Your future home: You'll have to share it with three other frozen bodies, or 5 other brainsicles.
Courtesy Alcor Life Extension FoundationSo? Do you? Want to live forever?

No, I didn’t think so. Buzzketeers are more practical than that. I mean, do we really need to live forever? There would all these people everywhere, just…living. And eating, and pooping—all that stuff. It’d be a mess. Sure, it would mean being around to see flying cars, and laser guns, and Harry Potter 20, and Thunderdome matches…you know, living forever might actually be pretty awesome, come to think of it.

If that sort of thing is your game after all, well, get in line with the other, ah, people with like priorities, because you’ve got some time to wait for the technology to be ready. And when the technology is ready, you’ll have even more time to wait, in a big, cold tank, until some more tech is ready.

I’m talking, of course, about cryonics, the science of freezing your dead body (or at least your severed, dead head) with cryogenics, just in case you ever need them again. A recent article in the Guardian goes over some of the developing science for cryonics.

The idea behind cryonics is that one might (stress might) be able to freeze their dying body (or, again, just their head and brain) until a time when medical technology has advanced enough to cure whatever you affliction might be, whether you’ve got cancer, or just old age. If you just freeze your head, obviously, you’d have to wait until science gets good at building artificial bodies too.

The problem here is that people weren’t really made to be frozen. Well, no, actually we freeze just fine; it’s the thawing out that’s the problem. Remember, our bodies are about seventy percent water, and when that water freezes it turns into tiny, jagged ice crystals. Think about when ice cream thaws a little then re-freezes—it gets kind of crunchy from the ice crystals that form. When this happens in our bodies, the ice crystals poke all our cells full of little holes, and it’s very important for our cells not to be full of little holes, if we want to be alive, that is. The first people to have themselves cryogenically frozen (people started doing it back in the Sixties) are going to have to add that to their list of things for future doctors to fix.

As a solution to this, cryonics scientists are now attempting to replace that troublesome water in our dead bodies with a chemical solution that won’t get so nasty when it’s frozen. Cryoprotectants have the convenient property of freezing into a smooth, glass-like substance, saving our delicate cell membranes from all the poking. On the other hand, vitrified people tend to shatter a little more easily than normal people (not quite Terminator 2 or Timecop style, but not good either,) and the cryoprotectants currently used for human vitrification happen to be awfully toxic. So some of the people frozen these days are going to have to add that to the list of things for future doctors to fix.

And then there’s ischemia and reperfusion. A person can be technically dead for about five minutes and still be come back. After that, though, if revival is attempted there’s trouble. Oddly enough, it’s not only the having been dead that gets you, as it were, but the coming back to life—being without oxygen for too long (ischemia) is obviously no good for you, but so is having oxygen flood back into the cells again, a process called “reperfusion.” And since a person must be declared legally dead before their body may be cryogenically preserved, part of the challenge then becomes how to freeze or vitrify them in the four to six minute window of time before ischemia and reperfusion become an issue (or to extend that window—cooling a patient just a few degrees seems to help this). Otherwise that type of cellular damage will have to be added to the list too.

It seems like a lot to deal with. But, then again, how else are we going to truly experience a future that (hopefully) will be something like Logan’s Run, or Planet of the Apes? Our imaginations? Please.

So what do you think? Is frosty immortality for you?

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