Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey Laren, welcome to Forward Thinking. Well that
Speaker 1: podcast that let's in the future and says, have you
Speaker 1: ever seen a turtle get down? I'm Jonathan Strickland and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. That that is a good one. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's like a you have to make a
Speaker 1: hop from from the to the artist to the topic.
Speaker 1: So our other host, Lauren voc Obamba, is not with
Speaker 1: us today. She is off exploring the wonders of the
Speaker 1: sewers of New York City to find that mystical turtle gang.
Speaker 1: But she will be back with us next time, hopefully
Speaker 1: with pizza. Right, you never pay full price for late pizza,
Speaker 1: you don't. So let's uh, let's let's let's transition smoothly,
Speaker 1: if we will, into the actual topic for today. This
Speaker 1: is the least smooth thing that has ever happened. That's fine,
Speaker 1: I am used to that. At this point, we want
Speaker 1: to talk a little bit about a topic that plays
Speaker 1: into something we've chatted about many times before. It kind
Speaker 1: of taps back into that that idea of how could
Speaker 1: you attain immortality and we've talked about in lots of episodes.
Speaker 1: There was the Future of Blood Um, there was Who
Speaker 1: Wants to Live Forever? There was Human plus Transhumanism episode,
Speaker 1: and most recently in the Anti Aging Debate episode. And uh,
Speaker 1: there's this whole idea about how can we attain immortality.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of people who think that that
Speaker 1: actually is within our grasp. Ray kurtzwell as the person
Speaker 1: that we talked about a lot on this show as
Speaker 1: one of those people. Or whether whether or not immortality
Speaker 1: is possible at least radical life extension, right, yeah, And
Speaker 1: if not immortality, the idea of living perhaps indefinitely. And
Speaker 1: and uh, one of the fears that people have is
Speaker 1: that what if we do figure out how to do that,
Speaker 1: But I'm dead before that happened. I missed the window.
Speaker 1: So it's only my my darn kids that get to
Speaker 1: live forever. And I die before I get the chance.
Speaker 1: I paid for those jerks to go through school, and
Speaker 1: I don't get to live forever. Right, this is something
Speaker 1: that comes up. So the obvious solution here is put
Speaker 1: me on ice, you know, freeze me, buddy. And so
Speaker 1: today we're gonna be talking about cryonics. The idea of
Speaker 1: using extreme low temperatures and cooling to preserve the human body,
Speaker 1: or more specifically the human brain and sometimes the body,
Speaker 1: with the hopes that in the future it could be
Speaker 1: defrosted and brought right back to life. Right. And then
Speaker 1: the important thing here is that we are talking about
Speaker 1: freezing someone after they have been declared dead, as opposed
Speaker 1: to your entering some sort of suspended animation alien style. Right.
Speaker 1: That might be a cool topic to do a whole
Speaker 1: other time, like general suspended animation. Can can they put
Speaker 1: you in the tube and let you go to sleep
Speaker 1: for sixty seven years on the way to some other planet? It?
Speaker 1: Can you rip Van Winkle it? That's a that would
Speaker 1: be a great companion episode to this one. So we
Speaker 1: thought it might be interesting to kind of go through
Speaker 1: the history of cryonics as well as the theory behind it,
Speaker 1: and then some discussion about is it at all plausible? Um.
Speaker 1: But before we do that, we have to address it.
Speaker 1: It's not in our notes, but we have to address it.
Speaker 1: One of the most well known urban legend stories about
Speaker 1: cryo preservation Walt Disney, Oh, frozen under Pirates of the Caribbean.
Speaker 1: I should have known you were going this direction. That's
Speaker 1: not true. It's not true at all. I don't think
Speaker 1: he was kryo preserved in any manner. No, he was not.
Speaker 1: But that's one of those enduring urban legends I remember.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's not enduring today. I remember hearing it when
Speaker 1: I was a kid. But that is not the case.
Speaker 1: He was not cryo preserved in any way. Um, But
Speaker 1: that is one of those stories that you would hear
Speaker 1: and I love the audacity of but not just that
Speaker 1: he was put into cryogenic preservation, but that he he
Speaker 1: is under a major tourist attraction. Well. I love how
Speaker 1: this is a story that gets repeated in different variations
Speaker 1: throughout our culture, which is the famous or powerful person
Speaker 1: is not actually dead or not dead in the way
Speaker 1: you thought they were. You know, Elvis is still alive,
Speaker 1: Hitler is still alive, right, Yeah, anybody who's I mean,
Speaker 1: whether they were loved or hated, powerful or just well known,
Speaker 1: these these public figures. Uh we we we tend to
Speaker 1: want to come up with stories for why they're not
Speaker 1: actually dead and just rotting in the ground. There there's
Speaker 1: something that happened. And and the cryopreservation version is a
Speaker 1: new uh is a new technological take on this, because
Speaker 1: it used to just be like, oh, you know that
Speaker 1: there was a body double who died and they're secretly
Speaker 1: alive somewhere. But now you can tell the same legend
Speaker 1: while accepting the fact that they did die. You just say, well,
Speaker 1: they're frozen and they could come back, right, So this
Speaker 1: idea dates back quite a way. Is actually, the idea
Speaker 1: of resuscitating a preserved human being is a really old one,
Speaker 1: particularly if you take into account certain religions, and they're
Speaker 1: fact that the the important factors of those religions. Sure,
Speaker 1: and that's not what we're gonna be talking about today.
