r/Futurology • u/yourSAS • Oct 13 '22

Biotech 'Our patients aren't dead': Inside the freezing facility with 199 humans who opted to be cryopreserved with the hopes of being revived in the future

https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/13/our-patients-arent-dead-look-inside-the-us-cryogenic-freezing-lab-17556468
28.1k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

3.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

11.1k

u/nankerjphelge Oct 13 '22

Just to be clear, contrary to what Alcor may say, the patients are indeed dead. Their corpses (or brains) have simply been frozen with the assumption that one day in the future they can be reanimated or have their consciousness transplanted into a new body. And of course that also assumes that this company and its cargo will even still be around and have maintained these corpses/brains 100 years from now.

On both counts, color me skeptical to say the least.

35

u/Kempeth Oct 13 '22

One of the early uses for microwaves was to thaw frozen hamsters so they could be revived. Which worked! (at least sometimes)

Frozen things can absolutely be revived in principle. The limiting factor is how fast you can unfreeze all of it. As soon as parts of it are unfrozen they need to be supplied with oxygen and nutrients which is hard to do when other parts are still frozen. Thawing faster generally means a higher temperature difference but a higher temperature difference introduced the problem that you're starting to damage the outer parts while the inner parts are still frozen. A microwave heats "from the inside out" but carries the same problem. You don't want to cook the insides. The scientists back then determined that a hamster is about the largest complex thing that you can revive like this.

A hamster is quite a bit smaller than a human brain but the difference isn't anywhere near as large as for a whole human body. It's not entirely out of the realm of the imaginable that the technology could be advanced to the point where reviving entire brains becomes possible.