How about factoring in “plans to live forever through science”? That’s probably the most relevant prior information.
Estimate P(never heard of cryonics | read tons of science and scifi books and researches interests and plans on living forever through science). Isn’t that basically Harry before magic came along? He somehow missed mention of cryonics when he looked into means to live forever?
I missed it completely and was doing much the same thing at that age. I actually ran right over cryonics—it showed up in Artemis Fowl and my absurdity heuristic/Colfer’s tone tossed it aside.
Harry’s also interested in space travel and a human diaspora. Cryogenic hibernation is the standard way to travel to other planets, barring warp drive.
Well, your Harry has heard of “nanotechnology a la Eric Drexler” (Chapter 28), so I find it very surprising that he wouldn’t also be aware of Drexler’s views on cryonics. Engines of Creation was published in 1986… I would have expected Harry to have read the whole book.
And yet, 8 years later, Matt Groening and David Cohen could assume that fans of The Simpsons would know what it is as a matter of course; the pilot episode of Futurama offers no explanation beyond the word ‘cryogenics’, an icy cartoon effect, and a dial with a timer on it. You could blame that on the Internet, but that’s for popular culture to learn that a sci-fi genius didn’t know.
On the other hand, I could easily believe that Harry has only heard of this in a way that makes it sound like nonsense, and he never followed it up. Its absence doesn’t detract from the story for me.
And yet, 8 years later, Matt Groening and David Cohen could assume that fans of The Simpsons would know what it is as a matter of course; the pilot episode of Futurama offers no explanation beyond the word ‘cryogenics’, an icy cartoon effect, and a dial with a timer on it.
I’ve seen Futurama mentioned negatively as having introduced cryonics to a lot of people in a ridiculous light, and Groening’s Simpsons has always indulged in a lot of very obscure references (read the Simpsons Archive’s annotated scripts for an episode and note how many you did not notice on a single watch), so merely appearing on his shows doesn’t necessarily mean a lot—especially since Futurama goes to considerable lengths to make the cryonics completely understandable to people with zero idea about it, with Fry falling into a glassy supermarket-style freezer*, being flash-frozen (not vitrified), and then a long timelapse montage explaining visually the lapse of time. The concept comes through clear as a bell to anyone who has ever used a freezer, which in the USA is pretty much everyone.
* note, by the way, how they went with a common piece of technology used in every supermarket for many decades, which looks completely different from every dewar ever used by actual cryonics organizations.
If Futurama really introduced it to many people, then I’m wrong. I always thought that Groening & Cohen expected the viewers to already know about it, but that doesn’t mean much, since I already knew about it (even though only as a crackpot idea yet).
It’s hard to prove that people were ignorant, of course, but I think it did bring cryonics up to a lot of people who didn’t know about it. (If nothing else, all the kids and teens watching it—the younger you are, the less time you’ve had to run into the idea.) Some links:
Ngrams 1960-2008, cryonics & Futurama (apparently ‘Futurama’ was a term long before the show? So the ngram is a bit meaningless, though it’s interesting it has surpassed cryonics.)
I’m kind of surprised by how few books have mentioned Futurama in recent years. (Then again, ISTR that Google Ngram Viewer sampled pre-2000 books and post-2000 books in different ways.)
Well before Futurama, there was a Woody Allen movie called Sleeper with a similar premise. It seems to be a pretty common way to do the Rip Van Winkle scenario.
And before that was the British TV series of 1966-67, Adam Adamant. And before that, Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, which Harry has surely read, takes cold sleep back to 1957. So the concept is available to him, and with his mind, he can take it seriously even if no-one else has yet.
Er, Fry was alive when he got frozen. I hadn’t heard about the idea of cryopreserving legally dead people in hope that not-yet-available technology to revive them will be invented until years later than I watched that Futurama episode. (Then again, I read way less sci fi than HJPEV.)
That he would fall into that category seems doubtful given that he’s been exposed to so much science fiction though. Cryonics is a staple of scifi, so it shouldn’t take him that much thinking to see how plausible it could be or to note that people have actually tried it.
As someone who read Ender’s Game at the age of 11, and consequently a lot more sci-fi since then, It took Eliezer’s “You Only Live Twice” post six years later to properly elevate my knowledge of cryonics to actual conscious awareness. It took an actual proponent of the procedure telling me about it and that people are actually doing it in real life for me to notice it as a useful idea.