Speaker 1: And now, that, of course is a very old idea
Speaker 1: and uh, and there are lots of different ways you
Speaker 1: could believe in that. Some people believe in sort of
Speaker 1: the spiritual survival of death and you know platonic dualism
Speaker 1: idea where you have a soul that leaves the body
Speaker 1: on death and survives in some way. And some religions
Speaker 1: also believe in physical reanimation of the corpse at some
Speaker 1: kind of resurrection events or something like that, or reincarnation.
Speaker 1: There are lots of ways to go at it. Today
Speaker 1: we're gonna be focusing on the scientific idea of reanimation
Speaker 1: of the body and the brain, and and one of
Speaker 1: those early ideas. Uh. I mean, obviously you could sit
Speaker 1: there and think of like Frankenstein being an example of that.
Speaker 1: But there is also a nineteenth century short novel titled
Speaker 1: The Man with the Broken Ear. It's written by a
Speaker 1: French author, in which a biology professor puts a person
Speaker 1: in suspended animation by drying him out, removing the water,
Speaker 1: and then turning him into into exactly just becomes the
Speaker 1: the macho man Randy Savage's worst nightmare in that case. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So at any rate, that this was an idea being
Speaker 1: thought about well before anyone came up with the notion
Speaker 1: of cryo preservation. But the first really serious proposal to
Speaker 1: use refrigeration, or actually even beyond refrigeration we're talking about
Speaker 1: vitrification to preserve humans dates back to Robert Ettinger, who
Speaker 1: published a book in nineteen sixty two called The Prospect
Speaker 1: of Immortality. And uh, in that you can actually read
Speaker 1: that book, including an updated version of that book in
Speaker 1: PDF format on the Cryonics Institute's website. Who is the
Speaker 1: Cryonics Institute? What do you think? It's an organization that
Speaker 1: was founded by it and uh, and obviously it's an
Speaker 1: organization that that promotes and performs cryo preservation. I guess
Speaker 1: what I was asking was, when you get a sense
Speaker 1: of them, do you feel like they're a strong, legitimate
Speaker 1: scientific organization or maybe a little cranky. That's a difficult
Speaker 1: thing to answer. My personal belief we're getting a little
Speaker 1: ahead of this, but my personal belief is that cryonics
Speaker 1: is uh perhaps goes beyond optimistic into wishful thinking based
Speaker 1: upon just what we know right now. And so I
Speaker 1: think that their practices are based upon the most comprehensive
Speaker 1: scientific knowledge we have at this time, but there are
Speaker 1: huge gaps in that scientific knowledge that make a lot
Speaker 1: of very optimistic assumption. Yeah, it makes me think of
Speaker 1: of the underpants gnomes number one, Underpant's number two something,
Speaker 1: number three profit. It feels like there's a lot of
Speaker 1: some things in that. Well, we'll we'll talk about those
Speaker 1: missing steps in this episode. But yeah, the the version
Speaker 1: here would be step one free as you step two, uh,
Speaker 1: step three. Yeah. So Edinger was a physicist and mathematician.
Speaker 1: I say was because he has passed on. He is
Speaker 1: crow preserved, who not only wrote about chronics, but he
Speaker 1: founded that cryonics Institute as well as the Immortalist Society.
Speaker 1: So he was a futurist who was really thinking about
Speaker 1: the stuff, including trans humanism, so covering a lot of
Speaker 1: the topics that we've talked about here on forward Thinking.
Speaker 1: He died in twenty eleven at the age of nine
Speaker 1: two and was cryo preserved. UM and Edinger's premise in
Speaker 1: the book is as follows. This is a direct quote
Speaker 1: from chapter one of his book. The fact, at very
Speaker 1: low temperatures it is possible right now to preserve dead
Speaker 1: people with essentially no deterioration indefinitely. Number two, the assumption,
Speaker 1: if civilization endures, medical science should eventually be able to
Speaker 1: repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing
Speaker 1: damage and senile debility or other cause of death. It
Speaker 1: is that second part, the assumption that a lot of
Speaker 1: people take exception to write the idea that um, just
Speaker 1: because civilization endures, that this is presupposing that what you
Speaker 1: are saying is actually possible. And if it is possible,
Speaker 1: then we agree, yes, we will one day figure it out.
Speaker 1: But what if it is not possible, that's the problem. Well. Also,
Speaker 1: just as stated, I'm sure Eddinger in some way anticipates this,
Speaker 1: but just in the simple way it was stated here.
