,694,977 filed : April 5, 2000, issued February 24, 2004: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=5&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=6,694,977&OS=6,694,977&RS=6,694,977

Harris, SB, et al. Rapid (0.5°C/min) minimally invasive induction of hypothermia using cold perfluorochemical lung lavage in dogs. Resuscitation. 50; 189–204:2001: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11719148

More like $40 since 2TB goes for $80: http://forre.st/storage#sata

Is any enemy to you anyone who disagrees with the value of saving lives through cryonics and wants to stop you (and as a result, commit the equivalent of involuntary manslaughter?)

I like reading your blog in part because I am curious about Robin Hansons statement that cryonics has at least a5% chance of working. Hanson is really really bright so I am following up on his belief that cryonics has validity and I don’t want this need for clarification to cause any kind of suspicion or disregard for facts.

I signed a form as a witness to enroll an acquaintance’s child into cryonics. It was a few years ago and I am not familiar with the legal aspects of this. But my whole point is that statements language begs for clarification. I am sure you will get around to it in other blog posts because you are quite passionate about this subject.