Cryogenics

[astrologica]

In the light of the court decision to allow a 14 year old girl to have her body frozen after her death, how would you all feel about doing the same thing?

[fallen-archie]

I would not want to preserve my old torso but if you are young and want to be frozen I can understand it especially when someone has a terminal condition. Trouble is I'm not sure that science will allow us to be suspended in a frozen state in a manner which is recoverable,

[023mjc]

Not me.  But then I'm not only 14.  

To wake up maybe a hundred years from now, with all your family and friends long dead,completely alone in the world apart from scientists who would treat you as an experiment, no home, technology that would scare the pants off you, a whole way of life that you didn't understand and probably wouldn't like. Food you don't recognise and clothes that would appear hideous.  The cost of living would be shocking, and you may not even recognise your own language.  What a lonely existance it would be. 

[cee-dee]

I don't think it'll work.

It's OK saying "You don't know WHAT they'll be able to do in 100 or 200 years time" but although some things may well be "freezable", other bits won't.

At the moment, they're able to freeze an embryo and bring it back to life but a complete body is something else.

[aand2136-voqfz8yx]

I wouldn't want to; the world will have moved on so much in the next 100 years or so. I'd be totally lost if they unfroze me and said "welcome back to the world, it's 2116". Also there'd be no close relatives to support you.

If I was 14, the situation would probably be different as youngsters usually adapt to changing situations and a changing world much better than I could. The girl does stress that's she's too young to die and she is. She probably hasn't done half the things she should have done if she's spent her childhood being unwell and of course will never get to do the things teenagers and twenty-somethings do.

Of course the generalisations above take no account of the individuals personality. Some older people are far more adaptable than they were at age 20.

[littleme61_6]

I wouldn't like to do this. When my time comes then that is it for me. Each to their own thoughts of course, but to be around in how ever many years with no other family members with me, and sure a completely different world to what I would have been used to. That to me would be hard, and not something I feel I could cope with. 

How the world has changed so much already in my time. I often think even if my Great Grandparents could come back again, they would never be happy I reckon with all that has changed in 45 years since they passed away.

[jd.linklater]

I cannot for the life of me see the point in prolonging life by unnatural means in a world that is so overpopulated.

[evoman3957]

I don't know all the ins and outs of it ( the scientific stuff ) but if you had an illness that was terminal and you got frozen BEFORE it killed you, I could possibly envisage that working.........but waiting until AFTER you died.....MMMMmm.  They wouldn't just need to thaw you out to a degree where everything worked perfectly, but they'd be raising the dead as well........a step too far perhaps ?  We won't even bother going into what potential living hell on earth could be confronting you, in perhaps 200 years time, when you were brought back.

[jd.linklater]

I just read the girl's mother's family paid £37000 for this cryogenic procedure. Putting ethics aside, that's not a bad deal. If they bring her back after 200 years that works out at about 50p a day, you'd struggle to get life cover for that these days.

   

[evoman3957]

In 200 years time, can't you just see the company pulling a fast one and asking for another £37,000 to bring her back; probably mentioning something about the small print in the contract. I hope she gave somebody her pin number, cos the bank of mummy and daddy and everybody else for that matter; will be long gone.

[cee-dee]

Before even thinking about it, best read this first?:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/23695785

[astrologica]

My thoughts exactly JD. There are too many people on this earth now. To me, it's the stuff nightmares are made of. I'm wondering...if you were frozen, and then brought back to life, would you be the same person when you wake up? Would you have memories of your old life? You would be in a strange country, and you might have unforeseen medical problems, even though you are alive again. And how long would one expect to live after being brought back to life?  A nightmare.🙁.

[jd.linklater]

Just over 200 years ago, 1804 to be precise, world population reached I billion people. Today we have 7 billion and if birth and death rates remain constant, latest estimates are that the population by 2100 will be around 11 billion rising to 16 billion by 2200. 

These are not wild over estimates, if anything they are a little conservative. Life expectancy in the developed world is expected to be around the 100 years mark by 2100 and birth rates in Africa and other still developing parts of the world are showing no signs of slowing down. Thomas Malthus predicted that this was unsustainable before we even reached the 1 billion mark and even though food production levels have managed to keep ahead of population growth, that doesn't mean his theory was wrong. The situation is getting worse exponentially. As the population continues to grow, more land is needed constantly to house people and less land is available for food production. This cannot continue ad infinitum.

If I was cryogenically frozen, I don't think this is the kind of future I'd want to return to in 200 years time. I doubt very much if there would even be a future to come back to.

[al**bear]

Some People can't cope 'Modern Life' after being in Jail for 30 years, and they had access to some TV, books and Newspapers to keep an eye on some of the progress

One American ex-Con couldn't walk the streets, because of all the people talking to themselves (Bluetooth phones), 30 years of staying well clear of the mentally Ill in jail, was hardwired into His safety regime

A Thought -

Maybe in 200 years there will be extremely strict Health laws, will all those Frozen people be viewed as Health hazards with all their 'Old Germs and viruses' , full of diseases already wiped out

[margaret*e]

If it ever was possible, if you had died of something incurable, wouldn't you still have it if you were revived?.

Would it mean dying soon of the same thing.

[aand2136-voqfz8yx]

Can you imagine how many cooking programmes will be on TV in 100 years time?

[cee-dee]

If it ever becomes possible to revive a frozen dead body...... the one's being frozen now will be useless because it'll be found that they've not been preserved in such a way as to comply with the way they'd be "doing it" in the future.

Although they're doing amazing medical things now (A head transplant is going to be done next year), reviving frozen dead people won't happen. If people have died, they've "died of something". They're dead.

If it ever becomes possible to freeze and preserve a body, the body would have to be alive and well when it was prepared for freezing.

At the moment, transplants of healthy organs have to be done from people at the moment of death (some, like kidneys can be taken from a still living person) but if reviving a frozen organ was possible, there'd be a "stock" of organs in storage.

It's OK saying that science fiction has become a reality with many things but I think suspended animation and reviving frozen, dead people will turn out to be a no-no.

[margaret*e]

I don't think it would ever be possible, but for the sake of the discussion say it was.

Who would be reviving them, how would they be trained for such a thing.

How far in the future are we talking.

How will they know where today's frozen bodies are.

[cee-dee]

It's not just the reviving, it's the original preservation that's most important as a first step.

As I said earlier, if people are dead, they're dead, gone. That's not the same as suspending animation. That would mean making a decision to suspend your life at that time.

If you die, something killed you, whether that was a major failure, disease or just "old age", you're dead. You'd have to reverse that to be able to begin revitalising someone presuming they'd been "preserved" the "right" way.

[margaret*e]

All the people involved with it now will be dead, I wonder if in the future they'll think it was a strange idea from a backward race.

The original question was how  would we feel about it.

I don't like the idea at all.