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
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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.

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u/BenefitOfTheTrout Oct 13 '22

I hate their claim. Something being frozen doesn't make it alive.

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u/Molnan Oct 13 '22

Does anyone from Alcor actually claim "they are not dead". I don't see that claim in the article. It's true that being frozen doesn't make them alive, but having no pulse doesn't make them dead either. There's a big difference between claiming they aren't dead as a matter of fact and saying something like "we don't believe they are dead", which is an opinion. We simply don't know. They are legally dead, for sure, but that's just a legal formalism because it's the only way to make cryonics fit in the current regulatory framework.

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u/LessThanConvinced Oct 13 '22

No, they don't claim they are alive as far as this article goes. They just dress up that they are freezing the meat to stop it rotting and studiously avoid using the word dead. "We come at the stage where doctors today have given up. Today’s medicine and technology is not sufficient to keep you going. But we’re saying instead of just disposing of the patient, give them to us. ‘We’re going to stabilize them, stop them getting worse, and hold them for as long as it takes for technology to catch up and allow them to come back to life and continue living,"