This is sad news, but less sad than a funeral and cremation would have been. I met Hal in the 1990s via the cypherpunks list, where a young Julian Assange was also hanging out. Hal went on to work for PGP Corp. in its glory days, and was involved in the early stages of Bitcoin as well. He is (not was!) the consummate cypherpunk and extropian.
A lot of those discussions have been lost to time, but here's a note from Hal that I posted to Politech in 1999 where he warned against building surveillance backdoors in Internet standards:
http://seclists.org/politech/1999/Oct/24
"If the IETF sets the precedent of acceding to the wishes of countries like the US and Europe, it may find itself forced to similarly honor the desires of less open societies."
And here's Hal responding to one of my Wired articles by pointing out the absurdity of the MPAA's claims against Napster:
http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.1Q01/3833.html
"Looking at it over the history of Napster the amount would have to run
well into the quadrillions. Surely this would be the largest legal
claim in history! I wonder if the record companies can present this
figure with a straight face."
I'll miss Hal. At least there's a very slim, but non-zero, chance he'll log back on again.
It's fascinating, and personally a bit disturbing, to read about his death as an announcement of cryopreservation ("being cryopreserved now") instead of the sad news it is anyway ("died today"). Also the discussion here revolves around he coming back, not he leaving.
Maybe it impresses me because he seemed so hopeful to be able to choose life in his post back then when he was diagnosed: "I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living." http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/
I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope. Anyway, I'd like to write down a regular epitaph:
Hal Finney (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014), second PGP developer after Zimmerman, first Bitcoin recipient, cypherpunk who wrote code.
It sounds from the language used ("he did not want his vital functions supported any further but should be allowed to cease functioning and promptly be cryopreserved") that he didn't regard this moment as death at all - merely pausing his life until a) ALS is curable and b) we have the technology to reawaken cryopreserved people.
To him, all that was worth announcing here is the cryopreservation.
Hal was one year ahead of me, and the next dorm room over at Caltech. Hal was scary smart - but you had to get to know him for a while before you'd find that out. He was completely unpretentious, just a regular guy.
And a great person - I never knew anyone who had anything but good things to say about Hal. It was a privilege to know Hal.
Hal Finney was one of the best people on the cypherpunks list -- wrote frequently, great developer, involved in some of the most interesting products of the past 30 years. He was also remarkably friendly and civil, even more amazing in a place like the cypherpunks list. A really great person, and will be missed. (but hopefully only for a few decades until the reverse-cryopreservation thing is worked out...)
Interesting that someone would choose to be cryopreserved somewhere where there's no legal assisted suicide. Wouldn't your chances of being successfully revived improve if you got cryopreserved while still alive?
The cost of this would have been much greater, and present organizations are not really set up to transport people already cryopreserved, so doing it ad hoc would be especially expensive. Transport when it does happen tends to be a packaged in dry ice type of deal, with final procedures happening on site on arrival, potentially a day or two later in the case of long distances. Alcor recommends that those who can predict their end of life date with any accuracy move to be close to their HQ. A good cryopreservation, all other factors being equal, is all about time to fully vitrified for important tissues. Regulation makes that enormously difficult on one hand, but transport is also a real logistics hurdle.
Also, in Finney's case the condition he suffered allowed for more self-willed timing in these matters than is usually the case. It isn't a pleasant thing to have to do to yourself by any means, but that is what it comes to when it is government employees who are the people who decide on every aspect of your life, not you. One recommendation from people in the cryonics industry in the past has been that when you are on the final downward spiral to stop eating and drinking so as to time the end yourself and thus ensure much better odds of a good preservation, organized and timely. Very rational, as the time from death to vitrification is so very critical, but again something forced upon people by uncaring bureaucrats and laws that prevent self-determination in end of life decisions.
There is a post on the front page right now http://www.gentweb.co.uk/wirerecorder.htm about re-constructing some old wire recordings just to listen to the past. Imagine the opportunity to bring the person themselves back, instead of just audio.
I think if technology advances sufficiently that it is "easy" and "cheap" enough, people will resurrect cryo-preserved patients just because it suits them to do so.
If I had a button I could push that would bring someone who died in 1800 back to life, I would push it.
