>For those unlucky enough to have a terminal condition (and regardless of progress there will always be some), or riddled with chronic conditions and infirmity, let's allow them to pass with dignity, when and how they choose.
I'm all for that, after all one can decide what to do with his/her life and how to end it. But I think it would be much more fair to give people another choice: being cryopreserved. Sounds futuristic, but I don't see anything futuristic in storing humans in a tank of liquid N2. The technology to do this on scale is half a century old.
Of course euthanasia is cheaper than cryo, and that makes us ask ourselves another unpleasant question: What is the real market value of human life? Is it really lower than the price of infrastructure for preserving humans in liquid nitrogen?
I can speak only for me. I don't want to be an anachronism in some distant future. We're a very long way from cryo being a viable solution anyway. Bring a formerly healthy rat back, then we'll talk. :)
Consider how our current world would treat people from the 18th or 19th C. Would it be endless media titilation, Buzzfeed memes of 20 things you didn't know about Bob the Victorian? Would there be the discrimination akin to how we treat indigenous or third world peoples? Would we help Bob the Victorian to get fully up to speed with society, or just see a curiosity?
Um? Sorry for being frank, but: are you saying you would commit suicide if the world were more confusing? In any case, I doubt that our future civilization would be at a total loss to help "anachronisms" transition into a surprising world.
>Bring a formerly healthy rat back, then we'll talk.
As the saying goes: That is like a terminal ill patient refusing to get into the ambulance because "I don't want to be in an ambulance here, I want to be in the hospital; call me when the ambulance is at the hospital, then maybe I'll get in."
I'm sure the society of the future will be way more humane than the current one, or at least not worse. I don't consider it as a problem.
About rat, you have a point, but there was recent experiment where cryopreserved rabbit kidney was successfully reimplanted and worked as intended. Also there was a recent brain preservation competition, and the winning method was shown by SEM microscopy to preserve very fine synaptic structure. You can google these things if you are interested (I won't post the links to avoid looking like a shill or a fanatic).
Looks like a better alternative to 20k$ (as was said earlier in this thread) euthanasia + perhaps 10k$ for funeral expense.
I'm all for that, after all one can decide what to do with his/her life and how to end it. But I think it would be much more fair to give people another choice: being cryopreserved. Sounds futuristic, but I don't see anything futuristic in storing humans in a tank of liquid N2. The technology to do this on scale is half a century old.
Of course euthanasia is cheaper than cryo, and that makes us ask ourselves another unpleasant question: What is the real market value of human life? Is it really lower than the price of infrastructure for preserving humans in liquid nitrogen?