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August 2, 2024 - 1:00pm
Got €200,000 to spare? Why not pay German start-up Tomorrow Bio to cryogenically preserve your entire body? After you have died, obviously. If that seems unaffordable, the company will freeze the patient’s brain for €75,000. The patient (or their brain) will be perfused with cryoprotection solution, cooled to minus 196 degrees Celsius, and stored in a giant vacuum flask of liquid nitrogen.
This is not the first company to offer such services. Hundreds of “patients” are cryogenically preserved in the US and Russia. The first person ever to have been successfully supercooled and sealed into a metal flask, Dr James H Bedford, is still suspended over 50 years later in the vaults of Alcor in Arizona, transferred after his original custodians proved unreliable and their successors got cold feet over the insurance costs.
Cheating death is an appealing idea, but here are some things to consider before signing up for the big freeze. First, though many people — and pets — have been frozen, no entire mammal has ever been successfully resurrected. The trusty nematode worm, C. Elegans, has been brought back from cryopreservation with memories intact, but the persistence of “olfactory imprinting” (aversion or attraction to chemical smells) in a simple organism is no guarantee that memories of courting a spouse, watching the Moon landings, or grandchildren’s names will be intact in a few hundred years.
A cryopreserved rabbit’s brain was thawed after a week and found to be generally intact, but the crucial step of bringing it back to life — either in a vat of chemicals or by transplanting it into a younger rabbit’s body — has not been demonstrated so far.
Meanwhile, some of the frozen few have succumbed to technical malfunction, or the demise of the company that promised them eternal rest until the resurrection of the body. While the physical self waits in a chilly limbo, the world moves on in unpredictable ways.
Ceasing to exist is never a pleasant prospect, but the popularity of betting large sums of money on the remote possibility of waking in the distant future is revealing. Why should immortality apply to someone as an individual and not to their civilisation? Why spend significant amounts of money on a gamble whose payout they’re unlikely ever to experience, instead of in the here and now? It looks a lot like giving up on the world a patient lives in, and the other people who share it, in favour of a hazily imagined, distant future world.
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SubscribeThis seems as good a place as any to mention that Walt Disney wasn’t actually cryogenically frozen.
so he will never return from the dead?
The way to cheat death is to travel back in time.
For example, I decided to travel back in time to early July 1976.
It worked! I can see photos of me, now 18 years old, enjoying the hot weather in early July 1976.
That’s more proof than cryogenics will ever have!
Who the hell is going to want to unfreeze you in 100 years?
Presumably, those who become the “frozen few” (great phrase!) choose to have themselves frozen because they have a good deal of agency in their current lives.
How much agency do they expect to have if resuscitated at some distant point in the future? By that time (for all they know) machines might have taken over all agency from humans, and decide to resuscitate in order to place into a state of permanent torture without further possibility of death; as in a zoo, for their own amusement.
There’s another name for this: Hell.
I neither believe in nor would wish for an afterlife. It would be Hell, even in Heaven.
Tired of smelling roses?
Tired of those who just can’t appreciate the preciousness of the one and only lifespan we have, and making the most of it.
There is nothing else, however much people try to convince themselves otherwise.
Life is beautiful.
If you find life beautiful then you should accept other peoples choices on such things. Their roses may smell a bit different then yours.
Cryonics won’t save you from death. Neither will death save you from taxes.
“Cheating death is an appealing idea”
Is that so? This type of sentiment is typical of a variety of right-onnery popular amongst those I term ‘post-luddites’, typically humanities oriented, interested in tech but afraid to pursue tech to and past boundaries – and it is of course a load of complete nonsense, easy to rip up, right up close and personal.
So, I throw down the following suggestions as a challenge to the author:
(i) Say in the near future biotech advances such that it becomes possible to build-in much greater longevity for humans, but only if some procedure is carried out when still a baby. So the question might then arise: would the author then make such a decision on behalf of her own children in the negative, because, you know, “cheating death is an appealing idea”?
(ii) It costs the opinion expresser nothing if they were to decide at some future date, when pro-longevity becomes possible, that they in fact quite fancy the idea of extending life and regaining youth, *specifically their own life*, when powers start slipping away and the reaper begins to beckon. Because, the option to extend life is theoretical – until that is, it becomes real and is offered to *you* on the free market.
As in: What would *you* do, if life extension is offered to *you*? At which point the option you actually take might just mark out every one of your past stances as a lie. So to keep the author honest (and free of the charge of hypocrisy) say we make the following a fantasy requirement by statute: anyone expressing such opinions about “cheating death” is automatically barred from taking up any great life extension should such become available by technological or biotechnological means at some future date. So, Ms. Author, what do you say? Game to make such a commitment?
(iii) I assume the authors parents ensured she got all the standard vaccines going when little, and I don’t doubt she took all the covid shots. What is that if not “cheating death” then? And any attempt to do the philosophical-shuffle about only wanting to maintain the normal human span in full health, is of course so much hooey, as I’m sure the author is well aware. Any such variety of faff can of course be ripped to shreds in minutes. Care to argue?
(iv) For myself, I don’t expect to cheat death, but I will take up any and every options to prolong life, should such become available. In this context cryonics is a losing game, not worth contemplating, but I have absolutely no doubt that multiple different means of prolonging life, in good health and full cognition are coming over the next few years.
Why are you attacking the author? Have you ever heard the phrase “Don’t shoot the messenger”?
I’m attacking her opinion that “Cheating death is an appealing idea” – is that not allowed?
It’s a matter of interpretation. I assumed she was making that point as a generality, i.e. “many people may think cheating death is an appealing idea” rather than making a statement of her own beliefs.
Ok, time to fess up – I read ‘appealing’ as ‘appalling’, no doubt because of some bias or other. I owe the author an apology it seems, so… Apologies.
I won’t edit my posts became no one should rewrite history when embarrassing facts come to light.
Kudos for that, and you make some excellent points in your original comment.
There is a science fiction book that goes into detail about possible outcomes and why the future should thaw popsicles. If memory serves, I can remember two. Google shows me there are lots.
Robert Heinlein’s The Door into Summer and Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines Trilogy (also a TV show) are the ones I have read that deal with cryogenics. The Door into Summer ended well, the Wayward Pines less so.
Perhaps it’s easier to be preserved in space. Of course, those who watched Star Trek TnG know there is a good chance you’ll be woken up by a pale android and his eloquent bald captain. They’ll be intrigued but quickly lose patience with your 21st century behavior. Nation states no longer exist, there is no money and people only work to better themselves and humanity. And then you suddenly realize that everyone is a communist now.