Since ancient Egypt and before people tried to protect deceased souls by preserving their bodies. Modern cryogenic body preservation techniques mean a realistic, albeit speculative, possibility exists that a future society, with unimaginably advanced medical technology, might someday revive those who opt for cryogenic body storage today. No human has yet been revived from liquid nitrogen temperatures, but less extreme examples of revival from below normal body temperatures abound. Scientists successfully revived dogs, cooled to 3 degrees Celsius, whose hearts had stopped beating for 3 hours. A 2 year old boy whose heart had stopped beating and body temperature had dropped was also revived. Small extremophiles, were revived after being frozen for 30 years. In 2016, the detailed structure of an entire rabbit’s brain was successfully stored at cryogenic temperatures without synaptic damage.
The Immortality Foundation has a good overview of the state of the art in cryonics technology here.
Cryonics has its detractors. Indeed, the society of cryo-biologists, who oppose cryogenic body preservation with borderline fanaticism, have branded those working in it as frauds and have even banned anyone who has cryogenically preserved deceased individuals from joining their society – forever. Yet although detractors often deploy strongly worded criticisms, their arguments and evidence are often lacking and a fairly comprehensive (albeit non-professional) survey of anti-cryonics literature has come to the following conclusion:
Let us begin with the most important question: Are the proponents of cryogenic body preservation con-men?
The process of dying, obviously damages the body a great deal. Cryogenic cooling does further damage, and people engaged in cryogenic body preservation constantly look for new ways to minimize the damage of this cooling process. However, once the body has stabilized at cryogenic temperatures, no further damage will occur – forever. A body cryogenically cooled very low temperatures will be in the same condition a million years in the future as it was a few hours after the cryogenic cooling process is completed.
Of all the different ways we deal with legally dead bodies, cryonics causes the least subsequent long-term damage – by a very large margin.
If we agree that:
The less physical damage a body sustains, the greater its chance of future revival.
…and it’s hard to see how one can deny this. Then we must conclude:
That of all possible treatments for legally dead bodies, cryogenic body preservation is the one with the highest chance of revival – by a very large margin.
There is, of course, no guarantee that cryogenically stored people will ever be revived, but those in cryonics conscientiously try their very best to minimize the physical damage that occurs after legal death. This is an indisputable fact.
Cryonics Costs
But is it worth the money?
Today, the Cryonics Institute quotes the cost of full body preservation at $28,000 plus a one time membership fee of $1,250. By comparison, those who’d rather an English churchyard to a Californian Refrigerator, could be set back by as much as £8,000 for a plot in the city plus another £2,000 in funeral costs. Thus, preserving your body forever through cryonics costs a little over twice as much as being left to rot in the ground.
But wouldn’t the extra $14,000 that cryogenic freezing costs over a fancy funeral be better given to some other good cause?
Cryonics is a good cause. Cryonicists are constantly improving and developing new procedures to cool down patients in ways that do less damage to make revival easier. At some point, future cryonic technology should be able to freeze and reawaken a healthy person. When pressed to estimate when the first living person will survive being frozen and thawed, the president of the Cryonics Institute, Dennis Kowalski, has stated “The true scientific answer is that no one knows for sure because no one knows the future. If I were forced to take a guess I would say no sooner than the next 50 years and probably less than 100 years.”
Reversible, affordable cryogenic body storage could save many lives. For a start, far less people with urgent conditions would die on waitlists for highly specialized treatments, saving many lives. It could also facilitate interstellar travel – a noble cause indeed.
But to advance cryogenic preservation technology, lots of practice, lots of testing and lots of donors are needed. Those who’ve currently paid for the cost of cryonic preservation have effectively bought a ticket in a charity raffle whose proceeds are donated to life-saving research into reversible cryogenic preservation to enable people in the future, with life threatening illnesses, to safely and reversibly freeze themselves. The first prize in this raffle is the off-chance that immense future technological advances will enable them to be reawakened, rejuvenated and live a life of immortal youth.
And cryonics is the best technology currently available to preserve our bodies.
But what about critics who say that living too long is selfish?
Perhaps living is selfish, and perhaps that’s a good thing. I’ve heard many elderly people say things like: “The world’s going to the dogs! I’m glad I won’t be alive to see it!” I’ve also heard younger people say things like: “You mean global warming could actually happen in my lifetime? You mean there’s a good chance I’ll actually live to see the effects of massive climate change? For real?” with a sudden look of horror on their face.
