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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   2835 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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What about cryonics? What's new? Where else would I read new cryonics if not a pitch on LessWrong?

"Traditional" cryonics requires a crisis response to a customer's death. A person dies, people are alerted, and a plan is carried out to evacuate a body to administer cryogoo-- glycerol. That body is transferred to cold storage and suspended in liquid nitrogen with a barrier of one fancy cask. The liquid nitrogen creates extreme temperatures for preservation, around -192C, a temperature that comes with risks-- human tissue kept at -192C tends to be very fragile. Another pressing issue is that the goo filling-to-freezer process takes time, and bodies stop all kinds of maintenance after death. Dying with imperfect preservation means if someone did find a way to upload your brain to the Matrix, or reanimate your corpse, unless they've fully cracked the mysteries of regenerative medicine the experience may not be to your liking.

Why is this this culture war? Nectome's new method offers a workaround to the last problem: kill yourself.

The result is a protocol that my company, Nectome, has spent the past ten years developing. After years of experiments in the lab and in the field, learning about the complexity of end-of-life biology, and after refining our protocol to make it robust and repeatable for real people in real-world clinical settings, we are now ready. We've developed a whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation protocol based on neuroscience first principles. We are capable of preserving every synapse and almost every protein, lipid, and nucleic acid throughout the whole body. Brains are connectomically traceable after preservation[1]. Our preservation is so comprehensive that current neuroscience theories imply it preserves all relevant information necessary for future restoration of a preserved person.

Nectome wants you to have the option to end your life so they can preserve your bits, bobs, and neuronal structure, increasing the chance you emerge intact down the line. You can read a slightly more detailed overview in this PDF from Nectome with citations. You can compare it to the big brand-name cryonics company in the US named Alcor. Alcor has facilities located in Arizona, which is a state with cheap land, no hurricanes, low humidity, and a favorable regulatory environment. Good things for long term groundskeeping. Unlike Alcor, Nectome plans to set up shop in Oregon. Also unlike Alcor, Nectome clarifies they will host no brains in jars with holistic, rather than trope filled, process.

We preserve the whole body, including the brain, at nanoscale, subsynaptic detail. We are capable of preserving every neuron and every synapse in the brain, and almost every protein, lipid, and nucleic acid within each cell and throughout the entire body is held in place by molecular crosslinks.

The business pitch relies on the fact that Oregon has MAID, colloquially known as assisted suicide. Rather than keep cells frozen in place with extremely low temperatures, Nectome's goo formula does more work to stabilize structures chemically, which allows a moderate preservation temperature at -32C. This process must be completed immediately following death. So if a client can plan around, or potentially induce, a state recognized terminal illness, they can purchase a flight to the state of Oregon, end their life, and receive the latest greatest chance at... something in the future. Don't want to miss the singularity or omnipotent medicine? No cryonics company promises anything like that, they usually only agree to look after your frozen bits for as long as is feasible.

About that, Nectome's founder is also involved with Eon Systems, a company currently working on brain emulators. They generated a viral story with apparent progress on a fly connectome earlier this month. Specific claims of hype are contested, but progress on mapping, building, and simulating brains seems real. Much has been written on MAID slippery slopes, but it seems we already have a current legal avenue to test a "freeze me" future with an upload waiting room. Take the upload to Elon Musk's Afterlife, which is a RuneScape clone by the way, replete with a procedurally generated non-stop feed of his greatest twitter hits at your finger tips into eternity, or until transcendent beings awaken you.

With so many sci-fi fantasies filling up the horizon, why not kill yourself and wait awhile? What did you think transhumanism meant, anyway? vibes? papers? essays?

Is he Elizabeth Holmes long lost brother? Same vibe.

Anyway couple of thoughts - yes killing yourself will make any kind of preservation easier. They could even start the process before you are dead. That is not a big break trough.

Anyway - there are a lot of lab mice in the world. If the technology was real - they could show something with a lab mice after it is preserved.

They got a fair bit towards getting cryonics to work on hamsters in the 1950s.

It's the bigger mammals that are the real headache. If we pull it off with monkeys, I'll care a great deal. If they do it for apes, then I'm an ape too and I'm going to sign up immediately unless it's ridiculously expensive. I earn enough these days that I could, in theory, afford Nectome. One small thing to be grateful for.

They can show the preserved neurons in the brain. Doesn't have to be lab mice they have scans of human brains. However, as of now we can't read the information nor do they claim to. The idea is to preserve the information and brain structure for future revival with scifi technology. I'm very curious if Nectome is for profit. Most all the three other operating cryonics organizations in America are non-profits with a decent history. Running one as a start up seems risky.

I think a lot of cryogenics relies on the idea that in a couple hundred years our technology will be so advanced that they will be able to bring people back from the cryogenic state. Therefore, they do not need to prove that we can bring a mouse back right now, with our current technology.

I think it's all crazy to assume we'll keep progressing the way we did in the last century and a half. We're going to go into a population crunch soon. We'll recover from it, but who knows what will happen to the cryogenic-ally frozen in the meantime?

I think it's all crazy to assume we'll keep progressing the way we did in the last century and a half

Most cryonics believers aren't really assuming that, just that we'll hit some kind of A.I. singularity soonish that'll have the same results.

I mean, there's technically nothing about destructive uploading that would require an AGI Singularity, just enough fidelity in the scanning process, messy as it is.

Anything beyond that... well, I confess, I'm both impressed and terrified that they managed to atleast stumble in the direction of uploading a fruitfly. So I guess we'll see.

That is a recent development. When I first learned about cryonics, I didn't expect AGI to be nearly as imminent or realistic as a possibility.

I mean if you're gonna die anyway and you have the resources of a Walt Disney or whatever where you can essentially pay in perpetuity I don't see anything wrong with purchasing a lottery ticket. Even identifying the many issues with the hypothesis.

You don't need to be that rich. I don't know about Nectome but most cryogenics companies have an investment fund to run in perpetuity and really aren't that expensive. About 25k for the ticket.

Yeah, the problem to me is more the Upper-Middle class Boomers who will give all their money first to the health care field, then to the cryogenics field, leaving little to their grandkids. But also because trusts are hard unless you have 100 million to make it worth it, all their money will be gone quickly and their corpse will be left rotting.

And then this current comment thread, killing yourself early for cryogenics is also a bad idea.

No, they won’t. Upper middle class boomers do not want a freezer after they die. They’re not silicone valley weirdos. Cruises, hopeless cancer treatments, sûre. But probably not this.

My dad was really excited about it 20 years ago. Pretty sure that's where the millions my mom can't track down in the divorce went.

It really doesn't cost that much around 25k for most and Alcor the more expensive option is around 100k. That's a decent chunk of change but it's also around the price of a new car and most people pay with life insurance anyway.

That is not enough to pay for an active freezer with VRLA UPSs (with batteries being swapped out every five years), generator backups, and annual maintenance checkups from qualified technicinas in perpetuity.

They're being sold a bill of goods that will quickly become not worth it.

That's because they don't use an active freezer they use a dewar full of liquid nitrogen. And the money isn't drawn on it's invested in the market and only returns are used for costs.

You still need people to maintain those so that they don't explode.

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