I believe I'm not the only person who feels this way, either.
Well, you make a contract and pay money to the company that cryopreserves you. They could screw you over after you die, but that would be bad for their reputation and they could be sued.
If there were no government or Friendly AGI doing it for everyone, I imagine it would chain backward through time: those still alive who are friends and family of the cryo-preserved would resurrect them. Then, those people would know older cryo-preserved people, and would resurrect them. (Unless, I suppose, the cost were exorbitant and the cryo-resurrected didn't have the means. But this is a future, post-death, probably post-singularity world; it'd probably be a society of abundance.)
A legally binding contract might do it. Or, there might be some fund that accrues interest over time to pay for the procedure. If neither of those options exist, then I suppose the first people to be revived would be in the name of science ("Let's do it just to prove that we can.") Then, I suppose anyone who's revived after that would be useful from a anthropological/historical perspective. Imagine having firsthand sources from different time periods.
Self-interest. In order to preserve the continued success of the Alcor company.
In order for people to continue buying cryogenic services, the company would have to be able to demonstrate that it's actually doing what it claims to do (keep the bodies frozen and stable). As soon as that stops, nobody would ever trust them with any business, ever. And as soon as revival is possible, it becomes the cheapest option, versus incurring the ongoing costs of preservation.
Once we've defeated death, reviving people who were preserved is the next logical step after saving everyone currently alive. Saving everyone who was not cryopreserved might not be possible, but will also be worth a shot.
I knew Hal back in the early days of remailing (94-96) where he ran several remailers and I had one nestled within the hidden confines of Indiana University (the gondolin remailer).
The thing I don't understand is how circulating cryoprotectant chemicals through the brain doesn't destroy the tissue. How could anything other than blood safely circulate through the brain?
As long as pressure, osmotic balance, pH, etc are in balance then it's not going to cause cellular trauma per se.
Regardless of the fluid medium, a bigger problem is absence of oxygen is going to start the process of autolysis after cell death. Neurons are particularly vulnerable, which how people can become brain dead within 5-10 minutes under normal circumstances.
The even bigger problem is cellular damage from the freezing process. Proponents of this sort of thing would say the "cryoprotectant" chemicals vitrify, so the massive small scale trauma from ice crystal formation is prevented. I'm not sure anything has ever been reanimated after this process, nor do I foresee a technology capable of allowing it.
Finally, and maybe the biggest problem, it is hard to see technological cure for advanced ALS. It is a structure problem with demyelination causing the symptoms. Even if you could correct the underlying source of myelin cell death/inflammation, it's very difficult to imagine a restoration process that results in viable life.
Anyway, probably more than you wanted to hear. This is just kind of sad, and reminds me this is a young forum on the whole that probably isn't too in tune with their own mortality (this is not directed at anyone, so I'd prefer nobody respond personally to it). He is dead, he lived well, there will be nobody else quite like him.
Ancillary to the sad news, for a fictional treatment of cryopreservation (circa 1993) -- one that I couldn't help think about as I read that email/release -- Gregory Benford's novel, Chiller, works through many of the thought-provoking implications. http://www.gregorybenford.com/product/chiller/
Halperin's The First Immortal is damned near a written infomercial for Alcor, but is still a pretty interesting book in its own right in terms of exploring various cryonics scenarios.
I'm surprised nobody has made the point that "death" is not a binary thing - it is a progression. If we consider a scale where "1" is alive (breathing, heart beating, higher brain functions working, etc) and "0" is when your brain has been unambiguously destroyed, we have a probability distribution of whether a person can be returned to "1".
At one time if someone left "1" (e.g. heart stopped), that was pretty much it. Now we can often recover someone whose heart has been stopped for several minutes with little to no long term damage through medical intervention. A cryonic procedure pushes a person to a place on the scale where the probability distribution provided by current technology is a big fat zero. There is some hope that as technology advances that probability distribution will look favorable to the those frozen. We're pretty much just guessing about that last part though.
I didn't know Hal Finney, but condolences to his family.
