Could you keep a human cryonically stored for cosmologically significant periods of time?

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

Even for the next 20-50 years, people disagree on whether something as impactful as superintelligent AI will exist. Similar disagreement exists, although on slightly different timescales, over nanotechnology, brain uploading, and replacement organs.

A cryogenic time travelling.

Spoiler

A cryochamber.

 

Nursies.
Like they are saying: "Hello-o-o!.."

Spoiler

 

 

 

[Gargamel]

On 7/2/2017 at 1:51 PM, KerbMav said:

And if all chemistry stopped - who would tell every single cell to start working again - especially the brain cells?

That's assuming the person who volunteers for this had any working to start with.......

 

But I find this question to be very selfish. 

What gain would society/civilization get from this? 

• The amount of energy required to keep the subject frozen for this period of time could be put to much better uses elsewhere.   
• A time capsule?  If society can keep a human frozen for this length of time, then surely they can keep records of that persons early life time. 
• For the subject to be of any use to science, aside from pure curiosity, it would take them years to re-acclimate to the era in which they awoke.  Technology, society, and even physiology would have changed so drastically that they would have no way of communicating easily.  They would be lost in the new world they awoke in.    The biological world they awoke in would reek havoc upon their body. 
• Instead of one person being able to 'travel' that far in time, they could, instead, could procreate and create more humans who could help advance society over that period of time.  The collective knowledge gained from their lineage would far far outweigh any gained from one person being frozen. 

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

A cryogenic time travelling.

Its an plot device, you want an average human in your setting as its easier to relate to.
For some reason, yes I get the it could be you argument. But you are not an astronaut or secret agent or elite soldier and if you was you would be very different. 
Most sci-fi or fantasy settings works well enough without it.

[Lisias]

9 hours ago, Gargamel said:

But I find this question to be very selfish. 

What gain would society/civilization get from this? 

• The amount of energy required to keep the subject frozen for this period of time could be put to much better uses elsewhere.   
• A time capsule?  If society can keep a human frozen for this length of time, then surely they can keep records of that persons early life time. 
• For the subject to be of any use to science, aside from pure curiosity, it would take them years to re-acclimate to the era in which they awoke.  Technology, society, and even physiology would have changed so drastically that they would have no way of communicating easily.  They would be lost in the new world they awoke in.    The biological world they awoke in would reek havoc upon their body. 
• Instead of one person being able to 'travel' that far in time, they could, instead, could procreate and create more humans who could help advance society over that period of time.  The collective knowledge gained from their lineage would far far outweigh any gained from one person being frozen. 

Not necessarily. Let me propose an alternative:

• Only if such energy is usable somewhere else. If you choose to put the guy's freezer on a geothermal energy source, the only cost would be the maintenance of the  energy converters.
  • Space Tourism will be simnifically more wasteful , IMHO.
• Not necessarily. You are assuming the good faith of the historians, what History taught us is not something you can rely on. It would be a very enlightening event talking with a Classic Greece citizen, for example. What he/she would told us would be biased, of course, but still useful.
  • It's a bit more than 60 years from the last World War, and people are already trying to rewrote it.  
• This is a problem to be handled by the tomorrow's society. Assuming that such experiment will be successfully carried on as time goes by, people in charge of the mission would take the needed measures. The guy would be long dead without constant support anyway...
• That didn't worked very well for the Neanderthal's history preservation. Knowledge is finickle - only two generations, and everything is lost if not cautiously studied and preserved.
  • We are unable to reproduce the Saturn's F-1 engines nowadays. We have the schematics, but we lost the manufacturing know-how. Humanity just lost the skills needed to redo the F-1 engine! We can build something equivalent, but we cannot reproduce it anymore.
  • We don't know how the Lycurgus Cup were made, neither. And just recently, after a lot of investment on research, we "rediscovered" how romans made their concrete - probably the best concrete ever made by the human race.

Edited September 1, 2018 by Lisias
Typo and redundancy.

[Xd the great]

Dude, just throw the guy in orbit around a black hole and get out later.

[Lisias]

2 minutes ago, Xd the great said:

Dude, just throw the guy in orbit around a black hole and get out later.

I don't think we have enough fuel on this planet to get someone out of a black hole's orbit!

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, Gargamel said:

For the subject to be of any use to science, aside from pure curiosity, it would take them years to re-acclimate to the era in which they awoke.  Technology, society, and even physiology would have changed so drastically that they would have no way of communicating easily.  They would be lost in the new world they awoke in.    The biological world they awoke in would reek havoc upon their body. 

