Re: ALCOR in the New York Times

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2021 at 9:09 AM Lawrence Crowell <
goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> wrote:

*> The problem is not so much with preserving brain states, though that is
> a possible consideration, it is phase change.*
>

I'm not sure what you mean here. If information on where bits of the brain
are supposed to go, or can be easily deduced, then then Information
Theoretic-Death has been avoided; and at this point that's all I'm
interested in, I leave the problem of actually extracting that information
and using it to construct a body or a machine or a virtual existence of
some sort to future technology. I just want to do my best to preserve the
information.

Information-Theoretic Death


* > Phase changes occur in a way that breaks symmetry. In freezing there is
> a breaking of scale size for water in the solid form. Beyond a certain
> large scale crystals are disconnected.*
>

I guess you're talking about cracking, and it's true that when biological
tissue is cooled two less than -135C cracking occurs, and all the brains
that ALCOR stores are cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature of -196C, so
all of them have cracks in them.  Sure, any damage is undesirable but the
sad fact is even if a patient is cryopreserved using the best methods
available today a huge amount of damage will be caused and a massive amount
of repairing (or replacing) will be needed to bring the person back to
consciousness. But cracks are by far the least serious form of damage
because they are the easiest to fix or replace; if 2 areas are displaced
along a well-defined line by a few hundred nanometers it doesn't take much
brain power to figure out how things looked before the crack developed. If
you can't even fix a simple crack then you have no hope of fixing the far
more serious forms of damage. I don't think any Cryonics patient will be
revived until we have Drexler style Nanotechnology and can control matter
at the atomic level. That's why I say cryonics will remain an unproven
technology until the day it becomes obsolete.

The key question is has Information Theoretic Death occurred? If the
information on what makes you be you is lost then you're dead. That's why I
think Alcor should switch from the vitrification process it uses now to ASC
(Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation). In ASC in addition to a
cryoprotectant a brain is also infused with the chemical Glutaraldehyde,
it's the stuff in wart removing lotion you can get over the counter in any
drugstore. Glutaraldehyde kills cells because it cross-links proteins, but
that very cross-linking holds things in place even when they're cooled down
to liquid nitrogen temperatures, and so Information Theoretic Death is
avoided.

ASC has been used on an entire pig's brain which was then cooled down to
near liquid nitrogen temperatures and then warmed back up to room
temperature and sliced into thin sections and sent to an electron
microscope. The result was beautiful pictures of synapses and other brain
structures that are superior to the pictures Alcor's current vitrification
process can produce, and there is no reason to think molecular-level
information wouldn't be preserved too. It's even more impressive when you
consider that *THE PICTURES WERE MADE AFTER REWARMING*, because most of the
damage happens at the warming stage not the cooling stage. The pictures
were so good I would have been delighted even if they were made while the
brain was still frozen because I'd be willing to let future technology
worry about warming, but this is even better.

Nevertheless Alcor has resisted changing over to ASC, I suspect the reason
for their hesitation is that if they did so they would implicitly be saying
"*we're not even trying to bring that frozen body back to life, we're just
trying to preserve the information in it because information on how the
atoms are arranged in my brain are different from the way they are arranged
in your brain is the only difference between you and me*".

I happen to think that's exactly what Alcor should be saying, but the ghost
of the discredited 19th century theory of Vitalism is still haunting the
21th century and many still think that despite all the scientific evidence
to the contrary the atoms in our bodies must somehow have our name
scratched on them. I suspect Alcor is reluctant to change because they
believe ASC would be bad public relations. But I think reality is more
important than PR and the Vitalism superstition could get people killed.