Comparing different religions' various flavors of afterlife is very interesting, but perhaps this isn't the right forum for it (though maybe it is; I don't know). One thing is certain, though: cryonics's promise of an afterlife is definitely the most materially expensive of all religions -- on average, that is (some Christians spent what probably amounts to more than the cost of cryopreservation to expunge their sins). It is also the most strictly transactional since Catholicism prior to the reformation. The burial practice itself, however, bears a lot of resemblance to ancient Egyptian religion, and probably some other religions of antiquity.
It's just a commoditization. Religion will charge what they think they buyer will be able to afford, cryopreservation companies charge what they think it should cost to get the problem pushed beyond their own lifetimes.
It's a scam, but a very clever one, just like religion. The only mitigating factor to me is that the participants here go in eyes wide open rather than that they are sucked in as defenceless children.
Sad, and in a way beautiful (I hope that's not an inappropriate word to use), at the same time. This man lived his life to the full, and faced the end of his life (as he has known it), with the courage of an adventurer.
I must admit i had never heard of the man himself, although I do know of bitcoin. But I am humbled by how he is smiling in all of his pictures, despite his physical body slowly giving up on him; his wife constantly by his side, through thick and thin.
I get the impression that Hal would have been a genuinely nice man to know. His life and the way he has faced his challenges head on is (should be) an inspiration to all.
Seeing people going all "cryonics is another religion" saddens me in a way. It's a tragedy that we've learned to accept mortality to the point that as a species we're not only unwilling to try and fix it, we're calling those few who try nutcases.
Even if current cryonics won't work, how about focusing on trying to find another, better way to fix death, instead of throwing the towel and sneering?
[+] [-] declan|11 years ago|reply
A lot of those discussions have been lost to time, but here's a note from Hal that I posted to Politech in 1999 where he warned against building surveillance backdoors in Internet standards:
http://seclists.org/politech/1999/Oct/24 "If the IETF sets the precedent of acceding to the wishes of countries like the US and Europe, it may find itself forced to similarly honor the desires of less open societies."
And here's Hal responding to one of my Wired articles by pointing out the absurdity of the MPAA's claims against Napster:
http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.1Q01/3833.html "Looking at it over the history of Napster the amount would have to run well into the quadrillions. Surely this would be the largest legal claim in history! I wonder if the record companies can present this figure with a straight face."
I'll miss Hal. At least there's a very slim, but non-zero, chance he'll log back on again.
[+] [-] FiloSottile|11 years ago|reply
Maybe it impresses me because he seemed so hopeful to be able to choose life in his post back then when he was diagnosed: "I may even still be able to write code, and my dream is to contribute to open source software projects even from within an immobile body. That will be a life very much worth living." http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ab/dying_outside/
I guess one can argue it is a good thing about cryonics, less mourning, more hope. Anyway, I'd like to write down a regular epitaph:
Hal Finney (May 4, 1956 – August 28, 2014), second PGP developer after Zimmerman, first Bitcoin recipient, cypherpunk who wrote code.
[+] [-] brey|11 years ago|reply
To him, all that was worth announcing here is the cryopreservation.
Who's to say he's wrong?
[+] [-] pron|11 years ago|reply
Not more so than in some other religions with their own versions of an afterlife. It all depends on your faith.
[+] [-] cousin_it|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|11 years ago|reply
And a great person - I never knew anyone who had anything but good things to say about Hal. It was a privilege to know Hal.
[+] [-] rdl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mef|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reasonattlm|11 years ago|reply
Also, in Finney's case the condition he suffered allowed for more self-willed timing in these matters than is usually the case. It isn't a pleasant thing to have to do to yourself by any means, but that is what it comes to when it is government employees who are the people who decide on every aspect of your life, not you. One recommendation from people in the cryonics industry in the past has been that when you are on the final downward spiral to stop eating and drinking so as to time the end yourself and thus ensure much better odds of a good preservation, organized and timely. Very rational, as the time from death to vitrification is so very critical, but again something forced upon people by uncaring bureaucrats and laws that prevent self-determination in end of life decisions.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|11 years ago|reply
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/DoraKentCase.html
[+] [-] eudox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blake8086|11 years ago|reply
I think if technology advances sufficiently that it is "easy" and "cheap" enough, people will resurrect cryo-preserved patients just because it suits them to do so.