Speaker 1: I might also take issue with the first part, the
Speaker 1: fact that it's possible to freeze people with essentially no deterioration,
Speaker 1: because I think what that's talking about there is it
Speaker 1: prevents the onset of natural decay. Your body does not
Speaker 1: go into sell death and continue to rot essentially. But
Speaker 1: they're the freezing process inherently does introduce uh quality of
Speaker 1: tissue preservation problems on its own. Yes, we'll talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more about those. Not only that, but there's
Speaker 1: no substantiation to the belief that that deterioration wouldn't have
Speaker 1: some other manifestation, like if the brain is an active
Speaker 1: that long, would would you be able to revive a
Speaker 1: person like you might be able to revive tissue and
Speaker 1: make and the body could technically live again, but there
Speaker 1: might not be a person there anymore. That's a that's
Speaker 1: a good point. I will also bring that up later,
Speaker 1: but we should for a moment take the cry onsts
Speaker 1: point of view, is that the cryonics advocates point of view,
Speaker 1: and say, what is the service claim to offer? So
Speaker 1: the basic claim is that cryo preservation will keep a
Speaker 1: body intact long enough for medical science to advance to
Speaker 1: the point where any damage that was endured by the body,
Speaker 1: including death itself, can be reversed. In fact, it has
Speaker 1: to include death, because cryo preservation is really about suspended death,
Speaker 1: not suspended life. And uh and so not only do
Speaker 1: you have to reverse the cryo preservation process itself, which
Speaker 1: is a tall order, but then also reverse anything that
Speaker 1: led to the person dying in the first place, whether
Speaker 1: it was a terminal illness or some other organ failure
Speaker 1: or whatever it might be. Right. Um, the important element
Speaker 1: here is preservation. The body and particularly the brain has
Speaker 1: to be preserved in order to give the future doctors
Speaker 1: the chance to revive the patient. And this does make
Speaker 1: sense because I mean, if you just if you have
Speaker 1: somebody die, you can't just leave them at room temperature
Speaker 1: and say we'll see if we can revive them later,
Speaker 1: because you're going to come back and they won't be
Speaker 1: there anymore. Well, what is there to revive except their bones?
Speaker 1: Right right? The actual deterioration will continue, bacterial will will
Speaker 1: break things down, so you have to slow all that
Speaker 1: or stop it as much as you can. So if
Speaker 1: you assume that the essence of the person is in
Speaker 1: some sense contained in the brain and the nervous system.
Speaker 1: Then the ability to preserve the person's ability or potential
Speaker 1: to come back to life rests in keeping the brain
Speaker 1: and the nervous system from changing from the state it
Speaker 1: was in dr life right, right, If it changes, then
Speaker 1: obviously that and we've seen this right, People who suffer
Speaker 1: brain damage can have different personality issues or intelligence issues
Speaker 1: depending on you know, where the damage was sustained. And uh,
Speaker 1: and that shows that there is this link between the
Speaker 1: brain and the self. I mean, that is that is important. Obviously.
Speaker 1: I think that is a robust finding of modern sciences.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to be respectful of people's beliefs here as well,
Speaker 1: but I mean science would show that the self, the self,
Speaker 1: and the brain are very closely tied together. If not, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think pretty much, no matter what you
Speaker 1: believe about dualism or whatever, the brain is the seat
Speaker 1: of the self in the body. Yes, yes, so clearly
Speaker 1: you have to have a way of preserving that. And
Speaker 1: so crownics depends upon, like I said, an unsubstantiated premise,
Speaker 1: actually more than one unsubstantiated premise, but one big one,
Speaker 1: and that is that long term memory can be preserved
Speaker 1: if the brain is kept at a low enough temperature. Obviously,
Speaker 1: you want to have long term memory preserved because of
Speaker 1: the wise the person is not the person when they
Speaker 1: come back, right, they don't have any memory of who
Speaker 1: they are, then they are not you know, we brought
Speaker 1: Jack back, but Jack's not Jack anymore. This again features
Speaker 1: into some strange questions that I want to ask towards
Speaker 1: the end. Excellent, I can't wait to hear them. So
Speaker 1: there are some surgeries in which doctors will cool a
Speaker 1: patient's brain in order to reduce the metabolic rate that
Speaker 1: the brain is going through. So typically this isn't around
Speaker 1: twenty five degrees celsius, which is seventy seven degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: That's boiling hot compared to the temperatures of cryopreservation. So
Speaker 1: cryonic says, hey, if we can slow metabolic processes and
Speaker 1: see patients make a recovery even after their their brains
Speaker 1: have been put into hypothermia, then if there's no or
Speaker 1: very little negative impact to their long term memory, maybe
Speaker 1: what we could do is freeze the brain. Essentially, vitrify
Speaker 1: is a better word, and we'll get into why that
Speaker 1: isn't later. You don't really want the brain to freeze
Speaker 1: to preserve long term memory indefinitely. And people would say like, oh,
Speaker 1: you made a big jump there to say that, because
Speaker 1: we can cool the brain down to slow down the
Speaker 1: metabolic processes and the person can make a recovery with
Speaker 1: little to no impact on the long term memory, it's
Speaker 1: an enormous jump to suggest that we could stop or
