Why limit yourself to no maintenance at all in your feasibility speculations? Tending graves is common across cultures. As long as you’re spinning a tank of liquid nitrogen as a “grave”, why not spin a nitrogen topoff as equivalent to keeping the grass trimmed or bringing fresh flowers?
Because if the shit hits the fan and cryo companies go bust, who can you rely on to pay $5000 for a tanker to come every few years? I don’t even think I’d rely on my kids to do that, every year without fail, even if there’s a major depression and their own kids are going hungry.
And if the shit really hits the fan (civilizational collapse) then there will be no liquid nitrogen.
I see what you mean. It’s a matter of what threat you have in mind. I’m thinking mainly of the hostility of a pretty-much intact society to cryonics, and how to take your idea of protecting preserved people by using the notion of “respect for the dead” further, also incorporating the idea of honoring the dead by maintaining shrines/graves, etc.
You’re totally right that if there’s a global depression or civilizational collapse, then the threat of thawing comes more from inability to maintain rather than unwillingness or opposition.
Maybe it would help to split the post, or maybe organize this discussion, to investigate these ideas separately? It seems that engineering speculation about zero-maintenance cryonics is interesting and useful, and that using the “grave” analogy to make cryonics more acceptable and safe from interference is also interesting, but different issues and constraints arise for each of them.
Could someone design a stainless-steel prayer wheel that doubles as a hand-cranked device for condensing nitrogen from the atmosphere?
“We maintain this mechanism to honor our ancestors, that one day they may be reborn” sounds like the kind of thing some Shinto priestesses could’ve kept straight for all of recorded history, let alone a few centuries.
If you could persuade people to keep a fire lit in a certain location for most of the time, you could use the heat energy to power a TAD-OPTR cyrocooler with no moving parts. It’s an interesting idea.
You could design it so that the fire only has to be stoked 1% of the time on average, for example.
Why limit yourself to no maintenance at all in your feasibility speculations? Tending graves is common across cultures. As long as you’re spinning a tank of liquid nitrogen as a “grave”, why not spin a nitrogen topoff as equivalent to keeping the grass trimmed or bringing fresh flowers?
Because if the shit hits the fan and cryo companies go bust, who can you rely on to pay $5000 for a tanker to come every few years? I don’t even think I’d rely on my kids to do that, every year without fail, even if there’s a major depression and their own kids are going hungry.
And if the shit really hits the fan (civilizational collapse) then there will be no liquid nitrogen.
I see what you mean. It’s a matter of what threat you have in mind. I’m thinking mainly of the hostility of a pretty-much intact society to cryonics, and how to take your idea of protecting preserved people by using the notion of “respect for the dead” further, also incorporating the idea of honoring the dead by maintaining shrines/graves, etc.
You’re totally right that if there’s a global depression or civilizational collapse, then the threat of thawing comes more from inability to maintain rather than unwillingness or opposition.
Maybe it would help to split the post, or maybe organize this discussion, to investigate these ideas separately? It seems that engineering speculation about zero-maintenance cryonics is interesting and useful, and that using the “grave” analogy to make cryonics more acceptable and safe from interference is also interesting, but different issues and constraints arise for each of them.
Could someone design a stainless-steel prayer wheel that doubles as a hand-cranked device for condensing nitrogen from the atmosphere?
“We maintain this mechanism to honor our ancestors, that one day they may be reborn” sounds like the kind of thing some Shinto priestesses could’ve kept straight for all of recorded history, let alone a few centuries.
Moving parts, it would break.
If you could persuade people to keep a fire lit in a certain location for most of the time, you could use the heat energy to power a TAD-OPTR cyrocooler with no moving parts. It’s an interesting idea.
You could design it so that the fire only has to be stoked 1% of the time on average, for example.