I'm getting back into the “swing” of things with this attempt at a rudimentary animation. If Cpt. Savage's butt looks big, that's for two reasons: (1) because she does sort of have a big butt, and (2) I was playing with some “soft body animation” tools to simulate movement on her soft parts, and got a distorted effect. I'll get better at it.
Next week we'll be checking back in on Ula, so stay tuned for that!
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Call him “Lazarus.” Or don't. I wouldn't.
Looks like Avram's brush with death was of the minor and temporary variety. Next time I'm sure he'll remember to set the Auto Safe release mode on his chokey collar.
Speaking of temporary death, some people are turning to cryonics as a way to cheat the Reaper and possibly be revived after they die to frolic in a future technological utopia. The New Testament comparisons are obvious, but what do I think about cryonics? Here are my Big Three concerns:
The most obvious dilemma is that we're not talking about freezing a living person, preserving them as they are, and then just waking them up later. That at least sounds fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, cryonics companies can't legally freeze you until after you're already dead, and it only takes minutes of postmortem anoxia for the neurons in your hippocampus to be irreparably lost. Assuming they can act fast enough to avoid your brain turning into a spongy paperweight, and successfully freeze, store, and thaw you, they'll still just have a very well preserved dead body. They would not only need to be able to fix what killed you; they'd also need to have a cure for death.
If you have any relatives who were cryopreserved in the early days of cryoscience, I have bad news for you: They will almost certainly not be recoverable. Freezing is bad for your body tissues, because it forms ice crystals in your cells that rupture them, turning you into frozen meat mush. Also, because the freezing process happens at different rates throughout your body (and because, ideally, different organs have different optimal freezing methods), the process creates fractures throughout your body and organs. An evaluation of cryopatients after just over twenty years of storage makes mention of “…bloody fluid issuing from the mouth… pulmonary hemorrhage… pulmonary edema… external fractures…” and a general “peeling paint” appearance of the skin as it has become separated from the underlying tissue. Of course, cryonics techniques have gotten much better since then, and these days they use vitrification (converting the body into a glass) instead of freezing… though the vitrification chemicals are generally quite toxic, but that's a problem they expect future medicine will remedy.
Most important of all, however, is the survival of the brain and its contents. Unfortunately, neurons are some of the most susceptible cells to freezing damage, and even losing just one percent of your neurons can have similar effects to a severe stroke. And of course, if they reanimate your body, but all of your memories and personality didn't survive the cold storage, then what's the point! Whatever process they use to preserve the brain needs to offer 100 percent fidelity, or it defeats the purpose.
You may have heard of a recent breakthrough where a team of scientists won the Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize (yes, that's a real thing; I was shocked too) for perfectly preserving a rabbit brain. Some cryo enthusiasts have hailed this as a major breakthrough for their field, and perfect brain preservation is right around the corner. What's overlooked in the small print is that the method used is not a means of preserving living tissue to be revived, because it basically involves flooding the organ with some sort of deadly super formaldehyde that renders it inert. It's a fancy way of making squishy brain fossils.
Cryonics can have a pseudo religious flavor to its following, or more accurately a cult, because there are only a few thousand people signed up for it currently. And there is some unsettling overlap with another culty group: Kurzweilian futurists. Namely, in recognition of the two hurdles mentioned above, some cryonicists are looking to the idea of brain uploading as their deliverance. For this splinter group of “plastinators,” the idea is that, even if it involves converting the cryopatient's brain into inert material, if they can perfectly scan its contents (its “connectome”) then some day science may be able to translate that into a copy of the cryopatient's mind and upload it into a new body. That would be really neat, I guess, but it wouldn't help you at all. You'd still be dead; they'll have just made a copy of you. Many Kurzweilians don't seem to acknowledge that there is a distinction, and if that's the direction cryoscience goes, then I'd say it's nothing to be too thrilled about.
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