Speaker 1: essentially stop the metabolic process and bring it back and
Speaker 1: there'll be no effect. Um. The prevailing theory and messine
Speaker 1: is that the brain needs to be continuously active for
Speaker 1: memory to survive. So even in the surgery example I
Speaker 1: was giving, the brain is still active. It's just slowed
Speaker 1: down significantly, but it's not like it's stopped. And so
Speaker 1: it could very well be that the people who are
Speaker 1: arguing for cryonics are absolutely correct in their assumption, but
Speaker 1: we don't have the scientific evidence to prove that yet. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: we mentioned at the beginning that this is a fundamentally
Speaker 1: different idea than the idea of suspended animation, like sending
Speaker 1: the body into some form of Often the idea of
Speaker 1: cold temperatures is involved, but not necessarily they're they're just
Speaker 1: different ideas about how you might make a human hibernate
Speaker 1: to stop their metabolism so they don't age, they don't
Speaker 1: need to eat, and stuff like that. Demolition Man, the
Speaker 1: amazing documentary Demolition Man has a lot of that in there,
Speaker 1: or as we said, alien And in these cases it's
Speaker 1: it's not cryo preservation because you're not being preserved. You're
Speaker 1: sort of going into hibernation. You don't die first, right,
Speaker 1: So crime preservation it does involve suspending a person after
Speaker 1: they have died, suspended death as as Attinger argued, it
Speaker 1: should be thought of as as opposed to suspended animation
Speaker 1: because it was it's it's easier to do. For one thing,
Speaker 1: there are fewer ethical concerns, right because the person is
Speaker 1: already dead. So the biggest ethical concern is is it
Speaker 1: ethical for you to ask for money first too, for
Speaker 1: the service that you cannot guarantee will work. So you're
Speaker 1: you're selling something and you don't know for sure that
Speaker 1: what you're selling will ever pay off in the long run.
Speaker 1: That's the only real ethical concern is So, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that's fine as long as you're perfectly clear
Speaker 1: with people what what the risks are sure. I'm just
Speaker 1: saying that it's it's more ethical. That approach is more
Speaker 1: ethical than saying, hey, uh, you want to live, you
Speaker 1: want to live to see you know, just go ahead
Speaker 1: and jump into this chamber. We're gonna lower your body
Speaker 1: temperature to minus hunter ninty six degrees celsius. Then that's
Speaker 1: gonna kill you, right like, that will kill you, and
Speaker 1: then maybe you can be brought back. That's where the
Speaker 1: ethical concern is, you could not get No one's gonna
Speaker 1: let that fly right. No one's gonna say, sure, go ahead,
Speaker 1: start killing people so that they can come back in
Speaker 1: a hundred years time. Um So, suspended death actually makes
Speaker 1: more sense, and it's easier to achieve from a social
Speaker 1: point of view. Not easier necessarily technologically, but perhaps culturally.
Speaker 1: Um and Inger in his book pointed out that there
Speaker 1: are different classes of death. He identified five, which miracle
Speaker 1: max would end up being three short because he said
Speaker 1: there's mostly dead, and then there's all dead. As it
Speaker 1: turns out, Inger says, no, no, no, there are quite
Speaker 1: a few. There's clinical death, which typically is when someone
Speaker 1: has stopped breathing and their heartbeat has stopped. That's often
Speaker 1: referred to his heart death. Yeah. Uh, there's biological death
Speaker 1: that Inger would argue in which he said, that's the
Speaker 1: state from which resuscitation is impossible under our current capabilities.
Speaker 1: There's maybe some ambiguity in there purposefully so and I'll
Speaker 1: get to why. Then there's cellular death. That's the actual
Speaker 1: degeneration of cells in our bodies. Uh. There's legal death.
Speaker 1: That's the condition that um uh so discouraging that a
Speaker 1: an attending physician will sign off on a death certificate,
Speaker 1: so essentially saying that a physician has determined that resuscitation
Speaker 1: is no longer possible and signs of death certificate. Then
Speaker 1: there's religious death um. And that definition depends upon the
Speaker 1: religion in question, and it relates to cryonics and how
Speaker 1: the religion frames death, because in some religions it might
Speaker 1: be considered um taboo to even think about cryo preservation.
Speaker 1: So ed Sure argued that clinical death is sometimes reversible,
Speaker 1: the idea that I'm gonna stopped breathing their hardest stopped,
Speaker 1: they can sometimes be resuscitated. Uh, And that the starting
Speaker 1: point for biological and cellular death isn't static. In other words,
Speaker 1: what might have been impossible, it might have been impossible
Speaker 1: to resuscitate someone under certain conditions twenty years ago, but
Speaker 1: today it is now possible. So he says though there therefore,
Speaker 1: the definition of biological death is fluid. It can change
Speaker 1: over time. It gets more and more narrow because we
Speaker 1: find new ways to bring people back. He also argues,
Speaker 1: this is this is evidence to support the idea that
Speaker 1: cryonics works, because if we keep pushing that that limit
Speaker 1: back further and further, why should we ever think that
Speaker 1: there's a limit to what we can do. Well, I
Speaker 1: think there's something to that, but then again, you will again,
Speaker 1: if we imagine someone dead and then left at room temperature,
Speaker 1: you will immediately start to encounter issues because somebody dead
Speaker 1: and left at room temperature is going to start to
Speaker 1: go through the degradation of tissues from which you cannot recover.
