But whether the science is there or not, people are being frozen in liquid nitrogen with the hope of seeing some distant tomorrow.Īlcor’s members come from all over the world. More points to studies in which scientists have studied the preservation of cells and tissues and even worms, but scaling that up to a full human body isn’t a trivial proposition. While researchers working on ‘ suspended animation’ are finding that they can cool a living being down to appear apparently dead before reviving them, freezing a body for decades is a different matter. Nobody has ever tried to bring a human back to life after preservation. Of course, the premise of cryonics also makes it essentially untestable. Cryonics is the same thing, we just have to stop them from getting worse and let a more advanced technology in the future fix that problem.” People we thought were dead 50 years ago we now know were not. Today we don’t do that, instead we do CPR and all kinds of things. Think of it this way: 50 years ago if you were walking along the street and someone keeled over in front of you and stopped breathing you would have checked them out and said they were dead and disposed of them. “We’re just taking over when today’s medicine gives up on a patient. “We see it as an extension of emergency medicine,” More says. Cryonics is a way to bridge the gap between today’s medicine and tomorrow’s. Those who die today could be cured tomorrow.

The general premise is simple: medicine is continually getting better. “I want to keep living and enjoying and producing.”Ĭryopreservation is a darling of the futurist community.

“I figure the future is a pretty decent place to be, so I want to be there,” he says.

More himself has been a member since 1986, and has decided to opt for neuropreservation – just deep freezing the brain – over whole body preservation. More is now the President and Chief Executive officer of Alcor, one of the world’s largest cryonics companies. “They were getting Cryonics magazine,” he says, “and they asked me about it to see how futuristic I was. He didn’t think much about it until years later, when he started hanging out with friends who held meetings about futurism. In 1972 Max More saw a children’s science fiction television show called Time Slip that featured characters being frozen in ice.

Bring up the bodies bbc