Something very similar actually happened:
A janitor unplugged something because the alarm was annoying, and it destroyed decades of scientific work
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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The Far Side
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About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
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Oh hey, my alma mater. Seems kinda weird anything cryogenic could be "unplugged," since there's a fuckoff-massive tank for liquid nitrogen outside the Low building... the tallest building on campus. Though I'm pretty sure it pipes over to Walker Laboratory, a thousand feet away and a hundred feet lower. Neither building being the Ricketts lecture hall and nameless gymnasium shown in the video thumbnail. When was that picture even taken? I think '86 Field is all crisscrossed with desire paths now.
Oh hey, my alma mater. Seems kinda weird anything cryogenic could be "unplugged," since there's a fuckoff-massive tank for liquid nitrogen outside the Low building... the tallest building on campus.
The article explains it. The freezer was wired through a disconnect box that was locked to prevent anyone from turning it off, but the janitor found the circuit panel and turned off the circuit breaker.
... yeah, and it's kinda weird circuits were involved, when we have a mad-science supply of liquid nitrogen. I would have assumed that was the mechanism for keeping anything extremely frozen for decades on end.
I would have assumed that was the mechanism for keeping anything extremely frozen for decades on end.
Boy you'd think, right? Gravity-powered liquid nitrogen just makes too much sense. No, we'll make it so it won't fail unless the circuit box gets opened!
That is a bit over my head (my degree is in CompSci), but the research samples only had a 3C degree margin for error (77 to 83C) so I am assuming they had a good reason for using the setup that they had. Or maybe they were forced to accept that setup due to financial limitations.
Either way, privatization was 100% at fault here. The university wanted to cut costs (avoid paying benefits) so they outsourced the cleaning job to a private company who hired the cheapest guy they could. The outsourced company didn't understand or respect their research and the guy they hired obviously didn't either.
If you find a reliable cryonics group, that's exactly what they do. Alcor, for example, stores bodies upside down in tanks of liquid nitrogen so that if the power and backup power go out, it will still take a lot of time before the corpses defrost down to the head.
What a read lmao
Yep, that's the fun part of this whole cryogenic thing. In order for your body to make it into the 25th century or whatever, it needs to be continuously frozen for multiple centuries.
No defects, no prolonged power outages, no human errors, no your great-great-great-grandchildren deciding they don't want to pay for keeping a guy frozen they never met.
And even if your frozen body somehow makes it to the 25th century and they actually have the technology to restore your freeze-damaged body, you still need whoever's alive then, to care to actually do that thing...
That's why you gotta put the capsules in space
The unmitigated radiation outside the ionosphere would also do just as much if not more damage over time than freezing.
Burial in a nitrogen filled sealed casket on the moon then?
Or the world just fuckin ends because of capitalism and a necromancer uses your corpse to kill Gaia.
In space you need even more cooling, unless you put them on the dark side of the Moon or somehow keep maintaining an orbit that's always in shadow.
Make sure things are good and cold first, then just send into an orbit around the sun that's at a Lagrange point far enough out to stay cool.
The dark side of the moon still gets just as much light as the other side so not sure why you mentioned that one, but you're right it can be hard to get rid of heat in space if you're producing it.
You are right, not sure why I said "dark side", I was thinking of craters that are in permanent shadow (a bunch of those on poles).
freeze-damaged body
Well that part is easy! Just run 'em through the vaccuum sealer real fast and you won't have any freezer burn!
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
I'm still not gonna do it, but it's not crazy as it sounds (warning: the post I linked to is LONG. if you don't have an hour to kill, don't start reading it)
- They store the bodies upside down in tanks of liquid nitrogen so that if power and backup power go offline they still have a while before the nitrogen boils off.
- Assuming revival becomes possible, it will likely decrease in expense and difficulty as time goes on. It seems likely that at some point people would be woken up just out of curiosity or for a study, once it becomes cheap enough.
And still it is infinitely more plausible at a success than anything else...