*> With ordinary temperature induced phase changes it would require some
> mechanism to localize atoms or molecules so the water in the body is in the
> same crystalline state. If you do not do that the cellular structures are
> torn up into mush.*
>

Now Lawrence, you must know that's just silly. Multicellular creatures and
even human embryos have been frozen in liquid nitrogen for decades and
brought back to life with no damage. Yes, things as large as a human brain
d

Re: ALCOR in the New York Times

[Lawrence Crowell]

On Thursday, July 1, 2021 at 10:20:10 AM UTC-5 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 1, 2021 at 9:13 AM Lawrence Crowell  
> wrote:
>
>>
> *> I think this is a modern version of entombment with ideas of 
>> resurrection. We might think of it as similar to what the Egyptians 
>> thought.*
>
>  
> In a way yes, but the Egyptian's relied on magic for the process to work 
> and the basic difference between magic and science is one of them works and 
> the other one doesn't. And the Egyptian's carefully preserved every part of 
> the body as best they could EXCEPT for the brain, they didn't even try to 
> preserve the brain, they just yanked it out of the skull with an iron hook 
> pushed up the nose and threw the brain away. I think we can do a little 
> better than that these days.
>
> *> **Cryogenic preservation works best with small organisms. *
>>
>  
> Yes.
>
> *> This is in part because ice crystallization occurs at a lower ratio to 
>> body mass. Single cells, sperm, ovum or even fetuses at very early stages 
>> can be preserved. This low rate of differential crystallization reflect how 
>> the freezing occurs very quickly. *
>>
>  
> Absolutely true. There are advantages in being a tardigrade, or a fetus. 
> The most impressive demonstration of this that I know of is  a report of 
> nematode worms being frozen for two weeks at -80 degrees centigrade, and 
> the worms not only survived they retained a memory too. 
>
> Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived Caenorhabditis 
> elegans 
>  
>
>> > If there is any way to make this scheme work it will require some 
>> field effect or something that is able to localize the thermal motion of 
>> every atom and molecule almost instantly at once and the thermal energy 
>> rapidly extracted. 
>>
>
> First of all it's almost certain that the brain information would not need 
> to be preserved with atomic precision, even molecular precision would 
> probably be overkill, cellular precision would probably be sufficient, and 
> we already know single cells can be frozen with little or no damage. The 
> difference between being alive and being dead is putting cells in the right 
> place.  And actually rewarming is a greater problem than freezing because 
> during freezing if a piece of a cell breaks off it won't be able to diffuse 
> very far away because the liquid environment will soon freeze, so you can 
> figure out where it came from, but with rewarming the environment will turn 
> from solid to liquid so that piece could end up anywhere. With freezing the 
> damage automatically stops when things become solid, and there are no 
> time constraints so we can leave the problem of rewarming and repairing the 
> damage that has occurred to future technology. Or at least we can provided 
> the brain information has not been so scrambled that even Nanotechnology 
> can't unscramble it, and that could happen if turbulence sets in. 
>
> So the key question is "will the micro-currents in my brain be in a 
> turbulent state when it is in the process of being frozen or will the flow 
> be laminar?". If it's turbulent then very small changes in initial 
> conditions will result in large changes in outcome and I'm dead meat, even 
> nanotechnology couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again; but if the 
> flow is laminar figuring out what things were like before they were frozen 
> would be pretty straightforward.
>
> Fluid flow stops being smoothly Laminar and starts to become chaotically 
> turbulent when a system has a Reynolds number between 2300 and 4000, 
> although you might get some non chaotic vortices if it is bigger than 30. 
> When chaotic turbulence starts a very small change in initial conditions 
> will result in a huge difference in outcome and that is exactly what we 
> want to avoid because we want to be able to figure out what the brain was 
> like before it was frozen. 
>
> We can find the approximate Reynolds number by using the formula LDV/N.  L 
> is the characteristic size we're interested in, we're interested in cells 
> so L is about 10^-6 meter. D is the density of water, 10^3 kilograms/cubic 
> meter.  V is the velocity of the flow, during freezing it's probably less 
> than 10^-3 meters per second but let's be conservative, I'll give you 3 
> orders of magnitude and call V 1 meter per second.  N is the viscosity of 
> water and at room temperature N is 0.001 newton-second/meter^2, it would be 
> less than that when things get cold and even less when water is mixed with 
> glycerol as it is in cryonics but let's be conservative again and ignore 
> those factors. If you plug these numbers into the formula you get a 
> Reynolds number of about 1. 1 is a lot less than 2300 so it looks like any 
> mixing caused by freezing would probably be laminar not turbulent, so you 
> can still deduce the position where things are were from the position of 
> where things are now, you 

Re: ALCOR in the New York Times

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2021 at 12:09:39AM +0200, Tomasz Rola wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 01, 2021 at 11:43:30AM -0700, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:
> > 
> > 
[...]
> > 
> > 4) It doesn't work very well, but your brain can be installed in a
> > robot to handle packages at the Amazon warehouse.
> 
> 4b) You will work in a helpdesk. For so long as they need English
> native speakers...

