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

Well, besides the overpopulation it doesn´t seem to me to cause any ethical problems. And would you tell a guy he had to die, because the world was overpopulated if he was frozen down? You wouldn´t tell a guy with TB that.

But the money could be spent much better. The company that freezes you down is probably going to go bankrupt after a while, and you´ll die.

Well, obviously you wouldn't tell him - he'd be frozen!

If all the people who had ever died up till now had been cyrogenically frozen, and we suddenly had a cure for all their conditions, the earth's population would double overnight, with many of its members unable to do any sort of useful job or having any useful skills. Instant economic collapse... and probably environmental collapse and social collapse as well. You'd have slash-and-burn farmers running through Hyde Park - make the anti-capitalists look civilised...

Of course, it's not on that scale. But the big issue is that thawing somebody out is something we can't do without causing irreversible damage. When we do figure out a way to do it, it may well be very expensive. Plus there's regrowing a body if they chose the head option, curing whatever disease it was that made the frozen person chose cyrogenic freezing, restarting the heart, and yada yada yada. Who's going to pay for this? And why shouldn't the money be spent on someone who's actually alive and dying, and won't need to be completely re-educated.

But basically, I reckon we can't answer these questions - cos we're not in the future that people will be revived into. Maybe globalisation will cause huge outbreaks of disease and they'll need the bodies and the gene diversity. Maybe they'll all super-evolve into something else, and no longer be born or die. Maybe they'll be hard-left, and figure that people from the past shouldn't get an a second life just cos they were rich. Maybe they'll be hard-right, and figure that they shouldn't help their fellow frozen man. Maybe they'll have compulsorary euthanasia (otherwise known to 2000 ethics as murder). Maybe they'll have some completely different political system that hasn't been invented. The truth is - we don't have a clue!

It's true, Lucinda, we don't have a clue about the future; so lets speculate.

You have to be dead to be frozen, thats the law (Freezing a living person kills them, that's called murder and is, at this time, still illegal). People who are dead may not own property, not even their own bodies. All of the stuff they own belongs to some-one else once they are dead. Also, the dead have no legal rights, not one. Maybe, when (if), you are revived you will still be legally dead. After all, you've been declared dead, there is a death certificate with your name on it, unless they introduce a 'back-from-the-dead certificate' you'd still be dead.

So what are these hypothetical future people going to do with you? Well, pretty much anything they like, you've got no rights 'cos you're dead. Maybe they need your organs for transplant surgery, or want to use you for medical experiments ("Hey, you can't torture animals for medical research, use those frozen dead guys instead, they had too much money anyway." And your results would be more accurate, rats don't respond the same way as humans).

In some stories by SF author Larry Niven these defrosted people were known as 'corpsicles'. The future society thawed them out and cured their illnesses so that they could become the pilots of deep space explorer ships, a job nobody else wanted because at slower-than-light velocities all their friends would be dead when they got back. If any corpsicle refused the job the response would be 'No problem, we'll just freeze you back up and offer the job to another corpsicle.' Being legally dead the state could do what it liked with you.

This is looking on the dark side, but it is a viable possibilty.

Ethically, I think all dead bodies should be fed back into the ecosystem. All the biomass of the dead should return to where it came, the Earth. I don't mean sending your loved ones to fertiliser factories, burial in cardboard coffins or linen shrouds would do. My feeling is that crogenic preservation and zinc-lined coffins both just impoverish the Planet.

(Hypocritically, I'd like to be plastinated).

I was just talking about the ethics. Of course the whole project is pretty bizarre in the first place.

But about the rights, today dead people doesn´t have any rights. But if cryogenics become ordinary they probably will. Besides, we have laws already for what you can do with dead people. Some indians want the Kennewick Man reburied, and he´s been dead for thousands of years.

Lets take a situation that already happens today.
In rare cases someone is pronounced dead and a death certificate is issued. And then, some time later, they come out of a coma or whatever. It has been known to happen. These people *do* have rights. They're death certificate becomes void.

Of course, what you could do is to load them onto interstellar craft without their consent, given that they have no rights either way...

I think that the current purpose of freezing rich people post-death is a bit dumb, given that this whole thing will probably be looked on as a turn-of-the-century fad in the not so distant future, and the storage facilities will probably go bankrupt due to continuing energy crises...

However freezing live people for space travel might have some merit. Not now of course, waaay too many ethical issues, but it seems to me we run out of options very quickly if we ever want to leave the solar system.

CR

We don´t have to freeze people. We just need very fast ships.

Or just upload them into machines, and dispose with their messy physical bodies altogether. Maybe if nanotech or cloning come of age (hmm, more ethical minefields) we can upload people, send them out into the solar system, and have their bodies re-grown (stronger, and better-adapted to their host environment) at the end of the journey.

I just read an article that says it is actually techie people that are frozen most.