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.

Technology is often called upon today to fill a God-shaped hole in secular societies. Those who no longer believe in the eternal life of the soul after death can instead put their faith in science and engineering, but only as an individual prospect. It might not matter that a thawed-out brain no longer recalls family and friends when after all they, and their own grandchildren, will be long gone.

There is something positive in the implicit faith in future generations to solve the many medical hurdles before a human being can be raised from super-cooled sleep. The eventual resurrection relies not only on their ingenuity and persistence, but on their altruistic willingness to continue caring for your suspended existence over centuries.

You’d better hope they will be kindly disposed towards the select few who chose to spend their spare cash on being frozen, instead of seeding a better world for generations to come. And who, exactly, is supposed to provide the younger body into which the newly-revived brain will be transplanted?

One thing seems certain: anyone who is successfully re-animated will be at the mercy of whichever doctor, scientist, or entrepreneur thaws an individual out. Perhaps brain-only patients can at least look forward to experiencing a real-life philosophical experiment. Brain in a Vat, anyone?

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