Jokes aside, while I have nothing against adults doing things to
themselves, especially when paid from their own pocket and not
touching other people, yet I still have some objections about
cryopreservation. Technical difficulties may one day be worked out, or
not. But the main problem as I see it is cultural change. Cryo, in my
opinion, will only work for the folks who can live well in any kind of
society. And I literally mean it. Cannibalism and zoophilia are two
things that come to my mind which could put me off. Well, a dog,
maybe, but a crocodile? Actually, neither a dog nor a croc. And I am
quite sure that over long enough period, everything will become a
cultural norm. I could think about other off putters, but the two
might be good enough for a start...

Above, I made an assumption that unfreezed human will be dominating
side of relationship. How about being partly consumed in exchange of
more prestige points and societal acceptance? How about being married
to upgraded alfa crocodile?

See? Only two small ideas. Now my brain is trembling.

Of course I am not going to deny it to other people who want to do
"the jump", if this is what they want. Chances are, they will make it
into a garden of earthly delights.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.  **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home**
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...  **
** **
** Tomasz Rola  mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit 
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/20210701232859.GC27905%40tau1.ceti.pl.

Re: ALCOR in the New York Times

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2021 at 11:43:30AM -0700, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
wrote:
> 
> 
> On 7/1/2021 8:19 AM, John Clark wrote:
> >Actually scientific andtechnological considerations are only
> >number 4 on my list of reasons why I think cryonics might not
> >work, my first three reasons are:
> >
> >1) I might not get frozen quickly after I am declared legally dead.
> >2) I might not be retained at liquid nitrogen temperatures until
> >the age of Drexler style nanomachines arrives.
> >3) Mr. Jupiter brain, or whoever's around at the time, might not
> >think I'm worth reviving; I am realistic enough to know that my
> >value to it will be almost zero, my hope is that it will not be
> >exactly Zero. I do have one thing going for me, in the age of
> >Nanotechnology everything could be put into one of two categories,
> >impossible to obtain at any price, or dirt cheap, nothing will be
> >expensive.
> 
> 4) It doesn't work very well, but your brain can be installed in a
> robot to handle packages at the Amazon warehouse.

4b) You will work in a helpdesk. For so long as they need English
native speakers...

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.  **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home**
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...  **
** **
** Tomasz Rola  mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit 
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/20210701220939.GB27905%40tau1.ceti.pl.

Re: ALCOR in the New York Times

['Brent Meeker' via Everything List]

On 7/1/2021 8:19 AM, John Clark wrote:
Actually scientific andtechnological considerations are only number 4 
on my list of reasons why I think cryonics might not work, my first 
three reasons are:


1) I might not get frozen quickly after I am declared legally dead.
2) I might not be retained at liquid nitrogen temperatures until the 
age of Drexler style nanomachines arrives.
3) Mr. Jupiter brain, or whoever's around at the time, might not think 
I'm worth reviving; I am realistic enough to know that my value to it 
will be almost zero, my hope is that it will not be exactly Zero. I do 
have one thing going for me, in the age of Nanotechnology everything 
could be put into one of two categories, impossible to obtain at any 
price, or dirt cheap, nothing will be expensive.


4) It doesn't work very well, but your brain can be installed in a robot 
to handle packages at the Amazon warehouse.


Brent

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit 
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/f74c1dda-625d-99ea-5904-d5af9bf058f6%40verizon.net.

