What do you think about cryonics? Would you want your body frozen after death? If a loved one had this request, and left you in charge of handling their passing, would you honor it?

Don't much see the point in freezing dead bodies.

There's really no point in this that I can see. It's only preserving a body. And for what reason? Even if science finds a cure for what killed them...they're still dead. So I wouldn't do it but I would always honor the request of a loved one.

I have to agree with the others, the body can be frozen but the soul cannot, so there's not much point in it and it's supposed to be very expensive.

I can see it if the person wants their body donated to science, and the scientific community wants to preserve it for future study, freezing can be an option. Other than that, the practice is pointless and a waste of time and resources.

The bizarre thing with some people is they want their bodies frozen because science may find a cure at some point. You can't get them to understand that even if a cure is found for their illness there isn't one for their deadness.

No. I'd want to be buried. If a loved one wanted that, I'd honor....provided they had the money set up for me to do so.

Nystyle709 wrote:

No. I'd want to be buried. If a loved one wanted that, I'd honor....provided they had the money set up for me to do so.

CeCe wrote:

There's really no point in this that I can see. It's only preserving a body. And for what reason? Even if science finds a cure for what killed them...they're still dead. So I wouldn't do it but I would always honor the request of a loved one.

(I'd honor the request if they were paying for the useless procedure)

It is the stuff of sci-fi about bringing back a centuries-dead person & I have seen enuf of those conjectures to make me not want to be in a completely alien world, perhaps put in a museum for study.

I'm to be reduced to ashes.

I don't get it....what's the point? Nah, I'll be buried.

I'm leaving my body to science fiction.

I wouldn't want my body cryopreserved if the chance of awakening and being happy was zero. I would be indifferent in that case. However it seems a lot higher than zero to me. The reason for this is that my chance of surviving it is based not just on what technology can do today, but what it will be able to do tomorrow. I'm pretty optimistic on that score.

Some points:

1. A lot of research has gone into reducing the amount of damage done by cryopreservation of tissue, to the point where they were able to thaw a rabbit kidney in 2005 and have it still work (the rabbit it was implanted into survived). No nanotech repairs were needed. The trick is to use a high concentration of chemicals which turns the tissue into a kind of glass instead of forming ice crystals. Exposure time to the chemicals while the tissue is still warm has to be kept short to prevent toxicity.
2. Brain damage due to lack of bloodflow is a grey area -- most of the damage of a stroke or heart attack happens hours later, not in the first 5-10 minutes as was previously thought. This is known as reperfusion injury. Mild hypothermia treatment actually interrupts this self-destructive effect to enough of a degree that people who have had no bloodflow for 15 minutes or more can survive without brain damage.
3. The brains of people subjected to hypothermia appear to start up again despite having a flat brainwave. So the pattern that encodes for memories and personality is probably based in the structure of the brain, not an ongoing electrical signal as many people believe.
4. Science is currently working on analyzing the connectome of the brain to see if they can figure out the basis of memory. Right now they are barely getting started on mice, but after that it is essentially just a matter of scaling it up and figuring out how to print new neurons or simulate them with computers or prosthetic neurons.

Cryonics makes the most sense when considered as an activist position, not a consumer product. If you want cheap and reliable, you probably can't get that in cryonics for a variety of reasons, at least not until a lot of social and infrastructural changes have taken place.