Cryogenics?

[oletheros]

I have a general question: how likely is it that bunkers storing cryogenically frozen people from the late 20th Century (pre-Twilight) would survive all the way to 2320?

Follow-up question: how likely is it that science in 2320 has the ability to bring cryogenically frozen people back?

Personally, I'm thinking that something like that would have been an interesting project during the 2280s, but the failure rate was so high (less than one in 20 survived and less than 10% of the survivors didn't go insane/catatonic) that the whole concept was shelved.

But that still leaves the possibility for a small handful (maybe a dozen or so) people from the wrong end of time wandering around. Or is that too far out?

 

[kafka47]

Some of the brain tapping technologies allowed in the cyberpunk 2020 ruleset (which 2300AD takes liberty with) might allow for a form of life. But, perhaps, micro surgery techniques by 2320AD may have been sufficiently advanced to allow reconnection of a brain but the problem would be a thawing process. The techniques we have now are very crude by near future standards and the dangers of freezer burn and hence rendering the person a vegetable would make the whole Futurama scenario unlikely.

 

[aramis]

But, perhaps, micro surgery techniques by 2320AD may have been sufficiently advanced to allow reconnection of a brain but the problem would be a thawing process.

see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1263758.stm

They are working on the surgery now...

 

[epicenter00]

Would the bunkers have survived? Unlikely.

The biggest problem with current freezing techniques is that it's often just that. It's just frozen people. Most of them are frozen after death, usually some time after death. The mechanisms of memory are still not well understood, but I think the time that most of these people have been dead before freezing would savage their memories.

Then there's the issue that no attempt has been made to prevent the formation of ice crystals during the freezing process, something which would basically make every single cell and organelle in those cells as little more than mush as far as revivification goes. You can't really revivify a frozen steak any more than you can revivify those people.

Also, these places are businesses. They run out of money and go bankrupt and the freezers probably will get unplugged. If you're using the Twilight War scenario, well the freezers are going to thaw when the nukes drop and the power plants stop working.

For all intents and purposes modern freezing of corpses is the spirtual successor of ancient Egyptian mummifcation. We laugh today at the foolishness of the Ancient Egyptians picking the brain out of the head using a hook to store them in a jar when we know in our "enlightened" age that the sum of what we consider a person resides in the brain. While the details have changed, I think modern cryogenics is basically buoyed by the exact same desire and will prove to be about as successful in attaining immortality.

Then again, with the strides they're making perhaps in 10 or 20 years, it might be possible. That's one of the pitfalls of hard sci-fi is that reality always has a nasty habit of catching up (and then passing) it long before the predicted date. But then again, 2300 has the 200 year hiatus from rebuilding after WW3 - the game's technologies are closer to like 2050 or 2100 than 2300. Indeed, we've far surpassed the computer technologies described in 2300 already. So if you want to have formerly frozen people walking around in 2300, perhaps you could push out the Twilight War to 2015 or something.

---

Does the technology exist in 2320? Yes.

In 2320, cryogenics have certainly advanced to the point where people could be frozen and unthawed and restored to life - it's so reliable that the system in some capacity is pretty routine - it's mentioned in a 2300 module Bayern that's how most of the passengers aboard Bayern are carried. However, apparently such "low berths" aren't common on other starships - the same scenario describes how the captain of the Bayern had to resort to extreme measures for rescue during a starship accident between stars. If Traveller-style low berths were common in 2300, the captain and crew could easily just tuck themselves into low berths and send out a signal with rescue being much more inevitable since Stutterwarp ships can pick up distress signals even deep between stars (unlike Traveller).

This suggests even in 2300, such technology is somehow limited. Perhaps it's expensive, bulky, power-hungry or something similar that prevents widespread implementation. Apparently it is safe enough for people to be frozen and unfrozen multiple times in the span of even a year (making it superior to Traveller low berths). Obviously, by 2320 technology might have advanced beyond that - the commercialization of technologies pioneered by the AR-I for Bayern might have become more affordable and safer, leading to low berths aboard starships. Perhaps by 2320 it's routine to freeze people with terminal diseases that can't be treated by those on-hand. It might be common for battlefield wounded to be frozen when medicial supplies run low, or on colony worlds that lack specialized biologists when there's an epidemic. They could be stored until a treatment is found (like when medical experts from the Core could make the long trip out there and diagnose things).

