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It’s no Expedia or Overstock.com, but apparently bitcoin can now buy you cryonic suspension, in an interesting turn of events when it comes to merchants accepting bitcoin.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona is accepting the digital currency for this interesting yet controversial procedure that hopes to keep today’s terminally ill alive 100 years down the line. That’s according to this tweet from Bitcoin Hey-Soos Roger Ver this morning.
You’re probably asking: what the heck is cryonics? From the Alcor website:
Cryonics is an effort to save lives by using temperatures so cold that a person beyond help by today’s medicine might be preserved for decades or centuries until a future medical technology can restore that person to full health.
Cryonics sounds like science fiction, but is based on modern science. It’s an experiment in the most literal sense of the word. The question you have to ask yourself is this: would you rather be in the experimental group, or the control group?
What that means is that your corpse is essentially frozen beyond belief and you may or may not wake up in an entirely new era (let’s hope the organization doesn’t shut down the operation, then you’ll really be done for).
You can now pay for your own cryonic suspension with #Bitcoin thanks to Alcor Life Extension Foundation! http://t.co/IiLqarHQOS#immortality
— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) June 12, 2014
Of course, perhaps the people of the world a hundred years in the future will all be using bitcoin. In that case, you’ll be quite a lucky chap. But this whole process sounds terrifying to me, personally.
Before I give myself nightmares, I’m just going to stop right here. If you would like all of the juicy details on cryonic suspension, visit the Alcor Life Extension website here.
Hannah 
itsme 
Shelly 
Omg
they failed to mention that in the future you need your illness to be curable as well as the cryogenic tissue damage somewhat fixed, but hell why not
That’s a subtly off-the-mark description in a couple of ways. A best case scenario is where your brain survives and a new body gets grown around it. Is that a cure? Kind of but not really. The main theoretical obstacle is brain damage.
But we aren’t talking brain damage like it would normally apply, we are talking about information loss… Even getting a person back in the first place implies really powerful regenerative medicine, like we might expect hundreds of years from now. So if you had brain damage in such a world (say a chunk of your noggin got blasted out by a bullet), they could make you smart again no problem, it would be mostly a question of whether you lose memories/personality/skills that you had before — in other words, still being the same person.
“That’s a subtly off-the-mark description in a couple of ways” why? Isn’t brain a tissue? Water expand at low temperatures, damaging tissues. Then what about that ‘rebuilding the body around the brain is a cure’? Was your a reply? Kind of but not really.
Even with today’s medicine, it is generally a mark of ignorance to talk about curing things. Cancer is never talked about as cured, it goes into remission. Cells repair themselves or get replaced by stem cells. Tissue can be ‘engineered’ or ‘regenerated’. Their prognosis can be improved. But we are light-years away from fixing a body as easily as we can fix a car, i.e. by reducing it to an exact science. That is the kind of tech that is needed to revive a cryonaut, and they can be kept in liquid nitrogen storage until that kind of technology is available.
As to water expanding, this is the first time you mentioned it and it is also a mark of ignorance. Vitrification avoids ice formation at very low temperatures. Vitrification has problems due to toxicity. So if you virified a rabbit brain, it would likely not have an EEG when you thaw it, due to too many cells losing their functionality. However, the loss of functionality of the cells not as likely to be insurmountable for exact-science repair strategies of the far future, because it is not a disorganizing mechanical effect in the way that ice formation is. So vitrification is an important advance. The next step of course is to try and reduce its toxicity further so that the cells will still be alive upon rewarming, brains will still exhibit EEG, and so forth. This has already been done in small slices, but a whole organ is a bigger challenge.
You can learn more by spending a few hours on Alcor’s website, and it could be counterproductive to get into a big debate over it so I will stop there. Here are some recommended wikipedia links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death
Another good site: http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/
i can’t see what’s wrong with my first post, but whatever
http://www.Cryonics.org has a lot of information on this interesting subject. I learned a lot there that surprised me indeed.
There is also a provider in Oregon that just got a state license to accept donor organs: http://www.oregoncryo.com/
This business is essentially considered a form of organ (brain) banking. The rest of the body is pointless to store because it can be regenerated from the DNA, but the brain contains memories and personality, the essence of the person.