People we thought were dead 50 years ago we now know were not. Cryonics is the same thing, we just have to stop them from getting worse and let a more advanced technology in the future fix that problem.
Of course, the premise of cryonics also makes it essentially untestable. Nobody has ever tried to bring a human back to life after preservation. But whether the science is there or not, people are being frozen in liquid nitrogen with the hope of seeing some distant tomorrow.
Ideally, More says, the company will have an idea of when their members are going to die. First, the standby team transfers the patient from the hospital bed into an ice bed and covers them with an icy slurry. They then administer 16 different medications meant to protect the cells from deteriorating after death.
In the operating theatre, the body is treated to avoid freezing damage, and the head removed if requested Courtesy of Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Then a surgeon opens up the chest to get access to the major blood vessels, attaching them to a system that essentially flushes out the remaining blood and swaps it with medical grade antifreeze.
Eventually the body finds its final home for the foreseeable future: upside down in a freezer, often alongside three others. This is the ideal scenario. Cryonicists believe that technology will sufficiently advance to a point where cells can be rejuvenated and the aging process reversed.
In practice, legally deceased patients arrive at a cryonics facility packed in ice. Cryonicists interrupt the dying process by draining the blood from the body and perfusing the corpse with a mixture of antifreeze and organ-preserving chemicals, known as cryoprotective agents. The body is then transformed into a vitrified state and lowered into a below-freezing chamber filled with liquid nitrogen, where it lies in wait for a future generation to restore it.
In the film, Ettinger, whom Kane and Koury interviewed before his death, says that many people mistakenly regard cryonics as an effort to achieve immortality. Cryonics has also met with skepticism across the scientific community. The main argument is that cryopreservation techniques would cause irreversible brain damage , rendering revival an untenable proposition.
When I asked Koury and Kane whether they were willing to sign up to be cryonically preserved after their own death, neither seemed totally convinced. Kane was slightly more amenable to the idea. Ken Miller likened cryonics to "selling tickets to a ride you can't go on. But in the eyes of Max More, it's not hope Alcor is selling. It's a chance. And to be fair, before cryonics posed these questions, scientific evidence was no more a prerequisite than hope for believing in an afterlife.
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