---

What can you do with such people?

The people of 2320 would probably look at the crynogenics we have now in 2007 and probably shake their heads - restoring or braintapping people frozen now would probably be impossible. This doesn't mean that a some eccentric or experimental method used by someone might just work well enough by some coincidence - perhaps like injecting glycerine into the body to prevent the formation of ice crystals (something they're experimenting with now with some success). Perhaps in the future some one-off method used in desperation today might be easily reversible/cured ("Oh well, of course you've lost your tan under your neck, they used this nasty cocktail of chemicals on you and your body was hopelessly dead, but we were able to save your head by nano-purging and cloned a new body for you..."). So it's entirely plausible as a plot device that someone frozen today might be revivified (like the classic "wealthy man freezes his beautiful daughter with terminal genetic condition..." thing), but I don't think it would be widespread - not just because of the technology we're using now, but also because human greed and profit-motive is probably going to remain the same in the future. Larry Niven explored the idea with "corpsicles" in his universe of "The State" (it's discussed in a few of his books, "The Integral Trees" probably being the most well known of the titles in that universe) but basically - why would anyone thaw and revivify people and bear the expense of what would assumably be a difficult and expensive operation. What useful skills or knowledge could these people bring to bear? Dealing with their future shock? What would they do to support themselves? What job could they hold with their skills that are essentially totally outdated? Knowledge of the 20th Century might be one, but why would you need to revivify someone for that? Assuming engrams are still intact, you could tap someone's memories without bringing them back to life, and even if they had to revivify someone, you wouldn't need to revivify many people to get a fairly good idea of the history.

On the other hand, Earth/Cybertech the sourcebook describes how people feel this nostalgia for the 20th Century in 2300. Perhaps wealthy and eccentric people might revivify people from the 20th century somehow so they have a tap on the fashions and attitudes of people then to make things more "realistic." If you want to even go further, perhaps if there is some way to tap engrams, presumably there's a way to edit memories. Perhaps tucked away deep within the Trilon corporation is a VR construct of such realism it's nearly indistinguishable from reality for those in it (think Matrix) and in there, someone has rebuilt the 20th century using memories of various frozen people, then copied the people into the VR to live their lives, ignorant that they're "dead" by memory editing. Historians, the curious, and so on might observe (or even go into the VR) to live out the 20th century. It might be like some ghoulish version of the TV show "Big Brother" or the "Truman Show." After all, it might not seem ghoulish to those in 2300 who might rationalize things saying that the future shock would be too great and the people in the constructs would never recover or become productive members of society so it's better to keep them in there. It might be a fun to start what seems like a 20th century game only to have netrunners who think the sim is basically slavery break in from the outside break into the 20th century simulation and confront people (the players) and give them the Morpheus line about "everything you know is a lie..." Then escaping the sim, confronting a new life, and so on would all be elements of this. But finding new physical bodies would be the first concern... Immediate sources for ideas like that could be the Matrix movies, the Truman Show movie, and Tad Williams' "Otherland" series of books.

As always, the ultimate rule with stuff like this is: Does it serve some game/campaign purpose other than some neat garnish/windowdressing? If it does, by all means grab it and run with it. No RPG is any fun without stories and if you have a good story to tell, beg/borrow/steal/cheat/lie and everything short of murder to tell it! I've hopefully given some additional ideas and concepts.

 

[oletheros]

Epicenter -

Thanks for the input. I agree that between the Twilight War's effect on bunkers and the poor condition of late 20th Century cryogenics technology, there isn't a high chance that anyone would actually survive to 2300, much less survive in a condition that could be restored.

Having said that, a revived character makes a very good point of view individual for the contemporary reader. Of course, you have to deal with Buck Rogers jokes (except that he's a century too soon), but that's a small price, really.

My current thinking is that some agency or another researching early low berth techology might have been inspired to test their defrosting techniques on "leftovers" found in a rare bunker that was just discovered in a remote archaelogical dig in Wyoming. Most of the results ranged from bad to really bad, but a few actually lived long enough to go quietly insane. But a few survivors with the mental fortitude to survive the futureshock? From what it sounds like, this is a plausible (if not exactly probable) situation.

