2 innovative life extension approaches using cryonics technology

post by Mati_Roy (MathieuRoy) · 2021-04-02T00:54:04.539Z · LW · GW · 7 comments

Contents

  Perpetual cooldown
  Split brain preservation
None
7 comments

x-post on LessDead

Edit: This was posted on April's fool :) (note: for some timezones, this was posted on April 2nd; oops) While the core ideas are not entirely unfounded, they were presented as stronger than they really are.

• While it's true that we can cool down mammals to near 0 °C without apparent damages, damages would very likely start becoming apparent after multiple surgeries; plus, the risk of surgical complications would presumably become significant (I posted about this on February 14th)
• There's not really a "big dilemma" in the cryonics community about whether healthy people should get cryopreserved now or later.
• While I haven't researched hemispherectomy much, I suspect they are much more dangerous, complicated, and damaging than how I presented it here.

Perpetual cooldown

Acknowledgement: Hunter Glenn came up with the general idea in a discussion with Mati ; written by Mati Roy (edit: Aschwin de Wolf informed me that Robert Prehoda proposed this idea in zir book Suspended Animation in 1969)

We already have the technological capability to cool down mammals to near 0 °C temperature for multiple hours and bring them back without any damages (reference: https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_brain_preservation).

While this was originally developed to improve critical care medicine as well as initial cryonics cooldown, there’s another way in which we could use that technology.

We could spend 6 hours at that temperature each day. Of course, that would mean days would be 6 hours longer as metabolism is stopped at that temperature, and the normal sleep functions are not operating. That means for each 4 subjective days, 5 objective days would pass. Waking hours would cycle like this:

• Day 1: 6:00 to 22:00
• Day 2: 12:00 to 4:00
• Day 3: 18:00 to 10:00
• Day 4: 00:00 to 16:00

This would delay the moment of your death by up to 25% given metabolism is slower at lower temperature, which means you would likely reach a time when anti-aging and cryonics technology has been improved, hence increasing your chance of living radically longer.

The cost includes:

• monetary cost for the surgeries
• how you feel after surgeries
• losing opportunities for work that require a regular schedule
• generally makes it harder to coordinate with people, especially other people into perpetual cooldown
• makes it harder to work 40 hours per week

Split brain preservation

Acknowledgement: Matthew Barnett came up with the general idea ; written by Mati Roy

A big dilemma in the biostasis community is whether one should get cryopreserved now or later. On one hand, getting preserved now has the advantage of stopping any further identity degradation (ex.: memory distortion, value change, etc.). On the other hand, cryonics technology will be more advanced in the future, and so it might be worth waiting for that before getting cryopreserved.

The other big dilemma in the biostasis community is whether one should get their brain plastified or cryopreserved. One one hand, plastification provides a more fidel preservation of the brain ultrastructure. On the other hand, cryopreservation maintains a higher biological viability of the cells.

Well, with hemispherectomy, those problems are no more. Hemispherectomy is a procedure where half of the brain is removed. It has been performed multiple times without any apparent complications (example).

With hemispherectomy, you can now choose to be preserved both now and in the future. We suggest considering the year leading to puberty for your first preservation as puberty is a good candidate for an identity altering event, responsible for a high number of microdeaths. If you’re already passed puberty, then we suggest considering getting half your brain preserved immediately.

Although there’s still the dilemma of deciding whether to preserve half now and half later OR preserve both halves using different technologies. We unfortunately haven’t yet found a way to split the brain in 4.

7 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.