July 10, 2002
Cryogenics
I think that someday in the future, doctors (or janitors or a hierarchical society of talking apes) will thaw out our painstakingly frozen bodies and heads and find nothing but a soupy, useless mess. And they will have a hearty laugh at our expense before vaccuming it all up with a Sears WetDry Shopvac. There's no point to being cyogenically frozen today because there's a very good chance that we may not be doing it in a way that will actually preserve a person for the future.
Think of it like this: 13th-century scientists conceive of, and build, their idea of the automobile, but they don't know how to create a combustible material to fuel their creation. So they let it sit around until the future comes up with gasoline. Now imagine what technology these 13th-century scientists had to work with. Would the body of the car be reinforced steel? Would the door panels be fiberglass? Would there be airbags? I think you would have a flammable and dangerous wood, stone and canvas car for your trouble. It would not be safe to drive even if the engineers got all of the specs right.
And just think of this - if you are frozen and it "doesn't work out" what recourse do you have? None! You're dead! Talk about a bad return policy... If you want to spend your money with a company that knows you're never going to be able to check up on their purported service, pay to have a star named after yourself or adopt a cow.
Even those practicing cryogenics admit that freezing can cause damage to brain structures such as cell shrinkage, protein leakage and brain chemistry alteration. Sounds fun, eh? Alcor, the company that has Ted Williams' head has a white paper on how it *might* be possible to fix this damage with nanotechnology. They hope. This is why I won't be frozen. It's not that I don't trust the cryogenics of the future - I don't trust the cryogenics of the present.
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