Probably a nowadays comfortable apartment is a death trap for a visitor from a pre-industrial epoch.
Electricity, gas, elevator doors, other simple things.

Interesting btw, how would feel the today world some ever-thirty clever person living here since a prehistorical epoch.
(Not taken from there, but a long-living witness living here since then.
From some epoch enough far to be called prehistorical, but enough close to be not a quasimodo for others.).

***

The worst enemies of a cryosleeper are his/her inheritors.

Just a single payment for a technician, just a single shutdown of the capsule, and so many nice people will receive their money.

Edited September 1, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Xd the great]

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Probably a nowadays comfortable apartment is a death trap for a visitor from a pre-industrial epoch.
Electricity, gas, elevator doors, other simple things.

Interesting btw, how would feel the today world some ever-thirty clever person living here since a prehistorical epoch.
(Not taken from there, but a long-living witness living here since then.
From some epoch enough far to be called prehistorical, but enough close to be not a quasimodo for others.).

***

The worst enemies of a cryosleeper are his/her inheritors.

Just a single payment for a technician, just a single shutdown of the capsule, and so many nice people will receive their money.

Captain America...

Now I understand your point

[NSEP]

Im not saying we could do this with humans. But im going to drop it in here anyways:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reviving-ancient-bacteria/

[Green Baron]

Phew ... that is was one shaky argumentation chain. With a little geoscience background one can say it is very improbable that a salt crystal stays unchanged for 250my.

I tried to find it "this weeks" nature issue but it is from 2000.

https://www.nature.com/articles/35038060

and one response:

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/18/6/1143/1046940

tl;dr: it was probably something younger they measured (13-65ky).

 

btw.: Those were the "wild years" of ancient dna, Jurassic Park, etc.

https://www.nature.com/articles/35077295

 

Still not quite over, as the latest take on Denisovan (Neandertal) dna shows, but i don't want to start any flame wars again ;-):

 

Edited September 1, 2018 by Green Baron
Took out the oldest ancient dna = 120my because nothing is clear.

[Xd the great]

1 hour ago, NSEP said:

Im not saying we could do this with humans. But im going to drop it in here anyways:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reviving-ancient-bacteria/

There is also an animal called the tardigrade...

Unkillable by freezing, radiation, boiling, or in space outside the ISS

[Green Baron]

1 hour ago, Xd the great said:

There is also an animal called the tardigrade...

Unkillable by freezing, radiation, boiling, or in space outside the ISS

Well, *cough*, some (not all of them) can survive at least days in the conditions of leo.

 

Anyway, for now, ancient dna older than several hundred thousand years remains fiction.

 

Edited September 1, 2018 by Green Baron

[Gargamel]

12 hours ago, Lisias said:

Only if such energy is usable somewhere else. If you choose to put the guy's freezer on a geothermal energy source, the only cost would be the maintenance of the  energy converters.

But any current day energy source is finite in it's output.   There are better uses than a "time tourist". 

 

12 hours ago, Lisias said:

Not necessarily. You are assuming the good faith of the historians, what History taught us is not something you can rely on. It would be a very enlightening event talking with a Classic Greece citizen, for example. What he/she would told us would be biased, of course, but still useful.

• It's a bit more than 60 years from the last World War, and people are already trying to rewrote it.  

 

Record keeping was not as important then.  Now we have records and pictures, of exactly what people ate for lunch, everyday.   People who are trying to rewrite modern history are for the most part failing.    And any single "time tourist" would have not have first hand knowledge of every major event that has happened.   

 

12 hours ago, Lisias said:

This is a problem to be handled by the tomorrow's society. Assuming that such experiment will be successfully carried on as time goes by, people in charge of the mission would take the needed measures. The guy would be long dead without constant support anyway...

Why not put off today what you can do tomorrow.  

12 hours ago, Lisias said:

That didn't worked very well for the Neanderthal's history preservation. Knowledge is finickle - only two generations, and everything is lost if not cautiously studied and preserved.

See above.  Any society capable of freezing some tourist is also capable of preserving accurate records for future generations.   And even if the lineage of any one person die's off, they would have, for the most part, contributed in some form to the continuation of society as a whole. 

[kerbiloid]

37 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

And any single "time tourist" would have not have first hand knowledge of every major event that has happened.   

His fresh and well-fed face obviously indicates that he is not a plebs.
He doesn't know church things, so he's not a priest.
He didn't fall enough quickly into the mud when a knight was passing by, said "Hey, mister!" to the inn-keeper, and greeted a monk "Hi, bro!"
So, obviously, he is a nobleman hiding from somebody. And just look at his hands.
He never heard anything from the local hit-parade Top-5. Spy? Cultist?