Cryogenic body preservation may well reduce the extent we live for the present…while trashing the future. Cryogenic freezing can only secure immortality if tremendous technological progress occurs in the future, society doesn’t collapse, and future generations are benign and kindhearted enough to revive those who opt to freeze themselves. A single bomb landing on a cryo-facility could obliterate all hope of immortality. This may be a tall order. Civilization could very possibly collapse, for one reason or another. Then no one would get revived.
In my opinion, this is the real reason why some people insist that, even with millions of years of exponential technological advancement, it is fundamentally impossible to ever physically, or even digitally, revive those who are cryogenically frozen today.
We can’t stand the idea we have a real chance of immortality…but will probably screw up and destroy civilization. Or perhaps we sense that our culture is becoming so selfish and egotistical, that future generations won’t bother to resurrect cryogenically preserved individuals. At the back of our minds we know that exponential economic growth can’t continue, that AI poses a serious threat, that, given enough time, a future major war seems inevitable and we are not doing enough in global politics today to tackle this threat, that manufacturing and agriculture needs to be completely overhauled to stop producing toxins that damage our ecosystem… and that securing civilization’s long term future will take A LOT of hard work.
It’s so much easier to ignore these really difficult problems, make a bit of money, buy a new car, hang out in the pub, head out to the disco, and ignore the fate of future generations. The possibility, but improbability, of immortality due to the likely collapse of our civilization, the immense problems we must surmount to avoid it, and the hard work this requires is a burden too heavy for most to shoulder. Most people cannot bear to contemplate the vast potential value they are throwing away tomorrow by acting irresponsibly today.
If most people truly believed they could personally live in a bright, technologically advanced future by working to secure it, we would take long-term problems a lot more seriously. We would also encourage people to care for others and value human life – to dispose future generations to revive those in cryogenic body storage.
Most importantly, cryonics helps curb elderly AI researchers (who desire immortality) from rushing to develop whole brain emulations without adequate safety precautions. Humans are not universally nice. Jesus was a person. Mahatma Gandhi was a person. But so was, Hitler, Ted Bundy, Genghis Khan and Charles Manson. Whole brain emulation will make an operating system, that produced Genghis Khan, a billion times faster and gives it perfect memory. This has obvious potential dangers. We should undertake whole brain emulation with great caution. Yet caution will slow down the development timescale. Those who would die from the delay need a safer technology to secure their survival. That safer technology is cryonics.
So cryonic storage has many benefits.
John
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I assume that if, one day, medical technology advances to the point where we can reanimate frozen corpses, then it will also have advanced to the point where the average human lifespan is greatly increased. In order for the planet’s resources not to be depleted, these two events will have to be accompanied by either:
– a drastic reduction in the birth rate (and indeed birth rates are going down in most parts of the world), or
– the colonization of space.
If we don’t manage to colonize space (either because the challenges are too great to overcome or simply because we lack the political will to do so), and if the increase in the number of old people, both through reanimation and through simply living much longer, is compensated by a large decrease in the number of births, and hence young people, what effect will this have on society? Even if we assume that medical technology has advanced to the point where this aging population is nonetheless fit, active and free of dementia, would people still become more politically conservative and less receptive to new technology as they get older? Would they still have the attitude of “I’ve managed perfectly well for the last hundred years without this newfangled thingamyjig, so I don’t see why I should need it now”? If so, would this slow the pace of technological progress? Would the world become more politically conservative? Are Brexit, Trump and the recent electoral success of far-right parties in Austria, Italy, Hungary etc. already a sign that an aging population leads to more conservatism, tribalism and nationalism? Or is this simply a temporary or cyclical phenomenon?
What about new scientific theories? Most new scientific theories from evolution to quantum mechanics have established themselves not because their detractors were eventually convinced by them but because the next generation was convinced and the detractors eventually died. Would a world in which people stay around a lot longer before dying lead to slower scientific progress?
If couples had an average of 1.5 children over their entire lifetime, the population would stabilize at 4 times its current value. Though if people’s lifetimes were radically extended this would lead to a corresponding drop in the birthrate.
It’s possible that even with a small population of youths, young people could form little ghettos where they try out new ideas, and these ideas could be taken up by the older generation. This does happen. I’ve noticed that old people today are massively more internet savvy than they were even 10 years ago.
