Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD
Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD 3 days ago
Lots of discussion of the morality of assisted suicide in this thread, and the circumstances under which it should be legal.
In the cryonics community, it's a common complaint that they have to wait until the patient is legally dead in order to cryopreserve, which can make it difficult to cryopreserve under ideal circumstances.
I like the idea of allowing individuals to opt for cryopreservation over end-of-life care. End-of life care costs so much money, it could even be neutral from a financial perspective.
Since cryopreservation lacks the finality of other forms of death, it could also address some of the ethical dilemmas around assisted dying. After all, a lot of end-of-life care seems to be motivated by a futile attempt to somehow delay the inevitable. From my perspective, cryopreservation seems slightly less futile.
If medical technology continues to advance, maybe in the year 2500 there will be people walking around who were born in the 1900s and can give talks about their experiences. Wouldn't that be cool? It would help a lot if just a single country to made it possible to get cryopreserved before you're legally dead.
You're talking about cryonics as if it were an established, scientifically proven and effective technology, but it doesn't work and is widely considered to be pseudoscience.
And mentioning the cost of end-of-life care is risible when your alternative is paying paying indefinite rent to a company for freezer space to keep a corpse frozen.