Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

I thought about death the other day and how maybe it's akin to the feeling of going under before a surgery.

When you go under and then wake up some hours later, often you feel like no time has passed at all.

What if death is just that same feeling or lack thereof for Millenia, an infinite amount of time, but at some point from your perspective, you wake up instantly far in the future.

Like a photon travelling for millions of years, you don't perceive time passing at all.

Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact.

To you, it feels like you woke up in an instant. To the universe, it took an infinite amount of time to wake up you again.

When it comes to cryopreservation the thing I find infeasible is the idea a provider would bother with the preservation, under the incentives of capitalism.

If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead can't sue.

This is optimistic, I see "The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?)"[0] and "The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything"[0] resulting of a product 10% already, seemingly matching the questionnaire as well as possible. They say "under ideal conditions" in the survey, so maybe that rules out cracking of brain tissue or ice growth, but that's not the number practitioners want to know about.

[0]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilitie... “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf

Mark Twain put it pithily (and perhaps apocryphally): "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

Apparently there's a name for this: the Lucretian symmetry argument. And I recently learned there are philosophers who argue the asymmetry in our attitudes is actually rational, and that fearing death while not fearing pre-natal nonexistence makes sense [1].

I find comfort in treating the two as being equal, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little hesitant to read their case.

[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9868-2_...

As with most science fiction, TNG did it better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_T...

Would you really want to be that first patient to be revived ?

> Conclusions and Relevance: US physicians assigned a median 25.5% probability to preservation retaining neural information under ideal conditions in a manner potentially compatible with future patient revival. The majority support for pre-mortem anticoagulation and substantial support for pre-cardiac arrest initiation indicate that many physicians would consider accommodating patient requests for preservation-enhancing interventions. These findings may inform development of clinical guidelines, though the speculative nature of the estimates warrants consideration.

"Another Cold Morning"

https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Transmetropolitan/Issue-8?i...