So, the question is:
Does he have something to buy off? Then let's cut his throat and take it before baron knows.
Or he has nothing, then let's take him to baron's house, get one or two coins, and let His Grace hang him on a tree on his own.

Edited September 1, 2018 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

16 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Probably a nowadays comfortable apartment is a death trap for a visitor from a pre-industrial epoch.
Electricity, gas, elevator doors, other simple things.

Interesting btw, how would feel the today world some ever-thirty clever person living here since a prehistorical epoch.
(Not taken from there, but a long-living witness living here since then.
From some epoch enough far to be called prehistorical, but enough close to be not a quasimodo for others.).

***

The worst enemies of a cryosleeper are his/her inheritors.

Just a single payment for a technician, just a single shutdown of the capsule, and so many nice people will receive their money.

First is an known issue regarding people from places with little technology. Probably far more an issue 30 years ago or earlier as it was more places who was way backward, today most people has mobile phones. Israel airlifted Ethiopian Jews and they started an fire on the plane to make tea. 

We have people living to past 100 this would be enough for lots of changes. I guess if you did not age you would get use to stuff changing fast 150 years ago, unlike old people you know you have to live trough all of this. 

The smart cryosleeper set up an fund with benefits for his inheritors if he dies the inheritors get nothing.
Free housing and cars would be an obvious one and would hurt hard if removed. 
Important part is that relatives does not benefit if you die, preferably they get hurt. 

[K^2]

The thing about cryo storage is that if you found a way to freeze and thaw the person safely, the answer is yes. Organics can be preserved for tens of thousands of years. Recently, some 40k year old worms were revived in a lab. Humans are a bit more complex, to put it mildly, but these worms weren't frozen under ideal conditions exactly. Keeping human body frozen at low temperature for 100k years shouldn't be a problem. Possibly a lot longer.

The problem is entirely with freezing and to lesser degree thawing. The onset of freeze has to be incredibly fast in order to prevent damage on cellular levels. It's no good having flesh perfectly preserved, if majority of cells are dead due to damage to cell walls and various internal systems caused by ice formation. Neurons are particularly delicate, as usual, so you have to ensure freezing conditions that let almost all of the neurons survive. We know it can be done on small samples, but you have to chill the entire body rapidly. And this isn't just difficult. There is no known way to extract heat from the depths of the body fast enough to achieve it. Even dropping the body into liquid helium isn't fast enough, as heat conduction from inner body to the exterior is too slow. You'd perfectly preserve the skin and some muscle, but kill the brain. And that's not good.

Thawing is the flip side of this. Fortunately, there are methods for delivering heat deeper into the body, which can allow restoring the circulation and warming the body up rapidly enough. The only time scale you are playing against here is getting oxygen delivered to tissues once they thaw. That means restoring circulation and normal body temperature in about 20-30 seconds. Still not trivial, but I can at least think of ways we'd do it with modern technology.

[Green Baron]

Yes, a human body can only be frozen to death if it isn't already dead. There is no way we currently know of to avoid the lethal damage done to it, only Hopes & Dreams Inc, to put it clearly. For now.

Since there is no serious science journal link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/23695785

Small organisms are a completely different thing compared to complete organs or even a functioning body.

 

 

Edited September 1, 2018 by Green Baron

[tater]

I'd have to say this is completely unknown. The important bit would be the ability to preserve the information content of the brain. Seems unlikely, and sans that, the issue is moot.

[kerbiloid]

If the brain is a data storage rather than a network adapter.

[Green Baron]

I wouldn't say "completely unknown". No vertebrate is known that survives complete freezing. Those that do survive temps <0 in body parts over a limited time (days to weeks) have some body chemistry that prevents freezing of cells.

Otoh, a whole lot of vertebrates are known that die on freezing of even parts of the body. A human dies when the core temperature drops below ~25°C. Maybe you can find isolated cases where lower temperatures over a short time have not lead to death, but i daresay those were not the same as before when they returned. But nobody survives freezing of the body or just a vital organ.

Edited September 2, 2018 by Green Baron

[Lisias]

On 9/1/2018 at 1:09 AM, kerbiloid said:

The worst enemies of a cryosleeper are his/her inheritors.

Just a single payment for a technician, just a single shutdown of the capsule, and so many nice people will receive their money.