Re: ALCOR in the New York Times

[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 1, 2021 at 9:13 AM Lawrence Crowell <
goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
*> I think this is a modern version of entombment with ideas of
> resurrection. We might think of it as similar to what the Egyptians
> thought.*


In a way yes, but the Egyptian's relied on magic for the process to work
and the basic difference between magic and science is one of them works and
the other one doesn't. And the Egyptian's carefully preserved every part of
the body as best they could EXCEPT for the brain, they didn't even try to
preserve the brain, they just yanked it out of the skull with an iron hook
pushed up the nose and threw the brain away. I think we can do a little
better than that these days.

*> **Cryogenic preservation works best with small organisms. *
>

Yes.

*> This is in part because ice crystallization occurs at a lower ratio to
> body mass. Single cells, sperm, ovum or even fetuses at very early stages
> can be preserved. This low rate of differential crystallization reflect how
> the freezing occurs very quickly. *
>

Absolutely true. There are advantages in being a tardigrade, or a fetus.
The most impressive demonstration of this that I know of is  a report of
nematode worms being frozen for two weeks at -80 degrees centigrade, and
the worms not only survived they retained a memory too.

Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived Caenorhabditis
elegans 


> > If there is any way to make this scheme work it will require some field
> effect or something that is able to localize the thermal motion of every
> atom and molecule almost instantly at once and the thermal energy rapidly
> extracted.
>

First of all it's almost certain that the brain information would not need
to be preserved with atomic precision, even molecular precision would
probably be overkill, cellular precision would probably be sufficient, and
we already know single cells can be frozen with little or no damage. The
difference between being alive and being dead is putting cells in the right
place.  And actually rewarming is a greater problem than freezing because
during freezing if a piece of a cell breaks off it won't be able to diffuse
very far away because the liquid environment will soon freeze, so you can
figure out where it came from, but with rewarming the environment will turn
from solid to liquid so that piece could end up anywhere. With freezing the
damage automatically stops when things become solid, and there are no time
constraints so we can leave the problem of rewarming and repairing the
damage that has occurred to future technology. Or at least we can provided
the brain information has not been so scrambled that even Nanotechnology
can't unscramble it, and that could happen if turbulence sets in.

So the key question is "will the micro-currents in my brain be in a
turbulent state when it is in the process of being frozen or will the flow
be laminar?". If it's turbulent then very small changes in initial
conditions will result in large changes in outcome and I'm dead meat, even
nanotechnology couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again; but if the
flow is laminar figuring out what things were like before they were frozen
would be pretty straightforward.

Fluid flow stops being smoothly Laminar and starts to become chaotically
turbulent when a system has a Reynolds number between 2300 and 4000,
although you might get some non chaotic vortices if it is bigger than 30.
When chaotic turbulence starts a very small change in initial conditions
will result in a huge difference in outcome and that is exactly what we
want to avoid because we want to be able to figure out what the brain was
like before it was frozen.

We can find the approximate Reynolds number by using the formula LDV/N.  L
is the characteristic size we're interested in, we're interested in cells
so L is about 10^-6 meter. D is the density of water, 10^3 kilograms/cubic
meter.  V is the velocity of the flow, during freezing it's probably less
than 10^-3 meters per second but let's be conservative, I'll give you 3
orders of magnitude and call V 1 meter per second.  N is the viscosity of
water and at room temperature N is 0.001 newton-second/meter^2, it would be
less than that when things get cold and even less when water is mixed with
glycerol as it is in cryonics but let's be conservative again and ignore
those factors. If you plug these numbers into the formula you get a
Reynolds number of about 1. 1 is a lot less than 2300 so it looks like any
mixing caused by freezing would probably be laminar not turbulent, so you
can still deduce the position where things are were from the position of
where things are now, you can figure out how the parts of the puzzle are
supposed to fit together.

