Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

bekkerd

Question:

What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?

His response:

A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.

Link

Question:

What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?

His response:

A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.

Link

What are the numbers that lead to your 1% estimate?

I will eventually sit down and make a back of the envelope calculation on this, but my current off-the-cuff estimate is about twenty (yes, twenty) orders of magnitude lower.

Mine was also just an off-the-cuff "guesstimate."

I am skeptical that it is possible to estimate the chances of cryonics working in a rigorous quantitative way. There's no way to know what technical hurdles are actually involved to make it work. How can you estimate your chances of success when you have no information about the difficulty of the problem?

13steven046114y

I see. So if you made a billion trillion independent statements of the form "cryonics won't work", on topics you were equally sure about, you'd be pretty confident you were right on all of them?

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

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Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

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