I suppose longer lives might slow the pace of technological progress (unless technology was decoupled from human beings with new discoveries being made by AI – which would have its own problems).
On the other hand, what do we want to get out of technological progress? What’s the point of technological progress if not to give us healthier, happier, longer lives? Arguably refraining from extending our lives because “why do we need these newfangled long lives when society’s managed perfectly well up until now with short lives” is itself conservative.
So it might be a catch-22 situation. Longer lives will slow technological progress, yet the only way to stop our lives from getting longer is to slow the rate of technological progress (at least progress in medical technology)!
Progress is also a relatively new idea. Archaeology has shown that in many places people worshiped the same Gods and preserved similar artistic styles for thousands of years with little change. It’s possible that society might stabilize again. It’s hard to know what will happen if things change ever more rapidly or indeed whether this change will actually be good.
I don’t think being tribal is necessarily a feature of old age. Young children are, if anything more tribal than their elders, with smaller, tighter groups of friends and greater anxiety in the company of strangers. It’s just this current generation was trained to be more tolerant and less bigoted. IMHO someone who is brought up to be tolerant, will continue to be so as they grow older. Indeed I’m acquainted with a number of elderly people who want to promote a tolerant inclusive society.
So I reckon tribalism is more a function of upbringing than age.
And yes, you may have a point about new scientific theories. In a world where people are immortal, there maybe generational ghettos, in which the scientific beliefs of different generations vary wildly from each other.
On the other hand, is this about being elderly, or just being a vested interest? It may be that academics stick to their guns wrt disproved theories but that elderly lay-people, without academic reputations to defend, may be more open-minded.
For more than 50 years, it has consistently been the case in most democratic countries that more older people have voted for right-wing parties than younger people have (even when accounting for the fact that older people are more likely to vote at all). It’s difficult to say whether this is because:
– people become more conservative as they get older (think hippies espousing peace and free love in the 60s and 70s becoming today’s anti-immigrant septuagenarians – yes, I know that’s a very broad generalization), or
– each generation is simply more liberal than the last, meaning the oldest generation still alive is always more conservative than society as a whole, or
– a bit of both.
It certainly isn’t the case that our generation is uniquely tolerant. Rather, our generation is part of a longer-term trend towards increasing tolerance. Admittedly, “longer-term” here refers to 50+ years, and I’m sure that during the thousands of years of people worshipping the same gods and preserving similar artistic styles, each generation was just as conservative as the last. Societal change is related to scientific and technological progress.
Whether people become more conservative as they get older or whether each generation is simply more liberal than the last, either way, a world with fewer younger people and more older people (who hail from older, more conservative generations) would probably be more conservative than the same world in an alternative universe where people are not reanimated from the past, lifespans are not radically extended and the birth rate decreases less drastically. Even if the few young people do successfully form liberal ghettos, if theses ghettos don’t have sovereignty, they’ll always be outvoted by their more conservative elders. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends, I suppose, on your political persuasion.
Regarding scientific theories, I think that most rational lay people just go along with the scientific establishment (while the irrational ones believe in homeopathy, horoscopes, creationism and the like). If the scientific establishment mostly consists of older people with a vested interest in defending their own, outdated theories, I think it will be very difficult for new theories to trickle down to the general population.
Yes, you may be right.
There is a rational for old people to be more tribal than young people, in that new relationships take time and effort to develop. So when you’re young, you put yourself out there and put in effort to make new friends where as those who are old will be more inclined to reap the rewards of their existing social capital.
The same applies to trying to integrate into new cultures. This also takes a great deal of time and effort. So if you don’t have much time left, it makes more sense to stick to what you’re familiar with.
Yet both underlying rationals for old people to be more tribal and conservative (the fact that they don’t have the time to reap the rewards of putting in the effort to go outside their comfort zone) have their roots in their approaching mortality.
So the question is: if people could be eternally vigorous and healthy…would they act like old people or would they act like young people?
What is considered young or old does vary with time.
Alexander the Great lead his Macedonian army to conquer half the world while he was still what we would consider to be a college freshmen.
And not so very long ago an 18 year old woman was considered “over the hill” when it comes to getting married and having children . Today we would think that someone who married at 18 was a bit young.
Much of the fooling around that college students (aged 18-22) engage in today, past generations would consider more appropriate for children in their early teens.
So a longer youth might result in prolonged youthful behaviour.