I don’t think we should go into details on this. It’s creepy enough that lifesaving stasis now involves having your head cut off. I don’t think it will reassure people to learn that the ideal it to then drop it into a giant jar of heads. i know it would be a giant frost metal ball, but in my mind’s eye it’s transparent and the heads are shrunken.
It seems like the focus of this post is not to do public outreach directly. The comparative advantage we have here at LW (in the particular domain of promoting cryonics) probably lies further upstream than that: coming up with ideas behind business strategy rather than hashing out marketing campaigns to make cryonics seem less “creepy” and more acceptable to the general public.
I’d expect the liquid nitrogen to provide an interesting set of challenges in the design of warehousing equipment. I suppose there would at least have to be shelves to prevent crushing.
But I was thinking this setup would be a lot easier to work with on the assumption that there would one day be a general immortality solution, and you could take heads out top to bottom. It just seems easier to design the whole thing if you never try to get someone out of the middle, and never have to immerse complex machinery in the nitrogen. Maybe this method would still be popular as a budget solution, while wealthier patients retain the option to be revived as soon as it is possible for them.
Point taken. Complex machinery on the inside seems like it would be a pain to maintain. A hoist that lowers patients from the top could be simplest. Computer controlled for precision and safety (perhaps still human operated).
Rather than shelves, I suspect steel boxes of a cubic meter or more would be used to contain the patients. Stacking the heads in a heap sounds like a recipe for crushed skulls and mixed-up brain matter. (Though who knows what nanotech can solve, eh?) In the cold-air version of the system (above LN2 temperature), these would act as heat sink and thermal conductor while providing strength. Fans would probably also be used to circulate the air to prevent stratification.
Stacking directly in LN2 might prove interesting. A reason to use cold-air temperatures over LN2 might be to make the stacking mechanism easier to design. Remember, the process of stacking patients is only going to take a few years, and it can be filled with cryogen later.
Cooling to LN2 temps over that last few degrees could be done at a rate that takes months (or even years), which I assume would induce fewer cracks. Then it would be filled with LN2. If we use the steel boxes, the inside of the boxes might need to be filled as well in which case they would need to have openings. (Perhaps they should be cages rather than solid boxes.) This is just to maximize cryogen volume; you could always keep it cool by just cooling the outside.
I don’t think we should go into details on this. It’s creepy enough that lifesaving stasis now involves having your head cut off. I don’t think it will reassure people to learn that the ideal it to then drop it into a giant jar of heads. i know it would be a giant frost metal ball, but in my mind’s eye it’s transparent and the heads are shrunken.
It seems like the focus of this post is not to do public outreach directly. The comparative advantage we have here at LW (in the particular domain of promoting cryonics) probably lies further upstream than that: coming up with ideas behind business strategy rather than hashing out marketing campaigns to make cryonics seem less “creepy” and more acceptable to the general public.
What I had in my mind’s eye was more like this. Jar is probably not the best metaphor. More like a long-term warehouse.
I’d expect the liquid nitrogen to provide an interesting set of challenges in the design of warehousing equipment. I suppose there would at least have to be shelves to prevent crushing.
But I was thinking this setup would be a lot easier to work with on the assumption that there would one day be a general immortality solution, and you could take heads out top to bottom. It just seems easier to design the whole thing if you never try to get someone out of the middle, and never have to immerse complex machinery in the nitrogen. Maybe this method would still be popular as a budget solution, while wealthier patients retain the option to be revived as soon as it is possible for them.
Point taken. Complex machinery on the inside seems like it would be a pain to maintain. A hoist that lowers patients from the top could be simplest. Computer controlled for precision and safety (perhaps still human operated).
Rather than shelves, I suspect steel boxes of a cubic meter or more would be used to contain the patients. Stacking the heads in a heap sounds like a recipe for crushed skulls and mixed-up brain matter. (Though who knows what nanotech can solve, eh?) In the cold-air version of the system (above LN2 temperature), these would act as heat sink and thermal conductor while providing strength. Fans would probably also be used to circulate the air to prevent stratification.
Stacking directly in LN2 might prove interesting. A reason to use cold-air temperatures over LN2 might be to make the stacking mechanism easier to design. Remember, the process of stacking patients is only going to take a few years, and it can be filled with cryogen later.
Cooling to LN2 temps over that last few degrees could be done at a rate that takes months (or even years), which I assume would induce fewer cracks. Then it would be filled with LN2. If we use the steel boxes, the inside of the boxes might need to be filled as well in which case they would need to have openings. (Perhaps they should be cages rather than solid boxes.) This is just to maximize cryogen volume; you could always keep it cool by just cooling the outside.