Suspended animation is about to make death political

Can death be useful? Thats the central question of the quickly expanding field of suspended animation, the process of slowing the bodys major processes as much as possible to induce a state thats very muchlike death without actually causingthe patient to die.

What precisely wemean when wesay actually die is a bit of an open question these days; in aworld where we can often be resuscitated after long periods of brain death, the noun Deathis probably best definedas, Any state ofzerobrain activityfrom whicha person will never berevived. Thats not particularly helpful, though; if a person is brain-dead next to a machine that could revive them, are they truly dead if the machine is broken and truly alive if it is not? Is death an absence of life, or an absence of any future potentialfor life?

Such questions used to be nothing but navel-gazing, but today represent concrete issues that could affect our lives in the every-day. With the recent onset of a trial for suspended animation technology, we have taken our first steps downa path with no end in sight. The trial will catch otherwise hopeless patients at the point of death (or potentiallyafter), and swap out a large portion of their blood for a chilled, oxygenated saline solution. This quickly lowers the body to a chilly 10 degrees Celsius, which almost immediately induces a hypothermic state and lowers the metabolic rate to near zero. If cells arent doing anything then they also arent producing any of themetabolic products that normally build up to toxic levels without breathing and circulation. At this point, the question is not whether suspended animation is real but whether its medically useful.

Medical evacuation helicopters see a lot of death en-route to hospitals, but that could be about to change.

The field of suspended animation facedwidespread skepticism for manyyears, but recent studies in pigs and a generally pro-futurism trend within science have led toa rather abrupt wave of professionalacceptance. It mostly comes down to drastically reduced claims for the technology; rather than alienating everyday physicians and scientists with speculation abouteternal life, suspended animation is now mostly about keeping terminal patients in a revivable statelong enough to getthem to machinery that can do the reviving. Many, many people die in ambulances, or military medevac helicopters, and these new attempts at induced hibernation could help those patients to get them the help they need.

Yet, there is simply no way well stop there. The trend will begin at NASA, DARPA, Calico, and other moonshot research organizations: how do we put healthy people into a hibernative state? Getting astronauts to Mars is probably possible without suspended animation, but a trip toEuropa or Enceladus will be much harder; theres a reason that space-ships full of stasis pods aresuch a trope of science fiction, and not least of them is a crews demands on power and consumables. Butspace isnt the only out-there application for suspended animation; not every prisoner at Guantanamo is an intelligence asset, so why keep useless prisoners conscious and complaining? And if you take the time to have an enemy combatant declared dead after combat, does that corpse still have rights if you revive it later?

Waking from suspended animation could be automated for long-term space missions with no conscious crew members.

Right now the research only really implies that suspended animation can be safe on the order of hours, but theres every reason to believe that a stasis nap could safely last weeks or months, and years arent such a crazy idea either. We are about to start allowing people topay to feel out the borders of death. Peoplewill freeze themselves even in absence of any plausible future cure for their fatal problem; if you can affordto do so, why wouldnt you?

This technologywill force us to ask tough questions about society: Does the word death mean something different forrich people than forthe poor? Do we declare a patient as dead depending on whether they can afford to stay in stasis until some projected cure date? In this dystopia, a market crash could wipe out savings accounts andswitch thousands of suspended patients from Long Term Pre-Mortal Stasis to Med School Cadaver In Waiting.

Minority Report had stasis prisons, albeit based on a different technology.