h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Criogenics is a subject of the moment.

Since the beggining of human existence death and what lies beyond fascinates us. Once i read one of Neil Gaymans "The Sandman" books that has a very interesting scene. Destruction (one of the endless - read the books, they are quite good) ask Death, his sister (another of the endless), what is the meaning of all this, "life, the universe, everything". Quite a cliché question around h2g2. But what is fascinating is Death's answer: "We all know that. The Meaning. But we deny it in order to have the best possible existence." More or less around those lines.

Human race is fascinating by death. It lives for it. Since the beggining we have buried our people hoping for the miracle of rebirth, or the wishing of a good rest. A lot of cultures made their entire burial tradition around rituals of conservation (the old egipt culture is the best known for that.

Nowdays we have criogenics and an exponential increase of people who wants to become in stasis. Nowdays the wish for rebirth is again bigger than ever. Those who want to fool death are in the wainting line, all want to get away of this era, to one of wonders, where technology is not only capable of taking you out of stasis, but also be part of a new era of dreaming possibilities.

That is all very attractive.... i want to be criogenised if possible. criogenics is also thought for big space travels. Or criminal stasis and many other sci-fi ideas. But the one i am talking - the passport for the future is the most polemic. It wakes up very old questions about life and death and most of all: What should with do with all that infinite time that immortality gives to us? Or being mortal is really the bleesing of a methaphysic creator?

"What should with do with all that infinite time that immortality gives to us?"

I can't quite decide if I'd like eternal life or not. Would immortality turn us into procrastinators? Something I'd like to know is if I'd perceive that a great deal of time had passed from my death to my 'rebirth'. Would it seem like I'd been asleep for ages or would it feel like I'd just nodded off and been immediately woken again? And the most important thing...would I know I'm me or would it be a clone of me assuring everyone that it is 'me'?

Uhm...

How do we know that we are?

The act of counscious and mind is something that science and many other areas of thought have been triyng to ask.

One of the lines "Death of the endless" also likes to say is that: "Everyone has it's time". I believe the time a being aknowledges is related to his thinking capacity.

In terms of waking up and trying to conceive if we are what we were before going to sleep, well, i prefer we can say that every mind as a pattern of it's one, is more unique than our genetic code. We can make clones, the millions you like but everysingle one of it wouldn't be the original, not only because didn't suffered the time before their becoming, but also don't have the social, psicological and physical experiences of the original, everysingle experience marked and processed by the mind and body of the original.

But the question gets even more complicated if we are able to copy the entire mind of an individual....the result of that is something i would like to study.

If it was cryogenics, I would say you wouldn't feel or think anything in between. It would be like waking up after having nodded off for a few minutes. Any chemical processes in your brain would be stopped under those cold conditions.

As for immortality, I also don't know if I want that. Depends on the conditions, for example would I still need to work 8 hours a day for the rest of eternity? I fancy writing a story about vampires, and one of the problems I have is I don't know how a creature capable of living centuries would spend their time. You might end up being very bored.

*pictures a vampire sitting up in a loft playing Sudoku...*

It would be sad being immortal and end up spending most of your life doing crossword puzzles.

well...quite a spin, from cryogenics to vampires...

If you want ideas of what a vampire or group of vampires should spend their time read World of Darkness novels, or go search for myths books, in Baba Yaga or Draculia.

But eternity can be very interesting when you get objectives. Imagine, ebing able to build an empire from scratch. Or why not help humanity in some fantastic science area.

But most of all Cryogenics won't give you any kind of immortality, it's just a stasis method, it's like a time jump machine, after you are waken up you are mortal again. You can only imagine that if you are woken up is because there is a future society who accepts you and/or has the chance to increase your life expectancy.

Then you wake up in a world which none of us at this time have a clue about, the future is impssible to predict until it is the present-we could have polluted the world to an extent that there are no more of us on this planet by the time you wake up-the world may have been saved and we may have evolved into something that would not recognise who you are when you wake up, we could be taken over by aliens, heck our planet could even be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass. But the most scary of all of the probable consequences and maybe the most believable is that we may never wake up from being cryogenised after all. Think about that before you decide you'll do a futurama and the world as we know it behind, I feel the need for proof that people can be awken from that and that they will be woken until I believe that if would even be the slightest bit alright with the idea. The variables of what could happen are endless and I wouldn't put my money on being concious ever again after the process, even if there was no money left to bet with. In answer to the question: You are cryogenized....then you risk the chance of dying whilst frozen, never being woken, getting the state of mind of a tree for when you wake up, waking up in a world that hates and fears you, and any number of bad things or good things. Feeling lucky?

Being put in stasis doesn't allow you to cheat death. Ask Ripley. Oh, then go and ask her again, again.

There's a vain hope that "humankind will have advanced so much by the 25th century, that acne will no longer exist...", and so on, but that's all a bit utopian/Star Trek (whichever generation). Of course we may have eradicated disease, and found wonderful cures to ills that are solved with the mere swipe of the remote control (at least that's what it often looks like on Star Trek). I don't actually watch a lot of Star Trek, but I bet that in the 25th century we won't still be sitting in front of consoles, as I am now, which is all a rather primitive way of getting an idea across, or downloading an amusing picture that compares bottoms in the US to those in Europe. So there's hope yet...

The assumption is that when you wake up everything will have become utopian. No disease, no war, et cetera. However, that is unlikely. Imagine for a second that someone from a couple hundred years ago was frozen and then thawed. Would they be more impressed with the new technology or more frightened? Missiles, nuclear bombs, assualt weapons, and Hummers (what? They're big!).

Talk about culture shock.

Is my dream of encountering an alcoholic, suicidal robot and a one-eyed beauty not so realistic, then?

B

Basically.

I don't think I'd want to leave friends & family behind in order to jump into the future.

Immortality - in the world as we know it, I thibk would become tedious. Some of Ian Banks' SF novels are set in a far future where immortality, or at least immensely long life, is the norm. Humans & other races (intergalactic travel is commonplace) can also change their physical appearance & gender, or go into some sort of stasis for a few hundred years.
Even with those sorts of abilities, I am guessing that we'd still recognise the same sorts of personality cropping up & leisure pursuits would become increasingly bizarre in an attempt to stimulate.

Read the short story "Rammer", by Larry Niven. Or "A World Out of Time", which is the novel which has "Rammer" as its first chapter. Then think again about whether you want to be "cryogenised"...

What happens in that story then?

Just a couple of points on post 13:

(i) Iain Banks' Culture certainly admits interstellar travel, but at no point gives an indication of intergalactic travel. From what I understand about the "science" bit, you need stellar objects to be able to get "grip" with your hyperspace engines. As I understand it, The Culture exists within The Milky Way. This is also supported by the short story, The State Of The Art. Which brings me on to point (ii), The Culture is *now* in The Milky Way, not some far distant future.

RF

Or for a more realistic look at what would happen watch Futurama.