And the only thing I needed for convincing was the feasibility of the science, not any moral qualms about the implications of it all. I was (and still am) in the same mind-set concerning life extension and widespread immortality as Harry, and a single afternoon reading about the procedure had me basically convinced.
So no, I don’t really think it’s incredibly unlikely that Harry hasn’t properly heard about cryonics as used in the manor he needs. Of course, I’m but a single data point. How many smart kids have you met that are or aren’t knowledgable about existing cryonic procedures?
I remember reading a cartoon as a kid about cryonics which portrayed it cynically if I remember correctly. I didn’t realize it was actually a thing people did, but I remember thinking “This sounds like something I would want to do in real life. There has to be some reason it wouldn’t work though, because I’m hearing about it in a cartoon and not in real life.”
What if we narrow it down to “Niven readers”? “Corpsicles” feature in a Niven-verse novel and a novella from the 70s, and Harry makes an offhand reference to Niven-verse Puppeteers in HPMOR chapter 9. Harry might not know about Alcor but he should at least be aware of the general idea.
Harry is very, very likely to have come across the concept of cold sleep. That is not cryonics. Cryonics is the idea of freezing the dead in the hope of fixing the problem later with better tech, even if you do not even know how to revive the frozen at the time. As a serious idea, it is new and fringy, as fiction.. It does come up, but not very often—even people wishing to throw a character into the future usually handwave a stasis field.
Sure. That still doesn’t answer the question of who does hear about it. We could just say that 1% of people who read SF have heard about it, but then my experience is hard to explain—I hadn’t read all that much SF by age 11. It seems quite reasonable to say that the 10 years that the Internet existed between me and Harry was decisive, but I’m asking what variables explain the difference between two SF readers, only one of whom has heard of cryonics.
Uhm—an personal experience like this holds approximately zero data about its own frequency. The sheer number of things you encounter and learn about while growing up, and the universe of learning are both so vast that if your exploration of the library strays from the beaten path of school assignments, bestsellers and nigh-compulsory classics at all, you will learn many, many things which only small minorities have also encountered.
Well, how did you hear about it? I didn’t (or didn’t see it as a real possibility) until I read a mostly non-fiction book by Robert Anton Wilson, long after the age of 11.
...not especially? I heard about when I read “Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition”, memory says at age 11 but the book’s publication date might imply I should have been 12. “The Internet has changed things”—yes it did.
This claim is surprising. The Psychomech trilogy (published in the mid 1980s) involves deliberate cryonic preservation of multiple characters in the hope that when one of them becomes a functional god he’ll be able to resurrect them. In that case, one of the characters who is preserved is the love-interest of the protagonist. And the later books in that series imagine a world in a not too distant future where cryonics is extremely common. Lem’s “Fiasco” deals with medical cryonics and is also from the 1980s. Pohl’s “The Age of Pussyfoot” also has explicit medical cryonics, albeit with a somewhat reactionary message.
Ettinger himself was inspired to think about cryonics as a practical thing from the short story “The Jameson Satellite” (admittedly fairly obscure).
As a matter of pure anecdote, I had encountered the idea in multiple contexts when I was about Harry’s age, and Harry if anything has been exposed to more scifi than I had at that age.
It’s important to remember that we’re talking 1991, rather than present day. While there are a number of older works featuring cryonics, they tend to include themes you probably don’t want to expose a ten-year-old to (Heinlein’s Door Into Summer) or are soft science fiction or outright fantasy (Star Wars, Captain America), or use a generic stasis instead of cryogenics (Aliens). Harder popular fiction versions like Futurama, Bujold’s Mirror Dance, and Cowboy Bebop wouldn’t come out for a few years.
There were older hard fiction pieces that mention it—Niven, at least—but it’s fairly recent for the concept to be an automatic assumption for near-future or even far-future works. If Rationalist!Harry read and remembered everything, he’d have to be aware of it, but honestly he’s got a bit too wide of a knowledge base to be reasonable as it is.
Having a futuristic, nonexistent technology which can reliably, reversibly, demonstrably execute suspended animation, is not the same as the realization that mere modern-day liquid nitrogen works to preserve brain state right now and future tech can grab it later.
I thought he’d read a fair amount of science fiction. Shouldn’t he have heard of it there?
Second thought: I have a vague impression that there used to be more cryonics in science fiction from before 1975 or so. If I’m right (and I’m not at all sure that I am), would that affect what Harry would be likely to know?
