How do you want your Earthly coil laid to rest? My mom is going to be buried with her parents back in the Bronx and my dad wants to be cremated. I don't look too favorably on both of their decisions. My will has be being buried in the same cemetary as my grandparents- in rural PA... with as little fanfare as possible. What do you want done with your body when you die?
Cryonics Low-temperature preservation of humans and animals who can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. Cryopreservation of people or large animals is not reversible with current technology. The stated rationale for cryonics is that people who are considered dead by current legal or medical definitions may not necessarily be dead according to the more stringent information-theoretic definition of death. It is proposed that cryopreserved people might someday be recovered by using highly advanced future technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics
Does this mean you've already spent the $15,000 to be cryonically frozen or are you just wasting everyone's time?
I put it into my will that it should be done with proceeds from the sale of my house but who knows what my relatives are going to do with me after I'm dead.:shrug:
Who cares? Okay that might sound non-sympathetic towards someone's loss, that's not actually how I mean. What I actually mean is once you are dead then you have no capacity to care how your body is dealt with after you are "no longer alive". I mean you could be cremated, recycled, cannibalised, fed to fish, it really wouldn't matter to you, the only people that it would actually matter to are those that either mourn your loss or have to put up with bits of your body being where they shouldn't be. If I had the capacity to tell people what not to do in the event of my demise, I'd tell them "No Autopsies" (I've already been screwed with enough by some phatkat that's been making money out of me through their projects, I'm not going to let my demise give them even more data for their selfish capitalism projects. This is also the reason they can stick their organ harvesting.) As for actual "disposal", it really doesn't matter as long as it's cheap and doesn't spread disease.
I wish to be cremated, with part of my ashes scattered to the four winds. When such a feat is financially possible, I wish to have the rest of my ashes scattered amongst the stars. Either that, or lay me and my wife (when her time comes) beside each other 'neath the largest tree in the field beyond our house, where there the sun may shine on us forever.
I want to be injected with a nanite slurry that rebuilds my cells from the inside long before my "end date" arrives. This should extend my life span indefinitely. ~String
Cryonics isn't about after you die. But (luckily?) today's standards for declaring death are kind of premature. If your heart stops from multiple organ failure, that really means that you are terminal, not dead. Basically you are just declared dead when your body starts failing so badly you can't recover sustainable consciousness with any conventional treatment. But of course we know consciousness isn't the same as life, otherwise you'd be dead when you sleep at night and anesthesiologists would be murderers. It's the ability to restore consciousness that counts. Cryonics attempts to preserve this possibility... You can't really call a cryonics patient "dead" without first assuming that it fails to do so. IMHO cryonics should be considered a fundamental human right, not an oddball curiosity for losers as it is currently perceived. Rather than seeming sad and pathetic to me when people are clinging to life against all odds, I find it inspirational that they do so using rational and scientifically plausible methods, rather than resorting to baseless superstitions (or worse, just plain giving up). Even knowing there's a high chance it won't work, these individuals are willing to face the fact that it's the best chance they have and place their bets accordingly. The cost issue is not as significant as it seems. $28k isn't much if you distribute it over the course of a human life. With an 84 year lifespan you can just stuff $28/month under your mattress -- it's cheap even not accounting for compound interest. The average middle class American makes millions of dollars in their lifetime. Furthermore cryonics costs tend to scale well. As a rule of thumb, storing 1000 people costs about a tenth the amount per person... If everyone was doing it my guess is your typical cryo cost including perpetual cold storage would be in the range of buying a new computer. Anyway I haven't signed up myself yet, but I support the rights and dignity of everyone who has. That's just basic human decency if you ask me. Folks in the dewar may not be conscious at the moment, but in case they ever are I don't want to be on the side that tried to get in their way.
Just neglect to mention that cryonics usually incorporate "dis-attaching your head from your body" due to the acclimatized conditions for the brain versus other organs being different and that currently it's "irreversible" sounds a little more than terminal to me.
I've already made arrangements with the University of Tennessee, to have my body donated to their "body farm". I can't see any point rotting in a grave, or being reduced to ash, when I can be of some use to others..
I believe in a sort of odd idea of rebirth, mostly just based off of conservation of energy, whether or not there is a soul or weather it applies is up for debate, but the way I figure it the best way is to be laid to rest in a way that your being is basically recycled into something else, eventually, possibly working its way into another human over a long time. I figure cremation may be best for that idea.
I am a firm believer in the adage, "Funerals are for the living." I will let those I've left behind make the final decision about such matters. If there is no one, or they don't care, or they can't agree among themselves, I'll opt for the cheapest, greenest kind of disposal. Of course if someone else needs one of my organs they're welcome to it, but I'm already 67 and I don't know how much longer they'll keep working, even in someone else's body. When my mother died and we sorted through her stuff, we got a posthumous chuckle out of the "Organ Donor" section on her driver's license. You were supposed to check "kidneys," "eyes," etc. She wrote in: "Take anything you want." Most of my friends are musicians and I do hope they'll hold some kind of memorial service in the local bar with one of their bands performing. They've all been told to play "Highway to Hell."
