Are cryonics possible? Cryonics might be possible in the future, but there is no way at the moment to imagine how it would be possible.
The basic idea behind cryonics is that someone who is sick and cannot be healed by modern medicine is frozen when they die so that they can be revived at a time in the future when a cure for that disease has been discovered. The word cryonics comes from the Greek word “kyros”, which means “icy cold” or “frost”. People that undergo cryonics are frozen very quickly to -196℃ and then stored in a facility to keep them at the low temperature so that they don’t thaw out. The body has to be frozen as soon as death has occurred and very quickly to avoid ice forming in the cells. The same is done with food when it is flash frozen. If something is frozen slowly, it gives ice a chance to form in the cells and that can cause a lot of cell damage. If you defrost vegetables that have been flash frozen and vegetables that have been slowly frozen, the difference is extreme. Slowly frozen vegetables will be damage, lose their shape, and very soft. This would happen with a person as well. As of this moment, there are 600 people who have been cryogenically frozen and there are many more signed up for the process. The majority of them are in the USA.
There are several problems with the idea of cryonics. The first problem is the technology. A frozen dead person is not the same as an alive person in a state of cryogenic sleep, not that cryogenic sleep is even possible. The technology that these people are hoping for has to not only be able to cure whatever killed them, but thaw then without any damage, and then bring them back to life. Of course, we can’t know what technology would be available in the future, but bringing someone back from death seems a little farfetched. We can resuscitate people whose hearts have stopped and we can bring people back who have briefly been dead, but the longer someone is dead, the more chance of damage and brain damage. Nanotechnology could repair the damage but it is not possible to recreate things that have been removed by the damage, as in memories.
The second problem is financial. Preparing a body and chilling someone down to the required temperature takes a lot of money, but not as much money as keeping them at that temperature. A person may pay a lot for the service, but relatives of a dead person might not be so eager to keep paying to have a person kept on ice. Several cryogenic facilities have gone bankrupt recently and once the power is off, the bodies thaw out very quickly and have to be disposed of.
The third problem is why would the people in the future want to thaw out and fix people from the past. There might be some novelty factor to it and people from the past could be useful with explaining a particular time in history. But, if there are thousands and thousands of these people, the novelty value quickly wears off and it becomes something of an organizational nightmare. They need to be fed, housed, and taught about modern culture. If we had the ability, we might want to bring back a Roman noble, but we probably wouldn’t want two thousand of them. We must also assume that the number of people who have been frozen will be staggeringly large. If 100 people a year are frozen, at least, and it takes 500 years before the technology to fix all of these people exists, that is 50,000 people.
A far more likely solution would be to digitize the brain. Our technology is not far enough along where we could make a virtual copy of someone’s brain, but we can see a point where it will be and that is not that far into the future. A safer method of cryonics would be to digitize a person’s brain, wait for technology to build clones to be available, and then load that digital memory into the new body. To me, that seems far more doable than thawing out and fixing a dead person from 500 years ago. The main problem with uploading a mind is we don’t actually know what a mind is and what consciousness is, but if we can create synthetic nerves and exactly copy the processes of the mind to be uploaded, it might be possible. The technology is, if it ever comes, probably a hundred years away. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/cryonics-could-you-live-forever
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/cryonics3.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics
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