If I had a button I could push that would bring someone who died in 1800 back to life, I would push it.
I believe I'm not the only person who feels this way, either.
[+] [-] cousin_it|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelkeenan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zheshishei|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbarham|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eudox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeoxyS|11 years ago|reply
In order for people to continue buying cryogenic services, the company would have to be able to demonstrate that it's actually doing what it claims to do (keep the bodies frozen and stable). As soon as that stops, nobody would ever trust them with any business, ever. And as soon as revival is possible, it becomes the cheapest option, versus incurring the ongoing costs of preservation.
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donohoe|11 years ago|reply
I'd love to hear your story!
[+] [-] harshreality|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haakon|11 years ago|reply
If you haven't read his post "Bitcoin and me", now is a good time. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0
[+] [-] strlen|11 years ago|reply
The article -- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129623.000-gunshot-v...
HN discussion with some insightful commentary -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7477801
[+] [-] bryanstrawser|11 years ago|reply
He will be missed.
[+] [-] owenversteeg|11 years ago|reply
Either way I just set my topcolor to 000000. Seems it doesn't take hex triplets.
[+] [-] shocks|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerovistae|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3am|11 years ago|reply
Regardless of the fluid medium, a bigger problem is absence of oxygen is going to start the process of autolysis after cell death. Neurons are particularly vulnerable, which how people can become brain dead within 5-10 minutes under normal circumstances.
The even bigger problem is cellular damage from the freezing process. Proponents of this sort of thing would say the "cryoprotectant" chemicals vitrify, so the massive small scale trauma from ice crystal formation is prevented. I'm not sure anything has ever been reanimated after this process, nor do I foresee a technology capable of allowing it.
Finally, and maybe the biggest problem, it is hard to see technological cure for advanced ALS. It is a structure problem with demyelination causing the symptoms. Even if you could correct the underlying source of myelin cell death/inflammation, it's very difficult to imagine a restoration process that results in viable life.
Anyway, probably more than you wanted to hear. This is just kind of sad, and reminds me this is a young forum on the whole that probably isn't too in tune with their own mortality (this is not directed at anyone, so I'd prefer nobody respond personally to it). He is dead, he lived well, there will be nobody else quite like him.
edit: fyi, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_substitute (though again, this differs because the cryopreserving fluid is selected because of its properties when freezing)
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdnier|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geoelectric|11 years ago|reply
Edit: looks like it's available freely online: http://coins.ha.com/information/tfi.s
[+] [-] ajb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onan_barbarian|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryan-c|11 years ago|reply
At one time if someone left "1" (e.g. heart stopped), that was pretty much it. Now we can often recover someone whose heart has been stopped for several minutes with little to no long term damage through medical intervention. A cryonic procedure pushes a person to a place on the scale where the probability distribution provided by current technology is a big fat zero. There is some hope that as technology advances that probability distribution will look favorable to the those frozen. We're pretty much just guessing about that last part though.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death
[+] [-] pron|11 years ago|reply
Comparing different religions' various flavors of afterlife is very interesting, but perhaps this isn't the right forum for it (though maybe it is; I don't know). One thing is certain, though: cryonics's promise of an afterlife is definitely the most materially expensive of all religions -- on average, that is (some Christians spent what probably amounts to more than the cost of cryopreservation to expunge their sins). It is also the most strictly transactional since Catholicism prior to the reformation. The burial practice itself, however, bears a lot of resemblance to ancient Egyptian religion, and probably some other religions of antiquity.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
It's a scam, but a very clever one, just like religion. The only mitigating factor to me is that the participants here go in eyes wide open rather than that they are sucked in as defenceless children.
[+] [-] morpheous|11 years ago|reply
I must admit i had never heard of the man himself, although I do know of bitcoin. But I am humbled by how he is smiling in all of his pictures, despite his physical body slowly giving up on him; his wife constantly by his side, through thick and thin.
I get the impression that Hal would have been a genuinely nice man to know. His life and the way he has faced his challenges head on is (should be) an inspiration to all.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
Even if current cryonics won't work, how about focusing on trying to find another, better way to fix death, instead of throwing the towel and sneering?
[+] [-] cowmix|11 years ago|reply
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/354/m...