What counts as death? And who gets to decide?
In the summer of 2013, I traveled to Scottsdale, Arizona to visit the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s leading cryonics organization, founded in 1972. CEO Dr. Max More gave me a full tour of the facilities and walked me through the entire process: from the moment clinical death is declared, through controlled cooling and vitrification, to the cryo-tanks holding (at the time) 117 patients in long-term storage.
I also asked him, somewhat selfishly, whether my big bald head would fit comfortably in a neuro-patient container.
After the tour, Max sat down with me for a 25-minute conversation that covered:
Affordability and the real cost of membership Why minimizing cooling delays after clinical death is critical, and what long-distance members do about it Preserving pets, because of course people ask Chemical brain preservation as an alternative path The importance of protecting the neuron’s microtubules The case for an X Prize style competition to reduce tissue damage Where cryonics sits inside the broader transhumanist project.
My favorite line from Max, the one I still come back to:
“Cryonics is critical care medicine taken to the next step.”
That framing matters. Cryonics is not a religion, not a guarantee, and not a death cult. It is a bet. The bet is that “dead” is a moving target, that what kills a person today may be reversible tomorrow, and that information theoretic death (the real, final loss of the patterns that make you, you) happens later than clinical death.
A decade and change later, the bet looks different than it did in 2013. We now have AI systems doing things that would have read as science fiction back then. The asymmetry between what we can preserve and what future technology might recover keeps widening. Whether cryonics ultimately works is still an open question. Whether it deserves serious intellectual engagement is not.
Watch the full tour and interview with Max More here:
#Cryonics #LifeExtension #Transhumanism #Longevity #Singularity1on1 #Alcor
A tour of Alcor where Max More walks us through the process of vitrification, shows us their long term storage facilities and talks about cryonics.