Maybe We Can Bring Them ALL Back
I'm tired of living in a deathcult vending machine. Why aren't you?
I am sick to death of humanity pretending like death and decrepitude are a surprise and then imbuing the dead and the grieving with immunity to prevention scolding. Just to get that out of the way, because we have the technology to try and people really act like death isn't a thing and then get all kinds of pity when that action leads to it. It's frankly infuriating because society is basically going to shrug its shoulders and say thems the breaks when I finally start losing immediate family.
And it is denying me access to the freeze tanks because money and training. Mythology is going to make something impossible to endure even harder. And for what? Well, bank profit, like always. If people cared about dying they wouldn't risk it for crumbs and pennies and clicks would they, and then the whole thing implodes.
The only way western civ can run is lubed with human blood.
The Human Sacrifice Lottery in Action
Our society is a death cult vending machine. And I have two works that best capture this reality. The first is the human sacrifice lottery, and the second is my cryonics debate question. Every time we accept human drivers instead of automated vehicles or trains, knowing with statistical certainty that X number will die in crashes, we've collectively agreed that inertia and profit are worth paying randomly selected lives. Every time we underfund safety research or preserve systems that predictably generate suffering, we're feeding the machine.
This extends to our death taboos. We treat mortality like a cosmic mystery instead of an engineering problem. The anomaly goes deeper than individual resistance to the idea. As I've explored in my cryonics research, there's something uniquely strange about how little cultural space cryonics occupies. People will try anything to cure cancer at the last minute, but freezing for future revival? That's somehow beyond the pale.
The contrarian impulse alone should have generated a "punk rock cryonics" movement by now. Where are the death-defying rebels? Where's the fuck-you-dad-I'm-freezing-my-head crowd? The silence is anomalous and suggests something deeper than suppression, whether conscious or unconscious.
The Digital Resurrection Project
But now we have a new way to fight death at least at the social level, that while cold comfort for the corpses involved, is still potentially very enriching and healing for us poor bastards still in line at the gallows.
AI is already at a place where it can be trained on a person's recorded history and emulate them to a high degree, like the scene in POI. “My approximation of Samantha Groves is 99.6% accurate. We are virtually indistinguishable. I find comfort in that.”
People talk about missing Alan Rickman for instance and I'm like, we don't have to miss him. He's iconic. And by virtue of that very iconic nature he can be satisfactorily emulated. It's easier to impersonate the iconic convincingly. They have a distinct flavor to capture.
We can similarly holodeck most people at this point, it's just a matter of compute and prompts. The church of intellectual property law is already trying to monetize and prevent this. So it will have to be done "criminally" case by case locally.
The Manhattan Project for Human Flourishing
I'm about to hit send on this rather than clean it up because why bother? Like why do I bother typing? No one will listen well enough to change things, it's like the old catch: If death and pain can't convince you to fight death and pain, then what chance does my drivel have? Look at history. No society has ever really tried to solve death and pain. Not overtly, except maybe the Egyptians or the ancient chinese on the word of a specific emperor.
I picture a space program/manhatten project/hoover-three gorge dam/ww2 manufacturing tier project where the whole aim is prevent extreme instances of pain first, and master cryonic or some other preservation for future revival. (Controlled desiccation like a water bear's tun state maybe?) And that's just for starters.
From there it's about working our way down according to reality repair theory until as David Pearce puts it the last instance of suffering becomes a precisely dateable event.
The Cryonics Anomaly as Diagnostic Tool
The strange cultural silence around cryonics serves as a diagnostic for deeper pathologies in how we process mortality. The fact that this obvious-seeming technology doesn't generate massive debate (not even significant opposition) suggests something beyond normal risk aversion or religious objection.
Consider the Drake Equation approach: Start with the total population, subtract those unaware of cryonics, then the religiously opposed, then the afraid, then the financially unable. Even after all those filters, the remaining cultural footprint should be orders of magnitude larger than what we observe. The silence is systematic enough to suggest either unconscious psychological suppression or active cultural management or something else entirely.
This anomaly matters because it reveals how thoroughly our death cult programming runs. We can't even properly discuss the alternatives, let alone consider implementing them.
Why This Matters Now
The convergence of AI capabilities with digital preservation technologies means we're at a unique historical moment. For the first time, we can potentially rescue some essence of the already gone while simultaneously building systems to prevent future losses. Not to mention throw AI at the technical reanimation and repair problems. The tools exist; the barriers are artificial.
Every day we delay implementing these systems, more people get fed into the meat grinder of "natural" death. Every day we maintain the artificial scarcity around life extension technologies, we're actively participating in the human sacrifice lottery.
Reality Repair Theory tells us that suffering is the most trustworthy signal that reality is broken. The fact that we treat death as inevitable instead of as a bug to be fixed represents one of the largest reality distortions in human history. It's time to treat it as such.
The question goes deeper than whether we can bring them all back. Do we have the courage to stop pretending that death is natural when it's really just unoptimized? The death cult vending machine keeps running because we keep feeding it coins instead of unplugging the damn thing.
Maybe it's time to pull the plug on something other than grandma and grandpa.
Links:
https://underlore.drj.ch/solutions-and-the-human-sacrifice-lottery/
https://github.com/Innomen/RealityRepairTheory/blob/main/reality_repair_theory_manifesto.md