Why Freezing Yourself Is a Terrible Way to Achieve Immortality

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What happens after we die? It's a question that has plagued the human mind since we first developed the concept of "death." The search for an answerand, more importantly, a means of circumventing its effectshas encited organized religion and served to shape one of the foundations of human culture.

We've built pyramids to house our dead in the afterlife, constructed terracotta armies to protect them, sacrificed the living in their honor, and even developed preservation techniques to ward off decompositionall in the effort to somehow defy the permanence of death and resurrect at least a part, however intangible, of the deceased person. Ignoring the mysticism and religious fervor of these practices, they represent little more than elaborate burial techniques, which stubbornly remain a part of modern society.

But unlike the miraculous rebirth of one's soul at the hands of Osiris, the practice of cryonics promises the rebirth of a younger, fitter, and not-dead youall through the miracle of future scientific progress.

Cryonics is the practice of preserving "legally dead" human bodies in extremely cold temperatures with hopes that future advances in medical science can revive their corpses and cure what ails themor, at least, extract their memories and consciousness.

The basic idea is that by rapidly cooling the body after the heart has stopped, but before the brain begins to die from hypoxia, the body is rapidly cooled to extinguish the metabolism and halt decomposition. However, unlike short-term suspended animation techniques that are currently being developed to aid in cardiac and neural surgery, traumatic injury, and similar life-threatening emergencies, cryonics freezes you for the long haul.

Not unlike Miracle Max's distinction between the stages of death in The Princess Bride, there is a very fine but very important distinction between "legally dead" and "brain dead" as it relates to cryonics. Cryonics cannot be performed on someone who is still aliveregardless of how ill, the cryonic process would kill them and that constitutes murder. Cryonic preservation practitioners therefore rely on the information-theoretic definition of death rather than the standard, legal definition.

The subject must be deemed "legally dead" by a medical professional, which denotes when the person's heart has stopped beating. Between the time that the heart stops and the brain suffers irreparable damage from oxygen starvation is when the cryonic preservation process must take place, so that the cellular brain function may someday be restarted.

There are a number of facilities in the United States that handle cryonic preservation, including the Cryonics Institute in Detroit, the American Cryogenics Society in Sunnyvale, California, and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Each charges a hefty annual membership fee as well as upwards of six figures to actually preserve your corpse, though you can save a significant sum by preserving only your head or just the brain itself.

Once you're declared legally dead, an emergency response team from one of these facilities first will stabilize the oxygen levels in your blood to maintain minimal brain function during your transport to the cryo facility, as well as pack your body in ice and administer the anticoagulant heparin into your bloodstream to keep your juices flowing.

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Why Freezing Yourself Is a Terrible Way to Achieve Immortality