Speaker 1: You go through the process of cell death. Like we
Speaker 1: talked about, the individual tissues at every level throughout the
Speaker 1: body start to degrade in such a way that it's
Speaker 1: not just kind of like we don't have a way
Speaker 1: to fix that. Yet. You look at somebody who's been
Speaker 1: dead at room temperature for several days, and there's nothing
Speaker 1: you can think of that you could do that would
Speaker 1: bring this person back. It's like without without having some
Speaker 1: sort of perfect map of their neural Yeah, you'd essentially
Speaker 1: just need to reprint them from scratch. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: at that point you're talking about cloning anyway. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it's and then you have the argument of well, is
Speaker 1: this the person or is just a copy of a
Speaker 1: person they actually have the experiences that the person had.
Speaker 1: That's a totally different realm of sci fi that we're
Speaker 1: not going to go into in this particular episode. But
Speaker 1: these are these are questions that remain unanswered. Uh. And
Speaker 1: obviously cryonics is all about getting the person into cryo
Speaker 1: preservation as quickly as possible after clinical death. So that
Speaker 1: doesn't happen really after legal death, I should say, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: so that you don't have this deterioration of tissue that
Speaker 1: would be at least problematic and at most a complete
Speaker 1: preventative from ever bringing the person back, no matter how
Speaker 1: advanced our technology gets in the future. So the first
Speaker 1: person to ever undergo cryogenic preservation, I mean true cryo
Speaker 1: preservation was James Bedford, and that happened in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: Now that actually happened a couple of years after, a
Speaker 1: guy named Evan Cooper published a book similar to Ettinger's.
Speaker 1: His book was titled and More Tality Physically Scientifically Now.
Speaker 1: Cooper founded the Life Extension Society and tried to convince someone, anyone,
Speaker 1: to undergo cryo preservation after death. He didn't. He was
Speaker 1: getting really of antsy about it. He was like, fifty
Speaker 1: million people die every year. Couldn't one of you say
Speaker 1: that I want to be cry o preserved? Uh? It
Speaker 1: starts out like he had a little air of desperation
Speaker 1: around him because it took a couple of years before
Speaker 1: he finally had an opportunity. Um he uh. He actually
Speaker 1: even said that the the organization would pay for the
Speaker 1: cryo preservation so the family of the deceased would not
Speaker 1: have to foot the bill for it, because he just
Speaker 1: wanted to get things started. One other person had actually
Speaker 1: been placed in crowd genning suspension temporarily. So there was
Speaker 1: a woman whose identity was never revealed, so we don't
Speaker 1: have a name, but the time between her death and
Speaker 1: the crowd preservation process was considered too great that she
Speaker 1: had spent too long out in uh In and sort
Speaker 1: of I think she was in a mortuary. So she
Speaker 1: wasn't like she had um, it wasn't like she was
Speaker 1: being stored at room temperature, but still wasn't a temperature
Speaker 1: cold enough for a cryo preservation. And it was it
Speaker 1: was cold enough to slow deterioration, but not to stop it.
Speaker 1: And so she was eventually removed from suspension and buried.
Speaker 1: So she doesn't really count as far as people in
Speaker 1: the cryonics field are concerned. Bedford was a psychology professor
Speaker 1: who passed away at the age of seventy three before
Speaker 1: being frozen. The Chronic Society of California performed the procedure
Speaker 1: and it's a it's kind of interesting, Um, he is
Speaker 1: still frozen. Uh he You can read all about James
Speaker 1: Bedford and they actually did a transfer I think in
Speaker 1: n which involved a thorough check to make sure that
Speaker 1: everything was as it should be and acording to the
Speaker 1: stuff I read, Uh, he was in good shape. Um,
Speaker 1: still frozen or vitrified as we should say. I keep
Speaker 1: saying that. I mean frozen is kind of like the
Speaker 1: layman term that you always hear when it comes to
Speaker 1: cryogenic preservation. Well, let's get into the actual specifics. Then,
Speaker 1: what do they do to you? And what's the deal
Speaker 1: with this vitrification. Sure, so there's a company called Alcore
Speaker 1: that does this, and they have a pretty thorough PDF
Speaker 1: that explains the process. So I'm going to use them
Speaker 1: as an example. Keeping in mind that cryonics companies there
Speaker 1: are few out there, and they all generally follow the
Speaker 1: same sort of approach. One thing I should point out
Speaker 1: is that way back in the day, the woman I
Speaker 1: was talking about who was put into cryogenic suspension, she
Speaker 1: wasn't actually treated with any chemicals to counteract ice crystal
Speaker 1: formation because she was she was really cryonically she was
Speaker 1: really not cryonically frozen. She was dipped in liquid nitrogen
Speaker 1: essentially um so that was a major difference. But today
Speaker 1: cryo preservatives are definitely part of the procedure. So first,
Speaker 1: Alcore says their first step is deployment and stand by,
Speaker 1: which is where they get a notification that a customer
Speaker 1: is uh is near death or has passed away, and
Speaker 1: they send a team to wherever that that customer happens
Speaker 1: to be there. The patient is how they refer to
Speaker 1: them to wherever the patient is as soon as they
Speaker 1: are aware of it, and at the moment that the
Speaker 1: patient is declared legally dead, assuming it has not already happened.