Except maybe rejuvenation!
Making your peace with the fact that you are mortal probably still has the highest success rate.
You need to do that either way, cryonics has the goal of extending your life, not make you immortal, obviously. Even if somehow the tech works out, you are still going to die at some point, probably in a traffic accident.
This is why it should be somewhere with low ambient temperature. Like the moon.
Time for my funny story!
At my University, the CIS department had a bunch of really expensive SGI servers (Origin 2000's) together in a server room that was kept at some chilly temp, 50° or 60° or something (nothing crazy). One weekend the power went out, and while the CIS department had battery backup for the machines, facilities didn't have battery backup for the A/C. They said, afterward, that the temperature in the room climbed by 200°F within a dozen minutes, and all of the SGIs crashed. The hard drives in those were designed to be spun up exactly once - the machines, once powered up, were never powered down - and the abrupt shut down ruined all the disks. I don't know what it cost to replace them, but it was a minor financial scandal.
I loved SGI at the time. SGI shipped that model in these giant, 8'x4'x4' crates, on which they printed "TERMINATOR - THIS SIDE UP ⬆️", which in the 90's was hilarious.
A bonus, related power outage story: once a friend of our's was working on her graduate thesis; she was a graphics artist, so it was a CGI animation she'd build on a NeXTSTEP desktop. A few days before submission, some drunk ran his pickup truck into a power line pole in the middle of the night and killed the power in the off-campus housing where she lived and was currently working on her almost-complete program. The surge wiped her project - again, mid-90's, disk was expensive, tape was even more expensive, and few people did backups regularly. She was set back several months and had to submit a really early version of the film. That wasn't a funny story; it was a traumatic experience for her, and we all felt terrible about it.
Those really were some wild-west days, though, and there was some seriously sexy, entirely unaffordable, hardware out there, before everything went beige. NeXTSTEP and SGI workstations were the pinnacle of style, but even Sun offerings had some pizzaz. It wasn't until Jobs came back to Apple that computers started getting style again.
I wish companies still did things like the 'TERMINATOR' stamping on the crates. Gotta love the whimsy.
Sgi boxes were the shit, but they came with a crazy price tag. A friend bought their smallest one (indy I think) which was still quite fun even though it soon felt quite crippled compared to a basic pc with Linux.
Unrelated story, I managed to save an early model (iris 3020 iirc) from the trash and found a home for it in a technology museum. So that was nice.
Doing the work of the lord.
I wanted an Onyx for so long, until IIT no longer made any sense.
SGI was one of the good companies.
Frankly whoever proposed a hard drive that couldn't power down should've been backhanded by everyone in the room. Themselves included. Whatever team shipped that immediately evident error should've been fired. Not even "out of a cannon, into the sun." Just regular told to pack their shit.
I may have misrepresented it: they may have been able to be parked, but that required a controlled shutdown - not a sudden hardware failure. And these were supercomputers, before cheap commodity hardware took over server rooms. It was common that these would be turned on and almost never be shut off except when being replaced.
Lots of hard drives required parking and would risk running the drive if the heads weren't parked before being spun down. The design required the later of air from the spinning disks to float the heads over the disks - if you didn't park the heads before spinning them down, the heads would touch down on the disks, sometimes while there were still spinning, and scratch the surface and ruin the disk.
Thank you for the stories :)
That's quite an efficient freezer to be so big and only need up to 15A.
A well insulated freezer that never opens would use very little power once it's already cooled. The impressive bit of this comic would be large thin pieces of glass providing enough insulation.
Na those are actually screens, like the weird ones popping up in gas stations that show you ads instead of what's in the fridge
Maybe it's super efficient insulating material and the electricity is only needed to maintain the temperature.
Could be up to 220V @ 20A for that size of plug. Still pretty impressive.
A heat pump for a freezer might have a COP of 4 or 5 turning that 15A into 4 or 5 times more cooling
The electricity only controlls the LN2 solenoids.