> > These people in liquid nitrogen bottles are not much more than
> high-tech mummies that are completely dead.
>

Maybe. Maybe not. Cryonics is an unproven technology and it will remain

Re: ALCOR in the New York Times

[Lawrence Crowell]

I think this is a modern version of entombment with ideas of resurrection. 
We might think of it as similar to what the Egyptians thought. The 
preservation of bodies as mummies meant they could reassume life at a later 
time and join the pantheon of gods. In this case it is a far more complete 
preservation of a body, but at a cost (those pyramids and tomb cities cost 
a lot too), with the idea they can be reconstructed by technological means 
in the future. 

Cryogenic preservation works best with small organisms. This is in part 
because ice crystallization occurs at a lower ratio to body mass. Single 
cells, sperm, ovum or even fetuses at very early stages can be preserved. 
This low rate of differential crystallization reflect how the freezing 
occurs very quickly. With a human body, that has a fairly high temperature 
at the time of death, will take considerable time to  freeze, leading to 
lots of local crystal formation. If there is any way to make this scheme 
work it will require some field effect or something that is able to 
localize the thermal motion of every atom and molecule almost instantly at 
once and the thermal energy rapidly extracted. 

These people in liquid nitrogen bottles are not much more than high-tech 
mummies that are completely dead.

LC
On Sunday, June 27, 2021 at 9:07:59 AM UTC-5 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:

> The following article about ALCOR was on the front page of today's New 
> York Times: 
>
> The Cryonics Industry Would Like to Give You the Past Year, and Many More, 
> Back 
> 
>
> It's a pretty good article except for a picture that to my eye makes Max 
> More look like Marlon Brando in the Godfather, and I've seen Max and he 
> doesn't look like that.
> ===
>
> *The Cryonics Industry Would Like to Give You the Past Year, and Many 
> More, Back*
>
> *The business of cryopreservation — storing bodies at deep freeze until 
> well into the future — got a whole lot more complicated during the 
> pandemic.*
>
> *By Peter Wilson*
> *June 26, 2021*
>
> When an 87-year-old Californian man was wheeled into an operating room 
> just outside Phoenix last year, the pandemic was at its height and medical 
> protocols were being upended across the country.
>
> A case like his would normally have required 14 or more bags of fluids to 
> be pumped into him, but now that posed a problem.
>
> Had he been infected with the coronavirus, tiny aerosol droplets could 
> have escaped and infected staff, so the operating team had adopted new 
> procedures that reduced the effectiveness of the treatment but used fewer 
> liquids.
>
> It was an elaborate workaround, especially considering the patient had 
> been declared legally dead more than a day earlier.He had arrived in the 
> operating room of Alcor Life Extension Foundation — located in an 
> industrial park near the airport in Scottsdale, Ariz. — packed in dry ice 
> and ready to be “cryopreserved,” or stored at deep-freeze temperatures, in 
> the hope that one day, perhaps decades or centuries from now, he could be 
> brought back to life.
>
> As it turns out, the pandemic that has affected billions of lives around 
> the world has also had an impact on the nonliving.
>
> From Moscow to Phoenix and from China to rural Australia, the major 
> players in the business of preserving bodies at extremely low temperatures 
> say the pandemic has brought new stresses to an industry that has long 
> faced skepticism or outright hostility from medical and legal 
> establishments that have dismissed it as quack science or fraud .In some 
> cases, Covid-19 precautions have limited the parts of the body that can be 
> pumped full of protective chemicals to curb the damage caused by freezing.
>
> Alcor, which has been in business since 1972, adopted new rules in its 
> operating room last year that restricted the application of its 
> medical-grade antifreeze solution to only the patient’s brain, leaving 
> everything below the neck unprotected.
>
> In the case of the Californian man, things were even worse because he had 
> died without completing the normal legal and financial arrangements with 
> Alcor, so no standby team had been on hand for his death. By the time he 
> arrived at Alcor’s facility, too much time had elapsed for the team to be 
> able to successfully circulate the protective chemicals, even to the brain.
>
> That meant that when the patient was eventually sealed into a sleeping bag 
> and stored in a large thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen 
> that cooled it to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 Celsius), ice 
> crystals formed between the cells of his body, poking countless holes in 
> cell membranes.
>
> Max More, the 57-year-old former president of Alcor, said that the damage 
> caused by this patient’s “straight freeze” could probably still be repaired 
> by future sci