Speaker 1: The team can then take action UM and that reduces
Speaker 1: the amount of time between the pronouncement of death and
Speaker 1: cryo preservation, which is critical. Just as you were saying earlier, Joe,
Speaker 1: you know you can't waste any time or deterioration starts
Speaker 1: to happen. UM. So they then jump into stage two,
Speaker 1: which is stabilization. So the al core team begins to
Speaker 1: cool the patient's body to just above freezing to depress metabolism,
Speaker 1: and they restore circulation. They actually cause blood to circulate
Speaker 1: again in order to have oxygenated blood feed into the
Speaker 1: brain UM and they may as part of this also
Speaker 1: ventilate the lungs. They also administer anti clotting medications, very
Speaker 1: important in order to get the blood to continue to
Speaker 1: flow through the circulatory system. UM and if it will
Speaker 1: take any a long time to get the patient to
Speaker 1: olt cores facilities, they might replace the patient's blood with
Speaker 1: an organ preservation solution to protect against cold schemia. So
Speaker 1: cold schemia that's actually something that happens with organ transplants UM.
Speaker 1: It's the chilling of a tissue or organ during decreased
Speaker 1: blood perfusion or in the absence of blood supply. Uh So,
Speaker 1: when you are are removing an organ for transplant purposes
Speaker 1: and you're cooling it, that is the the cold is schemia. Um.
Speaker 1: And then you alsh have warm a schemia. That's when
Speaker 1: you have the process when you're warming the organ up
Speaker 1: and then and then performing the surgery to transplant into
Speaker 1: a patient. Yeah. But at this stage in the process,
Speaker 1: if we were not to introduce some certain types of chemicals,
Speaker 1: we would really encounter problems because the body has a
Speaker 1: lot of water content of it. Yeah. Have you ever noticed,
Speaker 1: Jonathan that say, if you get some food out of
Speaker 1: the freezer, like some fresh vegetables or fruits or meat
Speaker 1: or something like that, and then you cook it up,
Speaker 1: doesn't quite have exactly the same texture it would have
Speaker 1: if you just had it fresh. Yeah. Are you somehow
Speaker 1: moving this to cannibalism discussion. No no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that you can tell just at that level without any
Speaker 1: kind of scientific analysis, that something happens to organic tissues
Speaker 1: that are frozen to have water content. And one of
Speaker 1: the main things that's going on here that scientists have
Speaker 1: identified is the problem of ice crystal formation. Yeah, ice crystals.
Speaker 1: If they form in your in your tissues, what happens
Speaker 1: is the ice crystals end up squishing cells, damaging cells,
Speaker 1: and killing cells. So if ice crystals are forming in
Speaker 1: your blood, in your in your tissue, then you're you're
Speaker 1: suffering tissue damage and that's bad. Obviously, you know, you're
Speaker 1: creating more work for the amazing scientists of the future
Speaker 1: to reverse when they're trying to revive somebody. So one
Speaker 1: of the way, and obviously you don't want, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't want your prefrontal cortex to be like that frozen
Speaker 1: ocra that you got out of the freezer that was
Speaker 1: so soggy and gross. So instead you need to undergo
Speaker 1: some kind of procedure to prevent ice crystals from forming
Speaker 1: in the body when you go to these super cool temperatures.
Speaker 1: That brings us to phase three, which is the cryo
Speaker 1: protectant perfusion process. Uh So, in that stage, which takes
Speaker 1: place at the alcore facility, the patient's blood is replaced
Speaker 1: with vitrification solutions. So now we're going to finally talk
Speaker 1: about vitrification. So the standard meaning of the word is
Speaker 1: to turn into a glass. Essentially that that you're turned
Speaker 1: into glass through some process. You're not actually turned into
Speaker 1: glass now, but in this case, the alcre uses the
Speaker 1: term vitrification rather than frozen because the chemicals used to
Speaker 1: UH in this in this phase actually protect water from
Speaker 1: solidifying into ice um. So this actually allows the the
Speaker 1: the tissues and water to to not form ice crystals,
Speaker 1: thus preserving the cells, or at least that's the plan.
