The Sunday Evening Update proudly welcomes one of the world's foremost experts in medical physics and cryobiology Dr. Brian Wowk on Sunday July 5th at 6pm eastern, 2200 GMT. The interview will focus mainly on cryonics - the state of the science and sociological concerns.

Nice, right on time too. Cryonics is stirring in the air more because of Jackson. This is a good time to latch on againg and excellerate this part of the meme.

cool, I'll be there

Haven't been to these updates in a while..this one sounds interesting though. I really want to here some more positive things on cryonics working.

This is a fine video, and thank you Brian. Aubrey's book "Ending Aging" is great and just explains it all so clearly. I recommend reading it.

Dr. Wowk is a long-time Imminst advisor on cryonics and gave a very informative presentation about the vitrification process at the 2005 Imminst conference in Atlanta.

Link to video here. It is a good refresher course for anyone who will be attending the show this Sunday.

Rsvp here if you can. It will inspire more to do the same. We want to try to grow this show if possible. This cryonics show is important. All these shows are important.

Make this a weekly thing, help promote this show, consider hosting some sort of show for the cause at this imminst.org/tv page of your own. This is a fun easy way to get involved, and its the kind of thing that will keep people hooked more and longer once we get this show to really take hold. Once we cross a certain small ratings threshold then it will take hold. It wont take much. Lets do this.

Attend them when you can, and sign on as a promoter, or create a show if you are looking for a way to get involved.

I have some questions. The background is that I never had any good feeling about cryonics. On the positive side, archiving some form of essential information about who I am / was is becoming appealing one way or another. The reason for this is (yuck) that I had quite a brutal accident (crashed my car against a tree with considerable velocity) a few weeks back so that I'm very happy to still be healthy as ever. In fact, I should be very happy to be alive at all, thanks to a good car, a considerable dose of luck and a healthy body of coarse. But it makes you think....

I'm still catching up on the matter, but I have some questions (that could be considered novice ones I guess) about what to look into when trying to find a solution that could be initiated in the next few years. I'm located in the Netherlands, so any form of required infrastructure for fast reaction times is absent or at an undesirable level combined with high costs.

I guess this starting point could be relevant to other not-to-hard-core-cryonists as well.

I'm considering the following levels of preservation, regardless what is considered "good practice" now or even in the near future. My knowledge is just not up to par yet.

1.
Get offspring......

2.
Archiving my DNA structure. Thoughts: this could be done today in all possible peace! (If technology allows, that is) Although the consequence is that my life will be lost ultimately since my memory will not be archived / preserved. But I eventually could be cloned.

3.
Preserving my brain (cryo or chemo?). Thoughts: All the relevant information about my life will be archived. Maybe not preserved since the technology to revive the information from the brain, let alone use it in a functional way, is not present.

4.
Full body preservation (I guess cryo would be the only viable option now). The idea still induces some form of science-fiction context, hence scepticism... And in case reviving would be possible eventually, I don't know if I would prefer a new cloned body instead of my hopefully old one, maybe a clone containing my old memories. But for that 2 and 3 could be sufficient. Would the high costs of full body preservation, that would possibly archive all the information possible, be cost effective.....

In a way, I just don't think option 4 would lead to reviving my entire body so that I could continue living at some point in time.... Focus would be on information storage in an efficient and effective way, hence option 2 or a combination of 2 and 3.

Where am I going wrong in my thoughts here?

Thanks!

This post has been edited by Brainbox: Jul 2 2009, 09:41 PM

You crashed your car into a tree? Thats horrible. Thats like Michael Jackson is dead, to world news, as it is to us here. You should open a topic detailing it, if you want to.

Im getting more and more interested in cryonics too. Good point about the brain vs. body. I think Im leaning that way now too. The information and program preservation is what is most important. Ive never had a good feeling about it either. The freezing arguements didnt convince me before. I felt it would be like Icarus trying to fly to the sun. But in a world of exponential accelleration in a place where it is, it seems like maybe we have evolved up through the Copernicus and Gagarin and Glen and Armstrong phases of this already. The understanding of freezing and its possible capabilities seem to be getting better all the time. If we sign up, chances are that by the time we possibily die that the freezing will be done much better.

Based on this then, a question I have is, what was the quality of freezing like 10 years ago, 3 years, ago, now, and what does the future of freezing technology look like?

Ive always thought this was important. Ive just always been poor, and thought that radical research strategies now was what was most important. Although, now Im hoping to get some life insurance with cryo with in the next 5, hopefully less, years. I still think working to see if we can get radical strategies in our life times is most important though.

Short Wikipedia article on Dr. Wowk.

So long as my connection holds up, I'll be there. Without sounding too ignorant, though, how do we actually join the conversation on Sunday?

Thanks for asking the question Boondock!

The show occurs here at Ustream.

Just below the video feed is an IRC chat box. Unfortunately due to recent prolific spamming in IRC chats, Ustream has made it a requirement that you register (free) before you can participate in the text chat. Before the show, I will try to implement an IRC code that removes this restriction, but I can't guarantee it will be successful. I recommend participating in the chat and asking questions as the interview rolls along. There have been many great discussions with researchers and leading advocates over the past 16 months of the show.

Awesome, cheers Mind.

One of the questions I will ask is about the current state of vitrification solutions. Are there any new and less toxic preservation fluids on the horizon?

Show coming up in about 3 hours. If you can't attend live then place your questions in the forum here.

This show is coming up at the end of this hour, tell your friends.

You can find it through a variety of sources including imminst.org/tv

I put in a code to enable the IRC text chat, but if you find that you cannot post a question in the Ustream chat, then you will have to register with Ustream.

As expected, Dr. Wowk provided a lot of great information about the current state of cryonics, the physical science and social considerations.

If you are interested in how things are progressing in the field of cryonics this would be a good program to view. Direct link to the video here.

the video is a bit long and not necessarily obvious to hear.
it would be nice if someone could write a summary of the main technical achievements and current limits.

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