Comment by krapp

>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.

Cryonics doesn't work currently on the scale of human brains. It works at much smaller scales, though. There was a natural experiment where roundworms were revived after 46,000 years [1] [2].

Assessing how well cryonics might in the future at different scales is a prediction. So, yes, cryonics is speculative; it is making a bet that future technologies will somehow bring a brain back to life, in some form. Digital: a brain scan followed by whole-brain emulation. Biological: physical repair at the molecular level. If/when some kind of revival works, the question of consciousness remains.

The current edition of Wikipedia's entry on cryonics writes: "It is generally viewed as a pseudoscience" which is attributed to Jens Karlsson saying "Cryonics ... is generally viewed as a fringe pseudoscience." [3]

I don't care for this characterization. When I think of pseudoscience (such as a homeopathy and astrology) makes claims that are unfalsifiable, often by design. On the other hand, cryonics is falsifiable. Scientists are trying to figure out scales where it can work: it has far to go, and it may not get there.

I personally can't speak to the degree of lies, hucksterism, or fraud swirling around cryonics. I won't defend any such practices.

Will future history show cryonics to be impossible, not dependent on the currently-available technology, but as a provable claim based on the laws of the universe? Maybe. Maybe cryonics is a long-shot worth trying. I'm not an expert, but I lean towards the latter: allocating a small fraction of resources towards exploring it seems wise.

[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-revive-...

[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/46-000-year-old-w...

[3]: https://www.chicagotribune.com/2002/09/29/mainstream-science...