Speaker 1: So in this process the water in cells is partially
Speaker 1: replaced with these chemicals, and that is hopefully something that
Speaker 1: could be reversed in the future when you're being revived. Now,
Speaker 1: there are some problems with this process as well, the
Speaker 1: injection of the cryoprotectants, and I'm going to talk about
Speaker 1: a recent study towards the end of this episode that
Speaker 1: I think sort of addresses this problem. Okay, and then
Speaker 1: you have the final phase of this process, phase four,
Speaker 1: which is the cryogenic cool down UM. So the patient
Speaker 1: has cooled, usually in a series of cooling periods, because
Speaker 1: if you do it too fast then you can have
Speaker 1: really bad tissue damage. But the patient is cooled to
Speaker 1: the temperature of liquid nitrogen, which is at the warmest
Speaker 1: negative three forty four degrees fahrenheit. Or nearly negative one
Speaker 1: six degrees celsius. And that's how they're kept at that
Speaker 1: temperature until there it's time to thaw them out. And uh,
Speaker 1: either that means that we figured out until the power
Speaker 1: goes off, Yeah, the money runs out something like that.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, that's how they stay and or
Speaker 1: barring any technical or financial failure. Uh. And at that temperature,
Speaker 1: physical decay is pretty much stopped. It is as so
Speaker 1: minor as to be negligible. And that's kind of what
Speaker 1: they talk about, as you know, indefinitely preserved until we're
Speaker 1: able to fix whatever the problems were. Now. Being preserved
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily mean that you have your own space. You
Speaker 1: might be in a chamber with somebody else. And by
Speaker 1: chamber I mean no, but it's like it's like, think about,
Speaker 1: you know, a tube large enough to hold a couple
Speaker 1: of bodies, maybe as many as four in one case
Speaker 1: that I read about, Uh, and sometimes this requires some
Speaker 1: creative placement. One of the things I read sounded like
Speaker 1: the four people have been had to be placed very
Speaker 1: very carefully into a single chamber, and it was like
Speaker 1: putting together a puzzle to see which bits could fit where. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: not pleasant to think about, definitely not dignifying to think about,
Speaker 1: but especially in the early days, there were some limitations
Speaker 1: because there weren't very many chambers in existence, so you
Speaker 1: kind of had to buddy up at any rate. Um Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you're dead, so you might not really care
Speaker 1: at that point. But it's definitely another part of the
Speaker 1: reason that a lot of people don't necessarily think about
Speaker 1: because they're thinking like, oh, it's in those you know,
Speaker 1: clear acrylic chambers where you can look in and you
Speaker 1: see the face of the person. Like, no, that's not
Speaker 1: really the case. Um. And also we mentioned Joe, you
Speaker 1: mentioned about the brain being really important, and sometimes that's
Speaker 1: the only important thing people are really concentrating on. If
Speaker 1: you're looking at cryo preservation and you realize, like that
Speaker 1: price tag is really high, like that's gonna be a
Speaker 1: huge drain on finances, you look at the price tag
Speaker 1: and then you look at your body, you're like, well,
Speaker 1: does all this really matter all that much? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you could go in for I didn't take care of
Speaker 1: it anyway. You can go in for neuro cryo preservation,
Speaker 1: which is a fancy way of saying they'll freeze your
Speaker 1: head and nothing else. So essentially you get surgically decapitated.
Speaker 1: It's a bargain and they, yeah, you don't need nearly
Speaker 1: as much space for neuro cryo preservation as you do
Speaker 1: for full cryoud preservation. And of course the idea behind
Speaker 1: that is that our brains have all the interesting stuff
Speaker 1: in them that makes us who we are, and hopefully,
Speaker 1: by the time we're able to start throwing people out,
Speaker 1: we'll also have the medical science necessary to create a
Speaker 1: new body, either through cloning or three D printing or
Speaker 1: some other means that we don't even anticipate right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you would have your head sewn onto the body
Speaker 1: of your new dog or whatever body. No, yeah, hopefully
Speaker 1: you get a robot, a very very strong and powerful robot.
Speaker 1: This is sounding a lot like almost every episode of Futurama, right,
Speaker 1: That's another reason why I get a little skeptical. So yeah, so,
Speaker 1: so everything we've said before that is what is supposed
Speaker 1: to happen. It's so sort of like what the claim is,
Speaker 1: what would work in theory if everything goes according to
Speaker 1: plan and how the preservation process works. Now we enter
Speaker 1: the section of our outline titled but uh, yeah, how
Speaker 1: do you how do you wake up? Yeah? Yeah, like
Speaker 1: that's that's a big question. So, oh, um, has anyone
Speaker 1: figured out how to how to do that? No, No
Speaker 1: one has even close to figured out how to revive
Speaker 1: a dead person from a frozen state. The freezing does
Speaker 1: not keep you in a state. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: some people kind of think about it like this. Okay,
Speaker 1: if you freeze them, you just warm them back up.
