Cryonics: Super High Tech Pseudoscience

[Waffles731]

You may be a king, or a simple street sweeper
But sooner or later you dance with the Reaper.-The Grim Reaper in Bill and Teds Bogus adventure (I like the quote, sue me)

For all of human history people have been trying to find ways to avoid that one unavoidable fate: Death. The hunt for the fountain of youth (actually, Ponce De Leon came to Florida for gold but that's beside the point), alchemy, Eastern and western mysticism and now it comes in comes in the form of cryonics.

The idea that you can freeze yourself shortly after death so that they may revive you in the future. On first glance it looks like a sound scientific theory.

Delve deeper and look at the facts. It's not; it's just a twenty-first century fountain of youth. The current idea that some people cling to in the hopes they will never shuffle off this mortal coil.

As a piece of foresight when someone brings in religion I'm just going to say this.

I've heard people call religion that but at least religion acknowledges that we do all die, that one day, your heart will stop beating, your lungs will stop breathing and you get a toe tag.

This isn't about religion, Do I believe in an afterlife, yeah I do but I have my own reasons (I've had paranormal encounters before.) and I know a fair amount of science and I know enough to point out that Cryonics is pseudoscience.

Cryonics is the idea that if you freeze your brain in liquid nitrogen it will stop cell degradation to the point where they can revive you from death in the future.

Now lets get this out of the way, Yes, Cold enough temperatures do actually slow cell degradation do a halt. That part is not in question. However the problems with the idea of cryonics lies deeper.

So you die, and your brain is harvested from your corpse and given the whole cryonics shebang. Well one thing is that now, while your cell degradation is stopped visibly. The water in your brain cells is now also frozen. Unfreeze that brain and your brain cells are now completely and utterly destroyed.

Another point is that your brain is already not functioning. Let me point this out. YOU. ARE. DEAD. Your brain is dead tissue. You know that after a few minutes of no oxygen flowing to the brain, you get severe brain damage. The thing is by the time the cryogenic freezing takes place you'd be brain dead.

AND THOSE ARE ONLY THE PROBLEM WE ACTUALLY KNOW ABOUT.

We know nearly nothing about the brain. We don't know why we are conscious, we don't know why we dream, we don't know why we sleep etc.

The likelihood that we are just butchering the brains of our deceased loved ones with extreme cold is a near certainty.

We do this out of fear of the unknown. We don't know what happens after death. It's the ultimate fear of the unknown.

What we shouldn't do is pay 80 grand to basically mutilate your own brain after you die.

There are ways that we seek comfort, some are comforted by spirituality, some are comforted by the natural process in which our bodies will be decomposed by the lowest part of the food web so our our bodies will return to nature. (Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust eh) and some like me are comforted by both of those but we all have to realize that we all die someday, one thing that we have to do in life is just make our peace with it.

#Imfeelingmorbidtoday

#Fuckpseudoscience

[SlightlyCrazy]

Well yea the whole issue of a lack of oxygen will cuase cell death. Why preserve dead cells

[Valkyrie1]

Dang! Now I feel bad for Walt Disney he will never be able to rule over his kiddie empire.

[Waffles731]

Thats a myth, he wasn't frozen

[bcromartie]

It was a good myth though. <3

[Valkyrie1]

@bcromartie Exactly. Stop bursting my bubbles waffles.

[JudgmentDay]

Yes, unfortunately. No matter what we do or hope for we're still going to die.

We've seen cryonics and cryo suspension in multiple science fiction movies, namely the Alien movies and Prometheus and even seen in Futurama, but unfortunately in the real world we live in, it just doesn't work the way we wished that it did or want it to work like how it was supposed to work in science fiction.

Just like how I always wished and hoped that Nanomachines would eventually lead to being able to make us virtually (near-) invulnerable to physical trauma, aging, disease, chemicals and poisons, and enhance and upgrade us to become super intelligent, super agile, etc., super beings.

Like how they were portrayed in various science fiction media. That and the ability to download and backup our entire consciousness and memory like imaging an entire hard disk drive of a computer and uploading it all into billions upon billions of neural networks of quantum computers.

That way we are no longer restricted to puny mortal physical bodies made of blood, flesh, bones, which I find to be very bothersome and burdensome, although I've learned to just accept it as reality. But that's me, I've always deeply felt that by being a mortal being in this physical form that I have is just really a prison made of flesh, blood and bones that will always require constant maintenance, and I really don't like it at all.

But unfortunately, it's only wishful thinking and hoping, but practically and realistically it would be unlikely to occur at least not without some outside force to help us.

I even hoped for and wished for that if any extraterrestrials out there that exists and have developed such technology would eventually come here and help us and save us by making it possible for us to do the same, serving as a catalyst in enormous developments and advancements of such possibilities. Again only more wishful thinking and hoping, but same situation.

[ad48hp]

You think big cryogenic companies are so stupid to be proven by some random 22y old "Hey, it doesn't work. It's all bullshit" ?
How do you know so much about brain cells?
Do you even know how it does work with them on -140C?
And what about temperatures like 0,5C above absolute zero (that is currently used by Quantum Computers), that wouldn't work too?
That would be weird to work with some quantum machine but not human brain. (Altough i heard there are some quantum vibrations in brain several weeks ago..).
Nothing actually happens after death. There are no myths, it's just our consciousness made those ideas to make it more clear.

[FUFGGt]

What a retarded fucking article.

First of all, you can’t proclaim it to be “pseudoscience” when you clearly don’t even know what these terms mean. Cryonics isn’t a “scientific theory”, nor does it claim to be one. A scientific theory is a model proposed to explain a phenomenon. Cryonics doesn’t propose to “explain” anything, that doesn’t even make any fucking sense, it’s a wager that MAYBE the damage will be reversible with future technology, and there is literally nothing we know of in the laws of physics that doesn’t permit that to be the case.

[Adigelunar]

nice to read