It's also probably not all that well-known, either. Makes you wonder what else people are doing on the down-low.

 

[epicenter00]

That cryogenics stop working once power is cut is the worst issue. Most of these places are powered by the local power grid, with a backup generator with enough power for a few days. Even if you extend the generator to months of operation, it's still not long enough to keep their charges frozen until the late 2200s. Even if it had the capacity to operate for years, given the devastation of the Twilight War, anyone who stumbled upon the site would come to the logical conclusion - divert power the needs of the living and let the dead get on with their thing. I'm not sure there's anywhere in Wyoming that remains below freezing 365 days a year to the point where the bodies wouldn't thaw out (and rot) in the intervening period.

There's a few scenarios that I think could help out here:

* Wars are very rarely sprung on anyone by surprise. There's almost inevitably a period of very bad tensions and incidents that give anyone with the will and the foresight enough time to plan. Perhaps as tensions arose, one of these companies with lots of money decided to move their charges to a place where the bodies could be kept cold indefinitely naturally. Candidates could be moving the bodies up to Alaska or Canada, boring a hole in a glacier and stashing the bodies there.

* New America. The white-supremacist survivalist organization New America gave the recovering United States decades of trouble, particularly in enclaves in the South. The founder of New America is noted to have been particularly loyal to those who supported him in the early years. It's possible some of his supports (and their families) might have had an interest in cryo-freezing after death, and to show his support, he might have kept a skeleton crew of people to set up facility in some remote area, guard it, and keep it running. It sounds extreme, but this noted as the kind of care he took in those who supported him. While it's likely that a vengeful Federal government would have probably unplugged the site when NA was finally put to rest, they might have somehow avoided that fate.

 

[G. Fieendish]

Re: Ice crystal formation....
The main problem with ice crystal formation is how quickly you can freeze a desired object....
In short, the longer it takes to freeze a person, the more likely that large ice crystals will form within the cell, causing the cell membrane to rupture on "defrosting", & destroying the cell....
Larry Niven's stories generally involved "corpsicles" being either used as a tax dodge, to avoid death related taxes, in that said corpsicle had him/herself frozen before death, or they had invested in trusts, that had done very well & or badly, depending on the story's purposes....
In addition, these stories used liquid Helium as the refridgerant of choice, whereas modern Cryogenic facilities use liquid Nitrogen, due to cost reasons.....

 

[G. Fieendish]

Re: helium
It turns out there could soon be a shortage of medical grade helium.....

 

[Colin]

By 2320, cryogenics is indeed mature. While it can be used, and is fairly safe, it suffers from a perception issue. People just don't like the idea of being frozen solid for a week. On long-range missions, especially ones with dedicated, professional personnel, that another matter. In emergency medical cases, too, it is widely accepted. But few travellers are going to let them selves be frozen solid just to save a few bucks.

 

[Anders]

I happen to know some people in the cryonics community and know a bit about their methods, so I think I can speak with some authority.

Realistically, nobody suspended before the Twilight war has any chance of survival. Today all cryopreserved people are in a few locations (Chicago, Phoenix, maybe somebody in Florida and a few in Moscow, I think). IMHO, they all are close enough to primary targets to get wiped out in a serious thermonuclear exchange. While secure, the facilities are not bunkers and will not handle nukes. Worse, the cooling method is liquid nitrogen refills every few weeks (apparently more reliable than using the power grid). Once the infrastructure breaks down and LN becomes scarce, the cryonauts end up permanently dead.

For game purposes this might be less of a problem. Cryo facilities could have been located somewhere relatively unhurt like France, Scandinavia or Japan and somehow avoided LN shortages.

Whether cryofirms could persist to 2300 is an open question; if they turn into generational "sects" where the ancestors of the generation running them currently are preserved maybe they would get enough cohesions to persist. Each generation want to help their dear parents, so they continue to run the facility and recruit new people. Lots of interesting potential here for internal feuds, fierce resistance to outside demands etc.

