Cryonics 101
An overview for the general public By Yuri Deigin
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ince this is a 101, let’s start with the basics. What is cryonics? From a consumer’s point of view, cryonics is just life insurance. Not the usual euphemism for a payout to one’s loved ones after his death, but a method to maximize one’s own survival. Or a way to hedge against catastrophic depreciation of your most valuable asset — your life. From a technological point of view, cryonics is a method of putting an organism on pause – into a state of suspended animation – in order for it to be restored back to life in the future. To achieve this pause, cryonics employs cooling of the organism to very low temperatures. Note that cryonics is not the only possible method, just one of them. Maybe in the future science will discover ways of inducing long-term suspended animation without the need to cool the body. But it hasn’t yet, and cryonics is presently the only viable and commercially available method. Why do we need cryonics? The answer is simple. Because our bodies have one unpleasant feature. They die. Nobody likes it, but most people prefer to gloss over the unpleasantness by coming up with various excuses why they need to accept it. A brave few, however, refuse to do so. Instead, they acknowledge the problem and attempt to use science and technology to eradicate it or at least mitigate it. Cryonics is one of the tools such brave people have invented for the benefit of humanity. Other tools you may be more familiar with — defibrillators, heart-lung machines, pacemakers, organ transplants, vaccines and antibiotics. They all stem from the same motivation — increase every human’s odds of survival. Of course, at the present level of scientific and technological advancement, there is no guarantee that anyone cryopreserved today will be restored back to life (or reanimated, as per cryonics parlance) in the future. To claim that cryonics guarantees anything would be intellectually dishonest. But what cryonics does provide, unlike any other technology, is a chance of revival. It might be very slim, but a nonzero chance is still better than zero, especially when it applies to an infinitely valuable asset – one’s life.
or months to live. They already know that modern medical technology will not be able to save them, so their only hope for survival is medicine of the far future, and cryonics is their only chance to benefit from it. But enough purple prose, let’s dive deeper into the science behind cryonics. What evidence is out there that cryonics can work? Broadly, it can be subdivided into two categories: what we see in nature, and what we see in experiments. Nature A great number of our planet’s inhabitants can survive subzero temperatures for months. The most numerous are, of course plants, most of which can safely tolerate temperatures from -4°C to -12°C. Many animals too have evolved the ability to periodically endure exposure to subzero temperatures. I won’t list them all, just mention a few survival champions. The most notable is the Siberian salamander (Salamandrella keyserlingii) which regularly encounters temperatures as low as -50°C and some claim it is even able to be revived after spending 90 years in the permafrost1. Here he is:
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By the way, cryonics can be viewed not only as life insurance, but also as an “ambulance to the future”. That characterization might not be of relevance for most of us today, as we are still in decent health, but for some people the question of life and death is a much more urgent issue — people who only have weeks
www.alcor.org
Cryonics / 1st Quarter 2019
The second place in the Colder Games goes to another frostresistant amphibian, the wood frog (Rana Sylvatica), which can spend many months in a half-frozen state. Another remarkable animal capable of surviving for months at -20°C as pupae is the cecropia moth 3
