No, but you may find these references interesting.Thank you, it is good to have concrete elements.
- Tardigrades and C elegans: better than nothing but tiny (<2mm): not great to get the enthousiam of more people. I remember there was once a big animal (a lamantine?) that was frozen and defrozen within a few hours; the chemicals were too toxic to make it last longer, the physiology of the animal made it easier; does anyone know what i'm talking about?
http://www.imminst.o...ryonics_letter/
I think that suspending someone that is about to die, until he or she can be revived and made in good health (if possible for hundreds of years ;-) is the what most people would understand by cryonics (and accept a little more, if it seemed technically quite ready). I'm not sure to understand whether it is "cryonics", "suspended animation" or both.
If you suspend someone in such a manner that you can revive them whenever you want, that's suspended animation. If you suspend someone in such a state that you can't get them back, and may be uncertain about whether they can be brought back, that's cryonics.
Even if you have a technology for suspended animation (which presently we don't), you can still practice cryonics. For example, suppose you lived in time when there was reversible suspended animation, but people could only be revived if their heart was stopped for less than 10 minutes. You have a patient whose heart has been stopped for 15 minutes. Nothing can be done. The patient is considered dead to the medicine of your time. Would you place the patient in suspended animation in anticipation that 10, 20, or 50 years in the future it may be possible to revive people whose heart has been stopped for 15 minutes? If you do, you are practicing cryonics.
If you think about it, it's very likely that on the long road to developing suspended animation, a time will come when the preservation technology is good enough to be reversible by future technology even though it can't be reversed in real time. Therefore if you wait until preservation technology is demonstrably reversible before using it, then there will in hindsight be a certain population of patients who could have been saved by using earlier preservation technologies, but weren't. A policy of not preserving anyone until preservation is demonstrably reversible guarantees that nobody will be preserved fruitlessly, but also guarantees that there will be some people who could have been saved, but weren't.
Edited by bgwowk, 01 May 2009 - 08:50 PM.