This works both ways. Inheritors are incredible easy to locate and… "Handle". You know in advance who they are and where they live.  

This is something that the project's stakeholders would take care properly before risking the huge amount of money on the project. People don't get rich by playing nice.

Edited September 2, 2018 by Lisias
deleting merged content after people reacting to the post. not fair, they reacted to the previous content.

[Lisias]

On 9/1/2018 at 1:17 PM, Gargamel said:

But any current day energy source is finite in it's output.   There are better uses than a "time tourist".  

GeoThermal sources, by all practical meanings, can be considered "infinite". By the time you would be have concerning about your GeoThermal source's longevity, you already have way more serious problems at hand, as finding a new planet to live.  

On 9/1/2018 at 1:17 PM, Gargamel said:

Record keeping was not as important then.  Now we have records and pictures, of exactly what people ate for lunch, everyday.   People who are trying to rewrite modern history are for the most part failing.    And any single "time tourist" would have not have first hand knowledge of every major event that has happened. 

"Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus".

We know that the Babylonians ate, but we don't have the slightest idea how it tasted and how they cooked it. Recordings are just it: recordings. I bought my apartment from a Croatian survivor from a WW2 concentration camp. 30 minutos talking to this guy and you learn more than every movie made on this matter - assuming the guy would be capable of talking about (he run from one early, before getting too traumatized - the best part of the history is how they survived wandering the World on the post-war times).

On 9/1/2018 at 1:17 PM, Gargamel said:

Why not put off today what you can do tomorrow.   

Because you don't need it put off today. You need it tomorrow.  Doing things in advance is not always a good move - things change, and you probably will need to redo it again, wasting the resources and time you spent on the previous work.

Edited September 2, 2018 by Lisias

[Green Baron]

32 minutes ago, Lisias said:

GeoThermal sources, by all practical meanings, can be considered "infinite".

They are tricky to get to. Either you use the geothermal gradient by letting something circle that picks up heat from below, or you use a subterranean aquifer and hang in there an end of a heat pump. The latter is frequently used for heating in winter and cooling in summer because very efficient.

While the first might be considered "infinite" in terms of a human lifetime, on a geological scale it is not. Plates drift, crust cools, faults become inactive, others take over, volcanoes loose the will to erupt, plumes find another way, etc. On a short time scale it needs a lot of work for maintenance and upkeep in general and can fail easily. And the aquifer thing, though easier to get to and maintain, can be quite ephemeral, when the water decides to take another route or the schmucks who drilled the hole drilled through a layer that starts to expand when it comes in contact with water, there is congestion. And the housings above crumble :-)

Edited September 2, 2018 by Green Baron

[Lisias]

On 9/1/2018 at 1:17 PM, Gargamel said:

See above.  Any society capable of freezing some tourist is also capable of preserving accurate records for future generations.   And even if the lineage of any one person die's off, they would have, for the most part, contributed in some form to the continuation of society as a whole. 

You are too optimist about our recordings skills. A single EMP weapons based war would erase absolutely all our knowledge not written on physical, analogical means. A reasonably strong Sun flare, and our electrical power would be impaired for years, playing havoc with our storage devices. SSDs loose data after some years of power off (flash memory is like DRAM memory - it just leaks electrons on a incredibly slower rate). And HDDs too! Every artificially magnetized substrate wears off with time, and the high density of the currently used substrate make them very brittle to any long term storage that induces wearing.

26 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

While the first might be considered "infinite" in terms of a human lifetime, on a geological scale it is not. 

We are not talking about human lifetime. We are talking about civilization lifetime scale.

Edited September 2, 2018 by Lisias
better phrasing.

[Lisias]

24 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Plates drift, crust cools, plumes find another way, etc. On a short time scale it needs a lot of work for maintenance and upkeep in general and can fail easily. And the aquifer thing, though easier to get to and maintain, can be quite ephemeral, when the water decides to take another route or the schmucks who drilled the hole drilled through a layer that starts to expand when it comes in contact with water, there is congestion. And the housings above crumble :-)

Take a look on Iceland's geological history. It's well known enough to make projections about the future eruptions. So you can have a reasonable confidence about the best place for such long term project. You don't need something to be "stable" for more time than you need it to be stable!  

You are also assuming that such guy would be put on the freezer and forgotten about. Nope, such a project would be being backed by long term stakeholders with long term history - a country or even some rich secret society with money to burn. Generations of scientists would have to be paid in order to keep the project running - what, for sure, would imply in moving facilities if needed.

Edited September 2, 2018 by Lisias
and another typo!