I also find it unlikely Harry hadn’t heard of cryonics. I mean, I’m born in 1981 almost like Harry, and when I was Harry’s age, I definitely had heard of it, like I had heard of robots, or long-distance space travel, or life expansion, or robotic prosthesis, as a scifi device. I had seen 2001 and Star Wars. And I did think at that time “oh, it’s something cool we’ll have in the future”. Sure, I didn’t know it was something actually existing in the real world. But while I wasn’t a dumb kid, I wasn’t the supergenius Harry is, and I didn’t even think defeating death was something possible.
So, yes, I would say it’s unlikely for Harry not knowing about cryonics. But… not “1 chance in 1000” unlikely, more like “1 chance in 10″ unlikely. And if you have 10 “one chance in ten unlikely” things, well, statistically one will actually happen. And it’s fully within the author’s “rights” to say “well, among those ten things there is only one chance in 10 Harry doesn’t know about, it’s cryonics he doesn’t know about”.
So while it’s unlikely that Harry didn’t hear about cryonics, it’s not unlikely enough to really sound artificial. Harry knows a lot, not all, and cryonics is where he fails, ok, fine.
If Harry can figure out how to reverse a Time-Turner and send Hermione’s body into the future, he doesn’t need cryonics. And there’s no worry about paradoxes, so possibly the six-hour limit wouldn’t apply.
I don’t think paradoxes have much to do with it, but it’s a limit of six hours into the past. Since negative a thousand is less than six, sending her a thousand hours in the future doesn’t violate the six-hour limit.
It seems hard to believe that Harry managed to reverse engineer it in six hours with no special equipment.
I was thinking it could be something for cryonics.
Eliezer has mentioned elseforum that Harry hasn’t heard of cryonics.
(I’m assuming this qualifies as a public statement.)
The uber genius science wiz kid who wants to live forever, whose father is an eminent professor of biochemistry at Oxford, hasn’t heard of cryonics?
I would guess >90% of whiz kids haven’t.
Let’s even grant that.
How about factoring in “plans to live forever through science”? That’s probably the most relevant prior information.
Estimate P(never heard of cryonics | read tons of science and scifi books and researches interests and plans on living forever through science). Isn’t that basically Harry before magic came along? He somehow missed mention of cryonics when he looked into means to live forever?
I missed it completely and was doing much the same thing at that age. I actually ran right over cryonics—it showed up in Artemis Fowl and my absurdity heuristic/Colfer’s tone tossed it aside.
Space Seed? Several 1970s sci-fi novels feature it.
2001: A Space Odyssey comes close, as does Planet of the Apes. Alien, too (though I wouldn’t expect him to have seen that)
HP is set in 1991, so we’re too early for Babylon 5 (“The Long Dark”) or especially Futurama.
You might have dismissed it, but I doubt he would have. Maaybe if his father dismissed it as rubbish.
KHAAAAAAAANNN!
How could a nerd not know that?
Harry’s also interested in space travel and a human diaspora. Cryogenic hibernation is the standard way to travel to other planets, barring warp drive.
Yeah, but to be fair, usually in those stories they’re sending live people.
Except for legal issues, there’s little reason to wait until someone is dead to preserve them.
Well, your Harry has heard of “nanotechnology a la Eric Drexler” (Chapter 28), so I find it very surprising that he wouldn’t also be aware of Drexler’s views on cryonics. Engines of Creation was published in 1986… I would have expected Harry to have read the whole book.
Surely you mean ‘hadn’t’ here?
And yet, 8 years later, Matt Groening and David Cohen could assume that fans of The Simpsons would know what it is as a matter of course; the pilot episode of Futurama offers no explanation beyond the word ‘cryogenics’, an icy cartoon effect, and a dial with a timer on it. You could blame that on the Internet, but that’s for popular culture to learn that a sci-fi genius didn’t know.
On the other hand, I could easily believe that Harry has only heard of this in a way that makes it sound like nonsense, and he never followed it up. Its absence doesn’t detract from the story for me.
I’ve seen Futurama mentioned negatively as having introduced cryonics to a lot of people in a ridiculous light, and Groening’s Simpsons has always indulged in a lot of very obscure references (read the Simpsons Archive’s annotated scripts for an episode and note how many you did not notice on a single watch), so merely appearing on his shows doesn’t necessarily mean a lot—especially since Futurama goes to considerable lengths to make the cryonics completely understandable to people with zero idea about it, with Fry falling into a glassy supermarket-style freezer*, being flash-frozen (not vitrified), and then a long timelapse montage explaining visually the lapse of time. The concept comes through clear as a bell to anyone who has ever used a freezer, which in the USA is pretty much everyone.
