Freezing people in liquid nitrogen is back

ccording to the UK Daily Mail, a new Australian company called Southern Cryonics is offering to freeze people in liquid nitrogen until science finds a way to bring back people from the dead.

I'd say “Don't hold your breath” but it's probably too late for that.

This is coming from a species that has 17,700,000 Internet sites, according to Bing—with even the US Geological Survey weighing in—expressing bafflement at the question of whether water is wet.

Freezing people with terminal illness in the hope of resurrection and a future cure has been going on for decades. It's not as far fetched as you might think. In the lab, we freeze cultured cells all the time and revive them. There are some species that can tolerate being frozen solid. What the two things have in common is antifreeze.

In the lab, the cells have to be cooled very slowly in a nutrient mixture containing dimethyl sulfoxide so that the cell membranes are not damaged, and then thawed out very quickly. If they're stored in liquid nitrogen for too long, few of the cells can be revived. For a typical cancer cell called neuroblastoma that is often used in research, usually about half the cells can recover if they've been frozen properly.

Studies have shown that radiation damage to DNA^[1] and even proteins ^[2] is not eliminated by low temperature, so by the time you got thawed out the DNA in your cells would likely contain a crapload of new mutations. This would have to be repaired before waking you up.

Your view for the next 10,000 years

Unlike the cells, these people are already dead when they get frozen, so it will be very difficult to bring them back to life. (Even if the patient gets frozen while still alive, in practice filling your circulatory system with antifreeze and cooling you to −196°C would kill you pretty quick). The best you can reasonably hope for is to become an exhibit in some future museum of crackpot ideas of the 20th and 21st centuries.

But you never know. Maybe aliens from outer space would buy you and take you back to their home planet for dissection—or for use as an exotic food item.

Imagine waking up 3,000 years in the future and finding yourself in a lab on an asteroid orbiting Lambda Ophiuchi A, covered with vegetables, with space aliens gnawing on you.

The second worst case scenario is that our degenerate cannibalistic starving descendants, crawling through the burned out ruins of our cities scavenging for rats and cockroaches to survive, will thaw you out and eat you.

The worst case scenario is the IRS thaws you out and forces you to pay ten thousand years of back taxes. Dead or undead, soul or not, all that matters to the IRS are your income and capital gains. Unless you can prove you've been declared legally dead (in which case they'll go after your beneficiaries), this one is a virtual certainty.

Most likely, though, you'd just be incinerated to prevent the population from contracting a virus that future generations will believe may have been responsible for the low intelligence prevalent in our era.

For those Cold Ones who aren't incinerated, eaten, or taxed to death, the antifreeze will be replaced with fixative and their brains sliced up for future researchers interested in studying the somatic DNA mutations and synaptic degradation from which the people of our time suffered in hopes of understanding why the humans of our time possessed so many bizarre beliefs. So your body will be a valuable time capsule for science.

Another possibility is that slices of your brain could be used to create a computer reconstruction of each cell in your cerebral cortex, a sort of Microsoft Tay but containing synaptic connections identical to yours, to find out how you managed to vote in every election of the past 10,000 years while frozen solid.

This raises ethical questions. If you're reanimated as a virtual person, does the virtual person have the same rights as a real human? We know that even your DNA is merely a copy of the original DNA you received at the moment of conception. If a copy of your mind reanimated in a computer is functionally identical to you, down to its DNA, is it you? Leibniz, inventor of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, would have said yes. Far be it for me to argue with Leibniz.

The average startup company survives about ten years. There is no chance that any cryogenic company will still be in business by the time we learn how to revive dead cells. Ironically, if you want to be brought back to life you're better off perfusing yourself with a high quality fixative like glutaraldehyde that can preserve your cellular morphology. Aside from the fact that this would kill you in very painful way, in the one in a billion chance somebody bothered to reassemble you the best you could hope for would be to become a computer simulation of yourself instead of a live person. Whoever reassembles you would also have to build a simulated world for you to keep you from going mad. That wouldn't be easy.

That raises a further dilemma: what if that has already happened? It would explain a lot.

Update Just in case there's anyone out there thinking about trying this, I want to be on record that I think this is a bad idea.

jun 19 2022, 4:11 am. updated jun 20 2022