Can sub-zero stasis help humans escape death? In episode five of Hacking the Apocalypse, Claire Reilly goes inside a cryonics facility to investigate the experimental search for a second life.
Though its a bit old, and sometimes innacurate or snarky in narration, it’s still the most detailed depiction of the cryonics process — the procedure itself on a real person, the person preserved before dying and her family as they decide to do this, deal with her death, and reflect on it after she’s preserved. It’s quite emotional and sometimes graphic, but well worth watching. Will it work? Maybe. But if you are NOT preserved there is NO chance at all. From your perspective it’d be like waking up right after dying in some distant future without feeling like any time passed at all.
That sounds a hell of a lot more appealing and likely than a bearded man on a fluffy cloud winking at me after I die.
Anita Riskin is one of hundreds of people who believe in cryonics — the process where doctors freeze human bodies. Preserve them, so that some time in the future they can be resuscitated — brought back to life. Now, as Anita Riskin sets out on her amazing journey, for the first time, you’ll see how it’s actually done — at times, quite graphically.
Alexey Turchin and Maxim Chernyakov, researchers belonging to the transhumanism movement, wrote a paper outlining the main ways technology might someday make resurrection possible.
From cryonics to time travel, here are some of the (highly speculative) methods that might someday be used to bring people back to life.
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Stainless-steel containers for freezing and storing bodies in super-cold liquid nitrogen at the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute, China’s only cryonics centre. Photo: The Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute.
Why is Alcor in Arizona? The main reason is that the risk of earthquakes and other natural disasters is fairly low. People opting for cryonics expect that their bodies might be in stasis for timescales measured in centuries.
As far as financial matters go, many of Alcor’s clients use life insurance policies to cover the cost of preservation and maintenance ($200,000 for a whole body or $80,000 for just the head). People use trust funds if they have net worth they want to recover when revived in the future.
The rationale presented to those considering cryonics is that there’s no guarantee they will ever be revived, but that it is reasonable that they might be. Along with chemicals called cryoprotectants, bodies getting preserved receive a host of medications. The list of the agents used is constantly evolving and continuing research is likely to reveal alternative methods that preserve organ function and cell integrity better. This means that cryopreservation is likely to work better years and decades into the future than it works now, even before getting to the milestone of having somebody revived.
I interviewed transhumanist thinker Anders Sandberg, research fellow at Oxford Universities Future of Humanity Institute. We discuss how the global transhumanist movement has changed, the potential political impact of technological revolutions and the debate around cryonics. Fairly new channel so very grateful for any subscribers smile
My interview with Anders Sandberg, a prominent transhumanist thinker and research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.
We discuss how the transhumanist movement has changed, how it should engage in politics, whether pre-natural death cryogenics should be allowed and how long humans could live for amongst other things. Hope you enjoy!