Death is not a topic that people like to think about, and that is just as true of healthy life extension advocates as anyone else. We have to recognise, however, that the future of healthy life extension (regenerative medicine, stem cell therapies, understanding the biochemical processes of aging, and nanomedicine, to name a few fields) will not arrive soon enough to benefit everyone. Many people are too old, or suffer from other conditions that will kill them before cures can be developed. This is an unpleasant reality that we must face.
Do we just write these people off and forge ahead regardless? Of course not. Instead, we turn to the science and business of cryonics, a serious effort to solve this problem that has been underway since the early 1970s.
What is Cryonics?Cryonics is the only option for life extension open to many older and seriously ill people: those who cannot wait for the promised therapies of the next few decades. It is the science of placing humans and animals into a low-temperature, biologically unchanging state immediately after clinical death, with the expectation that advances in medical technology may eventually enable full restoration to life and health. A small industry of cryonics providers exists to freeze or vitrify your body on death, in the hopes that future scientists (most likely using nanotechnology and nanomedicine) will be able to revive and repair you.
The practice of cryonics is an ongoing medical experiment with an unknown chance of success. Responsible cryonicists understand that cryonic suspension is an educated gamble. The chances are certainly better than zero, however, and as one wag noted, "the control group in this experiment isn't doing so well." By this, he was referring to the vast number of people who are cremated, buried or otherwise interred. The chances of any plausible future science restoring them is zero. Cryonic suspension is, after all, only the second worst thing that can happen to you.
The cryonics community is tightly knit, friendly and supportive. The community, and the industry it supports, have been ever-so-slowly growing since the early 1970s. To find out more about cryonics, you might want to peruse the following locations:
- Alcor explains cryonics
- Common myths and misunderstandings about cryonics
- Cryonics at Wikipedia
- Cryonics as an extension of metabolic arrest medicine
- The Cryonet community, archives and resources
In addition, an excellent article on the philosophy and practice of cryonics can be found here at Fight Aging!:
Cryonics has appeared in the news on a regular basis since 2003, largely thanks to the cryopreservation of baseball star Ted Williams and the ensuing high profile family fight over his will. This publicity led to local government efforts to regulate the cryonics industry, first in Michigan and then in Arizona, where the two largest cryonics providers are based. A new cryonics research group made headlines in Florida at the end of 2003, when the cryonics community rallied to try to prevent an unfavorable zoning ruling against the business. In the years since, the cryonics industry has enjoyed a higher profile in the media than before, and a greater public understanding of the core mission and science has resulted.
In addition to the publicity, long-time backers of cryonics like Saul Kent of the Life Extension Foundation are putting more money and time into pushing the cryonics industry forward into the 21st century. This makes sense for them, based on the arguments I put foward at the top of this page. They have thought long and hard about the likelihood of living long enough to benefit from the medical technologies of the future, and decided to put more effort into cryonics. One result of this renewed funding is Suspended Animation, a cryonics company that focuses more on research than providing services, another the work of Twenty-First Century Medicine towards a demonstration of reversible cryonic suspension.
How to Sign Up For CryosuspensionYou can sign up for cryosuspension fairly easily - both inside and outside the US - through one of the established cryonics providers or cryosuspension groups. You can learn more at the websites for the companies. Alcor is the largest of the providers, has the most comprehensive online information. If you have questions, pick up the phone or e-mail and ask. Company staff will be happy to help.
Cryosuspension is expensive, on a par with major surgery, but can be paid for in a cost effective manner through life insurance. You purchase a policy that pays out to the provider on your death and they take it from there. This is far and away the most common payment method for those of us who are not fortunate enough to be wealthy baseball stars, and the majority of people suspended or signed up are of very modest means.
Last updated: December 7th 2010.
I think that it is very unlikely that all neurons remain intact if you wait until you die until you perform cryogenics, does people who are terminally ill do it before they die of the disease? If you have 1-3 months OR possibility to do cryogenics it seems like it would be better to start it a month early to increase the chance of success.
A big question when it comes to Cryonics, and why I am skeptical of the whole thing, is: why would they ever wake you up? Imagine in a 100 years some major leap in medical technology would allow many cryonically suspended corpses to be revived. Lets say by that time there are tens of thousands of such people. So as the cryonics provider, even if you could afford to repair and wake up all these people, why would you? Not like they're going to sue you if you don't. Also, what do you do with them all once you wake them up? You've suddenly got tens of thousands of living, although perhaps frail and quite weak, people with no jobs, no social security numbers, nothing. Where do you find a hotel big enough to put them all in, and how do you pay to feed them all? The whole cryogenic thing is just not scaleable, and I think it's highly unlikely anyone would ever wake me up even if the science would allow me to be woken up and repaired.
@Phil: You have to bear in mind that any society capable of reviving these patients will have undergone many profound changes outside the immediate scope of biomedical technology. These changes will be such that they tend to alleviate conditions of scarcity, for instance. Molecular nanotechnology and nanorobotics would allow not only reconfiguring the cells of cryogenic patients but reconfiguring and reorganizing all manner of matter into useful form, while powered by abundant energy from the sun or from nuclear fusion.
Cost and productivity become meaningless concepts when nothing is scarce, and people (or sapient beings of any kind) in such a state are left to pursue their own passions and interests. You can hardly deny that there are people today who would put forth a nominal effort for the sake of reviving these patients if possible, and why would we think the future should lack this de minimis form of beneficence?