http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623.000-gunshot-victims-to-be-suspended-between-life-and-death.html?full=true
- First "official" program to practice suspended animation
- The article naturally goes on to ask whether longer SA (months, years) is possible
- Amazing quote: "Every day at work I declare people dead. They have no signs of life, no heartbeat, no brain activity. I sign a piece of paper knowing in my heart that they are not actually dead. I could, right then and there, suspend them. But I have to put them in a body bag. It's frustrating to know there's a solution."
- IMO this if (I hope!) successful, will go a long way to bridge the emotional gap for cryonics
The difference is that it requires a change to the laws of physics as we know them for mock airstrips and antennas made of bamboo to work, wheras it requires a change to the laws of physics as we know them for cryonic preservation of information to not work.
Cryonicists might not know the exact details or best approach to take, but they're at least starting from a platform of 'physics allows this'. I also have a lot of difficulty blaming them for being non-experts, given the social stigmas around cryonics and death. Expect that to change over the coming decades.
Not in the knowledge of those who used to build them. Well, technically they didn't have a concept of "laws of physics", but obviously they had a system of epistemic beliefs which had to take into account the undeniable observation that aeroplanes full of goods appeared at some point.
These people didn't really understand the phenomenon, but it was very emotionally relevant to them, hence they tried to elicit it using an irrational, ritualistic, approach.
This statement is logically unsupported:
At the current state of knowledge, we can't prove that the known laws of physics make cryonics impossible, much like we can't prove that they make many kinds of medical snake oil, including the literal snake oil, impossible (*). This however, doesn't imply that we can prove that the known laws of physics make cryonics possible.
"We didn't find a proof that X is inconsistent with Y" =/=> "There is a proof that X is consistent with Y"
Specifically, cryopreservation is obviously not a mechanically reversible process, therefore it doesn't preserve all the physical information in the brain.
The question is whether it preserves the information which is relevant to the individual psychology of the person, the "self".
Neurobiologists and cryobiologists, the people who actually know what they are talking about, seem to be skeptical about it.
It is possible that cryonics might end up working, but if it doesn't it certainly doesn't imply that we need to update the known laws of physics.
No, they start from a platform of 'you can't prove that this doesn't work'. Which is much like 'you can't prove that there is no god', or 'you can't prove that the cargo planes will not land on my mock airstrip'.
Cryonics is 50 years old. During all this time it has never gained substantial acceptance among domain experts. In fact, actual cryobiologists went from mildly sympathetic towards cryonics to outright critical.
It seems to me that the most likely explanation for the alleged social stigma is that cryonics has earned a reputation of being a shady and questionable business run by people who, at best, don't know what they are doing, and at worst, are deliberately scamming gullible folks.
(* Hell, strictly speaking we can't even prove that the laws of physics imply that cargo cults don't work!)