* note, by the way, how they went with a common piece of technology used in every supermarket for many decades, which looks completely different from every dewar ever used by actual cryonics organizations.
If Futurama really introduced it to many people, then I’m wrong. I always thought that Groening & Cohen expected the viewers to already know about it, but that doesn’t mean much, since I already knew about it (even though only as a crackpot idea yet).
It’s hard to prove that people were ignorant, of course, but I think it did bring cryonics up to a lot of people who didn’t know about it. (If nothing else, all the kids and teens watching it—the younger you are, the less time you’ve had to run into the idea.) Some links:
Futurama hits on Cryonet
‘cryonics’ hits: 535k
‘cryonics AND futurama’: 1,850k
Ngrams 1960-2008, cryonics & Futurama (apparently ‘Futurama’ was a term long before the show? So the ngram is a bit meaningless, though it’s interesting it has surpassed cryonics.)
I’m kind of surprised by how few books have mentioned Futurama in recent years. (Then again, ISTR that Google Ngram Viewer sampled pre-2000 books and post-2000 books in different ways.)
Well before Futurama, there was a Woody Allen movie called Sleeper with a similar premise. It seems to be a pretty common way to do the Rip Van Winkle scenario.
And before that was the British TV series of 1966-67, Adam Adamant. And before that, Heinlein’s The Door into Summer, which Harry has surely read, takes cold sleep back to 1957. So the concept is available to him, and with his mind, he can take it seriously even if no-one else has yet.
Er, Fry was alive when he got frozen. I hadn’t heard about the idea of cryopreserving legally dead people in hope that not-yet-available technology to revive them will be invented until years later than I watched that Futurama episode. (Then again, I read way less sci fi than HJPEV.)
That he would fall into that category seems doubtful given that he’s been exposed to so much science fiction though. Cryonics is a staple of scifi, so it shouldn’t take him that much thinking to see how plausible it could be or to note that people have actually tried it.
As someone who read Ender’s Game at the age of 11, and consequently a lot more sci-fi since then, It took Eliezer’s “You Only Live Twice” post six years later to properly elevate my knowledge of cryonics to actual conscious awareness. It took an actual proponent of the procedure telling me about it and that people are actually doing it in real life for me to notice it as a useful idea.
And the only thing I needed for convincing was the feasibility of the science, not any moral qualms about the implications of it all. I was (and still am) in the same mind-set concerning life extension and widespread immortality as Harry, and a single afternoon reading about the procedure had me basically convinced.
So no, I don’t really think it’s incredibly unlikely that Harry hasn’t properly heard about cryonics as used in the manor he needs. Of course, I’m but a single data point. How many smart kids have you met that are or aren’t knowledgable about existing cryonic procedures?
I remember reading a cartoon as a kid about cryonics which portrayed it cynically if I remember correctly. I didn’t realize it was actually a thing people did, but I remember thinking “This sounds like something I would want to do in real life. There has to be some reason it wouldn’t work though, because I’m hearing about it in a cartoon and not in real life.”
SF readers don’t know either.
What if we narrow it down to “Niven readers”? “Corpsicles” feature in a Niven-verse novel and a novella from the 70s, and Harry makes an offhand reference to Niven-verse Puppeteers in HPMOR chapter 9. Harry might not know about Alcor but he should at least be aware of the general idea.
Does your theory have anything more to say than “the internet has changed things” to explain why I knew about cryonics at Harry’s age?
Harry is very, very likely to have come across the concept of cold sleep. That is not cryonics. Cryonics is the idea of freezing the dead in the hope of fixing the problem later with better tech, even if you do not even know how to revive the frozen at the time. As a serious idea, it is new and fringy, as fiction.. It does come up, but not very often—even people wishing to throw a character into the future usually handwave a stasis field.
Sure. That still doesn’t answer the question of who does hear about it. We could just say that 1% of people who read SF have heard about it, but then my experience is hard to explain—I hadn’t read all that much SF by age 11. It seems quite reasonable to say that the 10 years that the Internet existed between me and Harry was decisive, but I’m asking what variables explain the difference between two SF readers, only one of whom has heard of cryonics.
Uhm—an personal experience like this holds approximately zero data about its own frequency. The sheer number of things you encounter and learn about while growing up, and the universe of learning are both so vast that if your exploration of the library strays from the beaten path of school assignments, bestsellers and nigh-compulsory classics at all, you will learn many, many things which only small minorities have also encountered.