ALCOR in the New York Times

[John Clark]

The following article about ALCOR was on the front page of today's New York
Times:

The Cryonics Industry Would Like to Give You the Past Year, and Many More,
Back


It's a pretty good article except for a picture that to my eye makes Max
More look like Marlon Brando in the Godfather, and I've seen Max and he
doesn't look like that.
===

*The Cryonics Industry Would Like to Give You the Past Year, and Many More,
Back*

*The business of cryopreservation — storing bodies at deep freeze until
well into the future — got a whole lot more complicated during the
pandemic.*

*By Peter Wilson*
*June 26, 2021*

When an 87-year-old Californian man was wheeled into an operating room just
outside Phoenix last year, the pandemic was at its height and medical
protocols were being upended across the country.

A case like his would normally have required 14 or more bags of fluids to
be pumped into him, but now that posed a problem.

Had he been infected with the coronavirus, tiny aerosol droplets could have
escaped and infected staff, so the operating team had adopted new
procedures that reduced the effectiveness of the treatment but used fewer
liquids.

It was an elaborate workaround, especially considering the patient had been
declared legally dead more than a day earlier.He had arrived in the
operating room of Alcor Life Extension Foundation — located in an
industrial park near the airport in Scottsdale, Ariz. — packed in dry ice
and ready to be “cryopreserved,” or stored at deep-freeze temperatures, in
the hope that one day, perhaps decades or centuries from now, he could be
brought back to life.

As it turns out, the pandemic that has affected billions of lives around
the world has also had an impact on the nonliving.

>From Moscow to Phoenix and from China to rural Australia, the major players
in the business of preserving bodies at extremely low temperatures say the
pandemic has brought new stresses to an industry that has long faced
skepticism or outright hostility from medical and legal establishments that
have dismissed it as quack science or fraud .In some cases, Covid-19
precautions have limited the parts of the body that can be pumped full of
protective chemicals to curb the damage caused by freezing.

Alcor, which has been in business since 1972, adopted new rules in its
operating room last year that restricted the application of its
medical-grade antifreeze solution to only the patient’s brain, leaving
everything below the neck unprotected.

In the case of the Californian man, things were even worse because he had
died without completing the normal legal and financial arrangements with
Alcor, so no standby team had been on hand for his death. By the time he
arrived at Alcor’s facility, too much time had elapsed for the team to be
able to successfully circulate the protective chemicals, even to the brain.

That meant that when the patient was eventually sealed into a sleeping bag
and stored in a large thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen
that cooled it to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 Celsius), ice
crystals formed between the cells of his body, poking countless holes in
cell membranes.

Max More, the 57-year-old former president of Alcor, said that the damage
caused by this patient’s “straight freeze” could probably still be repaired
by future scientists, especially if there was only limited damage to the
brain, which is often removed and stored alone in what is known in the
trade as a “neuro preservation.“

“I have always been signed up for a neuro myself,” Mr. More said. “I don’t
really understand why people want to take their broken-down old body with
them. In the future it’ll probably be easier to start from scratch and just
regenerate the body anyway.The important stuff is up here as far as I am
concerned,” he said, pointing to his sandy-blond crop of hair in a Zoom
call. “That is where my personality lives and my memories are … all the
rest is replaceable".

*Cryopreserving in a Pandemic*

Supporters of cryonics insist that death is a process of deterioration
rather than simply the moment when the heart stops, and that rapid
intervention can act as a “freeze frame” on life, allowing super-chilled
preservation to serve as an ambulance to the future.

They usually concede there is no guarantee that future science will ever be
able to repair and reanimate the body but even a long shot, they argue, is
better than the odds of revival — zero — if the body is turned to dust or
ashes. If you are starting out dead, they say, you have nothing to lose.

During the pandemic, a heightened awareness of mortality seems to have led
to more interest in signing up for cryopreservation procedures that can
cost north of $200,000.

“Perhaps the coronavirus made them realize their life is the most important
thing they have and made them want to invest in their own fu