As for the real-world feasibility of cryonics I think it is slim - not zero, but not very certain (still, it beats being guaranteed dead). The ice crystal issue is actually manageable by using cryoprotectants that prevent crystal formation and vitrifies tissue. Cryopreserved brain tissue looks good and retains LTP (long term potentiation, the basis for memory storage) in synapses. The cracking risk is serious, and if revival is supposed to happen by some kind of gradual thawing those cracks are going to become cuts - I doubt that approach would work. A more plausible revival process would involve nanoscale reconstruction of tissues, which would fix cracks, illnesses, ageing - you name it. But that is beyond 2320 tech.

However, for game purposes I do not see a huge problem with positing that a few *really* lucky cryonauts that were preserved in the past and against all odds avoided being thawed *and* had sufficiently good preservation around now get restored by a Life Foundation project - sure, they have had most of their destroyed bodies replaced by cloned organs and their identities might be a bit fuzzy thanks to all the replacement stem cells, but they are alive and walking!

I think cryonics in 2320 is used in niche situations. Most really wounded people can be put in an automed or pentapod life support creature. Cryopreservation is a rather cumbersome procedure requiring nurses and equipment (fast cooling is necessary, but you can't just freeze from the outside, you have to pump cooling solution through the circulatory system). Cryotanks are bulky, heavy and have to be handled carefully (cracking!).

I would guess cryonics to be used mainly for 1) handling some patients with particular illnesses (since cryonics is unlikely to be mild on the body it is not what you would like to subject a very frail or very wounded patient to), 2) berths on long-range expeditions, 3) maybe a form of escape pod and 4) like now, a form of burial/insurance for the day medicine becomes *really* advanced.

For some real-world stuff that can be fun or useful for a cryonics adventure, check out the website of the cryonics company Alcor. They have some pretty in depth FAQs on the issues involved, many of which could make great adventure ideas (treasure hunts for old possessions stored in mine shafts, legal shenanigans, etc)

 

[oletheros]

However, for game purposes I do not see a huge problem with positing that a few *really* lucky cryonauts that were preserved in the past and against all odds avoided being thawed *and* had sufficiently good preservation around now get restored by a Life Foundation project - sure, they have had most of their destroyed bodies replaced by cloned organs and their identities might be a bit fuzzy thanks to all the replacement stem cells, but they are alive and walking!

that's pretty much what i was thinking when i posed the question - is it feasible for a one-in-a-billion cryonaut to show up? he would make the perfect kind of foil character for the gm to explain what has changed. of course, he wouldn't be much use past that, except as comic relief.

 

[Anders]

A cryonaut from the 20th century might have obsolete skills in most areas, but those obsolete skills are in themselves invaluable historical information. Many academics would love to know how (say) pre-Twilight everyday life, politics, economics, animal husbandry, speaking or computing was done by asking a practitioner first-hand. So much was lost in that disaster (think of the odd reconstruction of 20th century society in Charles Stross' Glasshouse - many aspects of 20th century life are known only to that level) that it would be worthwhile for many scholars to support a revival project.

Many obsolete skills will also relatively easily be upgraded - bureaucracy in 2320 is not utterly dissimilar from the year 1990, and so on. The cryonaut would be backwards like someone from a real backwater planet, but that does not preclude him or her from being a very interesting character to play.

"I don't care about Gauss coils or electronic sights; it is an assault rifle. You point that end at the enemy and press the trigger!"

"You have guinea pig meat on the pizza?!"

 

[oletheros]

at the same time, any individual who has actually been revived after three centuries is likely to become some kind of massive celebrity, even if only for a short while (attention spans being what they are). of course, that would depend on whether the reviving foundation let the general public know about their project.

in my mind, there are all kinds of angles to something like that.

 

[G. Fieendish]

"Strip nude & lie face down on the Probulator....".
Predestination officer L.Tortunaga to (accidental) 20th Century Cryonaut Martin J Fry - Futurama

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

Memory problems?

Sir, you are mistaken, not all cryonaughts go insane, the future is why some of us did it in the first place and my memory is not at all....umm........uh......my memory is fine.

Now, really, this here rifle is really, really, really a LASER? What do you mean it's powered by a flywheel?!