The year is 37 022. It’s a warm, sunny April morning in Scottsdale, Arizona and you’ve just woken up. You take a minute to think about the dream you’ve had, in which you crashed a brand new Mercedes into your neighbor’s house. After a while, you stand up and look out the window – but you’re discobombulated by what you see – the world as you know it is nowhere to be seen. As you ponder on the fact that you’ve just seen a flying box of metal blast past the window, you hear a voice. “Welcome back”, you hear, in a broken English accent. Then, you remember – you’ve just been unfrozen, and you’re at the Alcor cryopreservation clinic.
Perhaps this would be the human version of what two ancient worms experienced a few years ago, when they came back to life in a lab after being frozen for over 35 000 years in a permafrost.[1]
We’ve recently seen that it is possible for an organism to be resurrected after an extremely long period, while preserving all its life functions – as if nothing had happened. Of course, it is worth noting that Nematoda (the phylum to which these worms belong) are extremely tough and can survive extreme conditions.[2]
This discovery set the eyes of cryonics researchers alight. But what even is cryonics?
Well, it is the ‘science’ of cryopreserving humans, with hopes of reviving them when we have the technology to do so.[3] It’s actually been around for a few decades now, with the first documentation of such a procedure dating back to 1966.
Due to law constraints, a person wishing to have a shot at continuing their life somewhere down the line can only be frozen after being legally declared dead. Thus, while on deathbed, they have a team of cryopreservers ready to prepare the corpse for storage. One important part of the process is the injection of cryoprotectants into the bloodstream to prevent ice crystals from forming (such freezing is called vitrification). Then, the body is cooled to -196 degrees Celsius and stored in a vacuum-insulated dewar.[4] Theoretically, it could stay so for thousands of years.
Right now, there are almost 200 people being ‘stored’ at Alcor in Arizona[5], with over 1500 being reported to have made arrangements for preservation after their death. There are 4 cryonics facilities in the world, 3 in the U.S. and 1 in Russia. Cryopreservation is a costly process, though, and can cost upwards of 250 000 USD.[6]

So far, there have been wildly unsuccessful attempts at bringing humans to life – in each case, there was horrific damage to the bodies (including ruptured organs), which seems way beyond repair with modern medical treatments.[7] It is not impossible that if we plan to unfreeze people, we first need to achieve biological reparation on a molecular level.
What is more, with the rise of transhumanist concepts[8], it might be an option to attach the brain of a person to a synthetic body, with far more capabilities than a regular human can even think of.
There is no way to predict whether successful unfreezing will be possible in the future, but with the current progress in technology, I’m leaning towards the opinion that eventually, we will be able to thaw someone safely. It might take us thousands of years (if we even manage to survive that long as a civilization), but hey – we didn’t have electricity until 300 years ago. There’s also the ethical concern of playing God and essentially defying the laws of nature.
It would definitely be very hard for someone frozen in 2022 to suddenly find themselves in the distant future, where the world we know right now will no longer exist. This concept is very well illustrated in Cameron Crowe’s 2001 movie Vanilla Sky. Notably, there have been some quite well-known people opting for cryopreservation, like two founders of PayPal – Luke Nosek and Peter Thiel.[9]

Would you ever consider being cryopreserved? Would you take the chance to find out what life will look like in the distant future? Perhaps you’ve always wanted a flying Porsche? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Until next time,
Jan
[1] https://allthatsinteresting.com/worms-frozen-resurrected
[2] https://www.pitchcare.com/news-media/nematodes-surviving-the-big-freeze.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics
[4] https://www.alcor.org/what-is-cryonics/
[5] https://journal.medizzy.com/almost-200-people-are-cryopreserved-in-arizona/
[6] https://www.alcor.org/library/required-costs-and-cryopreservation-funding-minimums/
[7] https://bigthink.com/the-future/cryonics-horror-stories/
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism
[9] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11098971/Peter-Thiel-the-billionaire-tech-entrepreneur-on-a-mission-to-cheat-death.html