3 replies to this topic

[CorbensLife]

Lets assume for the sake of this debate that the person in question is at its life's end. The person is already in hospital, with very little chance of making it through another week. This person has already signed up to the cryonics institute which are more or less waiting on standby for the person to die.

However - who says a person has to be clinically dead before they are actually frozen down?

If the person is already 100% sure to die within a weeks time, then why not take the "safe" route to cryonics? At some point I think I read an article that stated doctors had successfully operated and revived a person after being clinically dead for 12 hours or so.

So instead of waiting for what everyone knows will ultimately happen with this person, why should that person not choose to be put under a medically induced coma + having his body temperature significantly lowered. After which, the final process kicks in and the cryonics put the person to cryostate all the way?

This way the person never clinically died and the person "just" underwent a radical transformation from being warm to being very cold.

A person like this surely has a better odd of being revived, maybe even in 25-50 years time when we know even more about the brain functions and when they are ultimately destroyed for good or preserved.

[corb]

It's something a lot cryonics adherents have thought about.
Legally, euthanasia is a crime pretty much everywhere.
And without a clear answer whether cryonics actually work or not they won't change the law in a hurry. In fact I'm sure they won't change the law anyway in the US because it's going to create a huge uproar from the conservatives.

[brokenportal]

Anything can change. Its good to bring this discussion out as much as possible to get people thinking about it more and earlier. We dont want to wait until cryonics goes mainstream to roll this topic out more and more. If earlier cryo preservation is viable and could be passed through in some form, then if discussion can help that process along by even a few years, or even a few months, then that could be the difference between saving a lot more lives or not.

From what I can see at this time, my take on it is that an acceptable set of conditions can be found and agreed upon, that can allow a person to undergo cryo much earlier than the present day line of legal death, maybe even a lot earlier. I mean hey, imagine that the libertarian agenda goes through; the US will be a different place because of it, and then I could see cryo being allowed after say, taking a 3 month coaching class on whether or not you really want to do it, or something like that.

[CorbensLife]

If they call that euthanasia (according to my description in the scenario), then its a joke, since a dying man lying and waiting is already by definition deprived from living like everyone else.

But if this is a legal matter, as it apparently is, then all it takes is a doctor that would not mind doing this, and faking the death report, or moving to a country where this would matter less, probably Russia or China, where I doubt they will spend countless of months trying to figure out if it was alright or not to "die" like that.

I just think it makes a huge difference, as the brain wont be deprived from oxygen for a prolonged amount of time, thus killing the neurons and triggering degeneration in the tissue of the brain. I am almost certain that death is going to be extremely difficult to beat since some of those right now in cryo could have been dead for days before frozen down.