Cryonicists believe that people can be frozen immediately after death and reanimated later when the cure for what ailed them is found. To see the flaw in this system, thaw out a can of frozen strawberries. During freezing, the water within each cell expands, crystallizes, and ruptures the cell membranes. When defrosted, all the intracellular goo oozes out, turning your strawberries into runny mush. This is your brain on cryonics.
Cryonicists recognize this detriment and turn to nanotechnology for a solution. Microscopic machines will be injected into the defrosting "patient" to repair the body molecule by molecule until the trillions of cells are restored and the person can be resuscitated. Every religion needs its gods, and this scientistic vision has a trinity in Robert C. W. Ettinger (The Prospect of Immortality), K. Eric Drexler (Engines of Creation) and Ralph C. Merkle (The Molecular Repair of the Brain), who preach that nanocryonics will wash away the sin of death. These works are built on the premise that if you are cremated or buried, you have zero probability of being resurrected--cryonics is better than everlasting nothingness.
This article was originally published with the title Nano Nonsense and Cryonics.
Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.
See what we're tweeting about
6 Comments
Add CommentWhy does anything related to hope and taking chances have to be compared to religion? Science deals in near certainties, and failing that, gives ways to estimate probabilities. Does that mean that wherever science has nothing to say yet, the rational thing is not to have hopes and not to make guesses and gambles? Since when does planning ahead in the face of unknowns count as religion?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow does "the sin of death" resemble transhumanist thinking? Death is a result of damage. Plus, doh, it's really unfortunate, especially if it turns out it was avoidable. The question is whether and how the damage might be repairable. A merely practical, if interesting, question. But in the meantime we have to decide whether to account for the possibility in our plans.
Knowing Alcor, Esfandiary's head has been vitrified-- frozen in a way that minimizes crystallization. Someone give Michael Schermer a vitrified and restored strawberry.
The separartion of religion from state,science,art etc. should be enforced....always!!!Remember the dark ages?!How quickly we forget.Is science getting soft???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAccording to Alcor, FM-2030 was actually their pioneer vitrification patient, the first to undergo the (then) experimental procedure. To be fair to the author, vitrification was still a very new development in 2001, so news may not have filtered out of the cryonics community yet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEver heard of vitrification? - TheNanoAge
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is completely misleading and Scientific American has gotten complaints about this but refuses to clarify. Regardless of your views of cryonics, current techniques prevent the water rupture problem. The 'strawberries' quote has become something of a joke because it points out a bias and lack of due diligence in researching this story.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually I am a neuroscientist and have visited Alcor, met the people who run it and several of their members. And, no, I am no supporter of cryonics. I agree that Shermer's article would be better if he explicitly mentioned vitrification. Indeed, cryopreservation is a ligitimate area of science that makes for a good contrast with cryonics. However, Shermer's imperfect strawberry example more or less stands, in my view. Vitrification can cryopreserve small samples of certain types of tissues. These samples do not include whole brains or whole bodies. Alcor's post-FM2030 vitrified brains are less mushy than their frozen brains, but they are still mushy. Alcor claims imagined future technology will solve this problem. Further, Alcor still maintains their frozen non-vitrified brains at their facility, they still overtly claim that some unknown future technology might thaw them and they still keep the money of these members. So, in my opinion, criticizing them for freezing brains is fair game.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI also agree entirely that cryonics, while well-meaning, is in some ways analogous to religion. Sure, many members are indeed just gambling with small probabilities. But Alcor and cryonics is supported by an almost cultish ideological subculture associated with transhumanism, extropism, futurism, etc which is largely concerned with imagining how a morally superior society of immortal superhumans might be engineered. I'm not sure sociopolitical ideology and science always make the best bedfellows.
Shermer mentions some of transhumanist players here, including FS2030. I might add Cambridge IT guy Aubrey de Gray to this list. Its laughable to see this guy speak. I especially enjoy his "graphs" with schematic data (he doesn't have real data to present) which show that his so-called "engineering approach" to aging (which he never actually describes in detail) works better than "conventional" ones (even though nothing was ever actually tested).
Sorry, but imagining future data doesn't make you a scientist: ACTUALLY PRODUCING DATA makes you a scientist. I suppose I should start submitting papers to Science and Nature making big sweeping claims with no data. I mean, I promise the supporting data will appear in 2030. Ha! That doesn't happen because that's not science. Alcor employees mean well, but they are science fiction fans, not scientists.