Cryonics is the practice of freezing the body of a person with the intent to revive them at some future date.
Briefly, the idea is that they drain off the blood and replace it with an "antifreeze" chemical, and then freeze the body at extremely low temperatures, like -130 C.
Today this is only done with people who have already died. (Back to this point in a moment.) The goal is that someday in the future, when a cure for the disease that killed the person is found, they can be thawed out, revived, and cured. Then they can live the remainder of their lives.
As of this writing (2023), there are 4 cryonics facilities in the world: 3 in the US and 1 in Russia. A total of about 250 bodies are preserved in them, and there are another 1,500 people who have signed up to be preserved when they die.
The first obvious question that I would think one would ask is, How reliable is the technology? How many people have been frozen, and then successfully thawed out and revived? The anser is ... drum roll please ... zero. No one has ever been revived from cryonic preserveration.
Advocates of cryonics routinely talk about how some day there may be cures for diseases that are incurable now. So if we can freeze someone until a cure is developed for their disease, they could then be unfrozen, cured, and go on to lead a normal life.
It may well be true that a cure for any given disease will be found someday. But unfortunately, that's the least of the problems for the frozen person.
First off, the process of freezing a body is tricky. If you just take a body and freeze it without any preparation, the freezing process results in ice crystals forming, which then break cell membranes. Almost every cell in the person's body would be destroyed. Cryonics companies try to get around this by draining the person's blood and replacing it with a "cryoprotectant", basically an antifreeze. If done right, this can prevent ice from forming. But then the chemicals in the antifreeze damage the cells. So you've just replaced one kind of damage with another.
So if you tried to freeze a living person, one way or another it would kill them. Even if the subject was willing to do that, the cryonics companies are not willing to risk being prosecuted for murder. So no one is frozen until after they have died.
All this means that reviving a frozen person requires:
#1 is not a big deal, at least in principle. Just pull them out of the freezer. Let's give them #2 also. The assumption is that we don't thaw them out until the original disease is cured, so we assume #5 is solved.
No one today has any idea how to solve #3, repairing the freezing damage.
But even if we suppose that that problem is solved, that still leaves #4, bringing the person back from the dead. Is that even possible? If medical science found a way to bring dead people back to life, that would be big news for a lot of things beyond cryonics!
On top of that, we have to suppose that the body will be successfully preserved for decades or even centuries. What if the cryonics facility is destroyed in a war or a riot? What if there's a technical problem or a power failure and the bodies all thaw out prematurely? What if the cryonics company goes bankrupt?
Those aren't hypothetical questions. The first known cryonics company, in Chatsworth California, had technical problems with several of their early subjects, and finally went broke. One of their customers was ultimately transferred to another cryonics facility. The others were thawed and disposed of in various (rather grisly sounding) ways.
I don't know what's going through the head of a person who gets himself cryonically frozen. If they think this is a sure thing, they are sadly mistaken. But maybe they're thinking, Okay, the odds may be small, but if I just have myself buried normally, there is a 100% chance that my body will rot. My chances of further life are zero, so this is better than nothing.
Someone who goes to the effort and expense of having their body frozen must be very desperate to continue living. I wonder how many believe in an immortal soul. I'd think that if you did, you wouldn't see a need to go to such efforts to extend your life. But that's just my speculation.
Which leads me to thinking about the Christian view of this. I read an article about cryonics by a Christian writer recently who said that he believed that it was impossible because it would mean that a person could live for hundreds of years, and the Bible says that people can only live to be 70 or 80. He's referring to Psalm 90:10, "The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years ..." I find that argument unconvincing. That psalm was written by Moses, who himself lived to be 120 (according to Deuteronomy 34:7.) I don't think anyone knows just when in his life Moses wrote that psalm, but it was probably after he became the leader of the Exodus, when he would already have been 80. So I don't think Moses meant that 80 was the absolute, divine limit. More likely he meant that 70 or 80 was about what someone might reasonably hope for. Indeed the fact that he said, 70, or if you are particuarly strong maybe 80, would indicate he is talking about normal expectations and not an absolute maximum.
And one could quibble about the lifespan question. Even if the frozen person was alive, he's alive in a state of suspended animation. If he lives, say, 50 years, has himself frozen frozen for 200 years, gets thawed out, and then lives another 20 years, is his total lifespan 270 years? Or is it really more like 70 years with a 200 year gap in the middle?
Money comes into this in two ways.
First, how much does it cost to be frozen? It appears to vary widely depending on which cryonics company you go to, but the answer is, Somewhere between $20,000 and $200,000. Some cryonics companies include creating a trust fund to pay for the preservation of your body indefinitely. Some offer an option of freezing only your head. That's a lot cheaper. And presumably the assumption is that if future generations develop the technology to thaw you out and bring you back from the dead, they can also put your brain into a robot or create a synthetic body.
I've seen some discussion of leaving yourself a trust fund so when they do revive you, you have a bunch of money. Some even suppose that, with the magic of compound interest, they'd be hugely rich. Like if you put $10,000 into the stock market -- surely manageable to someone about to drop $200,000 on the freezing process -- and got historically average rates of return for, say, 200 years, when you are revived you'd have $170 MILLION dollars. After adjusting for inflation.
But there are legal catches to that, in the US anyway. There's a thing called the "law of perpetuities". You can't create a trust fund that last for longer than the life of someone now living plus 21 years (exact number of years varies by state). The frozen person is biologically and legally dead. So his trust fund can't last more than 21 years.
The reason for these laws is to prevent all the nation's money from ending up in trust funds controlled by legal documents created generations ago. Without the law of perpetuities, we could find that every generation, money goes into trust funds that never comes out, and within a few generations a huge amount of money is in these trust funds and there's no legal way to get it out. And how the money is spent is controlled by a document written generations ago, that may or may not be foresighted enough to have anticipated current conditions. Half the population could end up working for someone who's been dead for 100 years.
Even if cryonics takes off, I doubt that the laws will be changed. The idea that the frozen person is preserving this money for himself wouldn't make it better. It would probably make it worse. If the whole scheme worked, we would then have a class of unfrozen billionaires controlling all the nation's wealth, in an economy that they don't even understand because technology and society have moved ahead by centuries while they were frozen. The government is unlikely to make laws to accommodate that.
I'm reminded of a science fiction story I read years ago -- I forget the title and author so I can't give proper credit -- that briefly discussed this issue. The hero is thawed from cryonics and tells the people who thawed him out how he should be a billionaire now because he left himself a trust fund. They tell him no, the government declared such trust funds illegal and dissolved them "because it wasn't fair to the heirs". Which was oversimplifying but yeah, basically the problem. And so he had nothing and under the law of the time he was required to work for the company that thawed him out to repay their costs. He was basically a slave, or at least an indentured servant.
As no one has ever been revived from cryonics, you can't really call this "science". The experiment has never been performed successfully. It is certainly very technical, but that doesn't make it science. Astrologers today use computers to make their charts, but that doesn't make astrology "scientific".
As a Christian, I believe that I will live for eternity in paradise with Christ. So getting frozen in the slim hope that maybe someday I could be revived just doesn't seem worth the bother. I think someone has to be clinging to life very desperately to try this.
© 2023 by Jay Johansen
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