Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD
3 days ago
Lots of discussion of the morality of assisted suicide in this thread, and the circumstances under which it should be legal.
In the cryonics community, it's a common complaint that they have to wait until the patient is legally dead in order to cryopreserve, which can make it difficult to cryopreserve under ideal circumstances.
I like the idea of allowing individuals to opt for cryopreservation over end-of-life care. End-of life care costs so much money, it could even be neutral from a financial perspective.
Since cryopreservation lacks the finality of other forms of death, it could also address some of the ethical dilemmas around assisted dying. After all, a lot of end-of-life care seems to be motivated by a futile attempt to somehow delay the inevitable. From my perspective, cryopreservation seems slightly less futile.
If medical technology continues to advance, maybe in the year 2500 there will be people walking around who were born in the 1900s and can give talks about their experiences. Wouldn't that be cool? It would help a lot if just a single country to made it possible to get cryopreserved before you're legally dead.
You're talking about cryonics as if it were an established, scientifically proven and effective technology, but it doesn't work and is widely considered to be pseudoscience.
And mentioning the cost of end-of-life care is risible when your alternative is paying paying indefinite rent to a company for freezer space to keep a corpse frozen.
>You're talking about cryonics as if it were an established, scientifically proven and effective technology
I don't believe that. I do believe it is a hair less futile than delaying the inevitable and then burying yourself 6 feet underground.
>it doesn't work and is widely considered to be pseudoscience.
The cryonicist claim is something like: "If we save your brain in a way that preserves its information content, it may be possible for future technology to reconstruct that information content, and effectively revive you." No cryonicist is claiming that cryonics "works" with existing technology.
Consider the state of medicine in the year 1925 vs the state of medicine in the year 2025. Now extrapolate that advancement trend forwards until 2525. Is extrapolating trends forward a form of pseudoscience? If so, what do you say about global warming?
>And mentioning the cost of end-of-life care is risible when your alternative is paying paying indefinite rent to a company for freezer space to keep a corpse frozen.
Keeping a closed canister filled with liquid nitrogen is not especially costly.
Alcor charges $80K out of pocket for neuropreservation: https://www.alcor.org/membership/pricing-and-dues/
The Lancet says a typical American accumulates $155K in healthcare costs during the last 3 years of their life: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...
Long-term care costs are rising fast: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/business/retirement-long-...
(BTW, I appreciate that you made a falsifiable claim here, since that helps readers evaluate the credibility of your other claims. A sort of within-comment Gell-Mann effect.)
I wish billionaires believed in it. Would make the world a much better place.