Well, how did you hear about it? I didn’t (or didn’t see it as a real possibility) until I read a mostly non-fiction book by Robert Anton Wilson, long after the age of 11.
I can’t recall at this distance.
...not especially? I heard about when I read “Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition”, memory says at age 11 but the book’s publication date might imply I should have been 12. “The Internet has changed things”—yes it did.
This claim is surprising. The Psychomech trilogy (published in the mid 1980s) involves deliberate cryonic preservation of multiple characters in the hope that when one of them becomes a functional god he’ll be able to resurrect them. In that case, one of the characters who is preserved is the love-interest of the protagonist. And the later books in that series imagine a world in a not too distant future where cryonics is extremely common. Lem’s “Fiasco” deals with medical cryonics and is also from the 1980s. Pohl’s “The Age of Pussyfoot” also has explicit medical cryonics, albeit with a somewhat reactionary message.
Ettinger himself was inspired to think about cryonics as a practical thing from the short story “The Jameson Satellite” (admittedly fairly obscure).
As a matter of pure anecdote, I had encountered the idea in multiple contexts when I was about Harry’s age, and Harry if anything has been exposed to more scifi than I had at that age.
On the other hand, I’d never heard of Psychomech, and I thought I knew sf from that era fairly well. Perhaps the book is better known in the UK.
It’s important to remember that we’re talking 1991, rather than present day. While there are a number of older works featuring cryonics, they tend to include themes you probably don’t want to expose a ten-year-old to (Heinlein’s Door Into Summer) or are soft science fiction or outright fantasy (Star Wars, Captain America), or use a generic stasis instead of cryogenics (Aliens). Harder popular fiction versions like Futurama, Bujold’s Mirror Dance, and Cowboy Bebop wouldn’t come out for a few years.
There were older hard fiction pieces that mention it—Niven, at least—but it’s fairly recent for the concept to be an automatic assumption for near-future or even far-future works. If Rationalist!Harry read and remembered everything, he’d have to be aware of it, but honestly he’s got a bit too wide of a knowledge base to be reasonable as it is.
what about from science fiction? star trek: TOS. kirk meets kahn. kahn has been on ice. many other star trek episodes. see also nancy’s comment.
Having a futuristic, nonexistent technology which can reliably, reversibly, demonstrably execute suspended animation, is not the same as the realization that mere modern-day liquid nitrogen works to preserve brain state right now and future tech can grab it later.
Or have only briefly heard of it as something for the rich akin to Lenin’s tomb.
I thought he’d read a fair amount of science fiction. Shouldn’t he have heard of it there?
Second thought: I have a vague impression that there used to be more cryonics in science fiction from before 1975 or so. If I’m right (and I’m not at all sure that I am), would that affect what Harry would be likely to know?
I also find it unlikely Harry hadn’t heard of cryonics. I mean, I’m born in 1981 almost like Harry, and when I was Harry’s age, I definitely had heard of it, like I had heard of robots, or long-distance space travel, or life expansion, or robotic prosthesis, as a scifi device. I had seen 2001 and Star Wars. And I did think at that time “oh, it’s something cool we’ll have in the future”. Sure, I didn’t know it was something actually existing in the real world. But while I wasn’t a dumb kid, I wasn’t the supergenius Harry is, and I didn’t even think defeating death was something possible.
So, yes, I would say it’s unlikely for Harry not knowing about cryonics. But… not “1 chance in 1000” unlikely, more like “1 chance in 10″ unlikely. And if you have 10 “one chance in ten unlikely” things, well, statistically one will actually happen. And it’s fully within the author’s “rights” to say “well, among those ten things there is only one chance in 10 Harry doesn’t know about, it’s cryonics he doesn’t know about”.
So while it’s unlikely that Harry didn’t hear about cryonics, it’s not unlikely enough to really sound artificial. Harry knows a lot, not all, and cryonics is where he fails, ok, fine.
He could still be inventing it (sort of already did.)
If Harry can figure out how to reverse a Time-Turner and send Hermione’s body into the future, he doesn’t need cryonics. And there’s no worry about paradoxes, so possibly the six-hour limit wouldn’t apply.
I don’t think paradoxes have much to do with it, but it’s a limit of six hours into the past. Since negative a thousand is less than six, sending her a thousand hours in the future doesn’t violate the six-hour limit.
It seems hard to believe that Harry managed to reverse engineer it in six hours with no special equipment.