Speaker 1: It's like you reverse the process and then they wake up. No,
Speaker 1: then you just have a warm dead body, not a
Speaker 1: dead body. Right, So, no one has figured out how
Speaker 1: to revive a dead person. I mean, we've figured out
Speaker 1: how to people. Yeah, people who might go into cardiac
Speaker 1: arrest or something like that, and there are some cases
Speaker 1: in which they can be brought back through through interventions.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this kind of dead person, we don't know
Speaker 1: what you do with that. The really most sincerely dead,
Speaker 1: as the Munchkins would say. Yeah, So not only have
Speaker 1: we not figured out that at this point, as of
Speaker 1: right now, no mammals have ever been cooled to cry
Speaker 1: o preservation temperatures and revived. Now, there have been some
Speaker 1: kind of weird, creep but interesting experiments. Yeah, and those
Speaker 1: experiments usually involve mammals that have been uh operated on
Speaker 1: so that their blood has been swapped out for some
Speaker 1: sort of protective solution, and then the animals were cooled
Speaker 1: to blow freezing, then rewarmed and revived, and that has
Speaker 1: worked out. I think dogs and monkeys largely have. I
Speaker 1: think it doesn't work out all the time. Doesn't work
Speaker 1: out all the time. It's not a successful but it's
Speaker 1: one of those things where there has been some success.
Speaker 1: But cooling down to freezing and cooling down to minus
Speaker 1: one celsius is that's a pretty significant gap. So yeah,
Speaker 1: So we we mentioned earlier all the different assumptions that
Speaker 1: cry preservation depends on. So it depends on the ability
Speaker 1: to successfully and safely reverse the freezing process and revive
Speaker 1: the brain. It also depends on medical advancements, advancements to
Speaker 1: cure whatever problem killed you in the first place, or
Speaker 1: else this will be a very brief and unpleasant revival.
Speaker 1: It makes me think of the sim sins like like
Speaker 1: looking for a cure for nineteen stab wounds in the back.
Speaker 1: We're exactly, yeah, um, And then of course there's imagine
Speaker 1: you only got your head preserved, you've got the problems
Speaker 1: to deal with their Yeah, yeah, none, there may be
Speaker 1: a shortage of robotic bodies at the time you wake up,
Speaker 1: which would be very unfortunate. None of these are terribly trivial, right,
Speaker 1: These are all pretty tough problems. But we mentioned also
Speaker 1: problems associated with the freezing itself and then apart from
Speaker 1: whatever killed you naturally. Yeah, so freezing tissues to this
Speaker 1: temperature sometimes results in fracturing. It can actually be fractures
Speaker 1: that happen, and I mean even with the vitrification. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's it's when you're getting two temperatures that low, it's
Speaker 1: something that can happen. And uh, you know, the cryonics
Speaker 1: groups strive very hard to try and preserve people without
Speaker 1: any damage, but it's difficult to predict and even if
Speaker 1: you're taking very great care, it can still happen. Some
Speaker 1: of the organs in our body are quite large, and
Speaker 1: when they get cool to those temperatures, there could be
Speaker 1: these fractures, which that's definitely a problem. Um. There are
Speaker 1: several kronos companies that are exploring other options that would
Speaker 1: allow for the preservational bodies at higher temperatures to reduce
Speaker 1: the chance of these fractures forming in the first place.
Speaker 1: So some vapor uh techniques that are being experimented on,
Speaker 1: but as far as I know, I haven't been deployed
Speaker 1: in any way. But the idea being that you could
Speaker 1: preserve bodies at a higher temperature still be below freezing,
Speaker 1: significantly below freezing, but well above minus one celsius. And uh.
Speaker 1: There's also been some pretty big black eyes on the
Speaker 1: history of croyonics, some some notable and tragic failures. Well,
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier about the power going off. I know
Speaker 1: that's been a problem before, right, Yeah, So here's the deal.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about some pretty awful stuff here, and
Speaker 1: I just wanna I want to preface this by saying
Speaker 1: that reading about these was really hard on me because
Speaker 1: I just put myself in the mindset of a family member,
Speaker 1: someone who who agreed perhaps to a wish or let's
Speaker 1: say that that that the deceased person wanted to be
Speaker 1: crygenically frozen, and the family members honoring this wish and
Speaker 1: thinking about going through the grieving process once when the
Speaker 1: person passes away, and then again after a failure is
Speaker 1: a really tough thing to think about. Now, not everyone
Speaker 1: had that reaction. Some people say I went through and
Speaker 1: made my peace after they died, and to me, this
Speaker 1: was an unfortunate thing, but it was something that they
Speaker 1: had wanted. It wasn't something I believed and I did
Speaker 1: all of the sense of obligation. I am at peace
Speaker 1: with what has happened, even though it was unfortunate, that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff they might have had, might have had
Speaker 1: an understand from the beginning that this was a you know,
Speaker 1: an outside chance anyway, an optimistic long shot that was
Speaker 1: likely to fail, and possibly a long shot that would
Speaker 1: pay off well after they themselves had passed away, right
Speaker 1: Like it could be like, yeah, it's gonna be sixty
Speaker 1: more years before this even has a chance to pay off,
Speaker 1: meaning that the children of the people who were putting
Speaker 1: them to cryos storage at the beginning may not live
Speaker 1: to see it actually pay off in the end. Well.
Speaker 1: First of all, everyone who was frozen before nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: with only one exception, has since been thought and buried
Speaker 1: or cremated. So every single person who was put into
Speaker 1: cryonic suspension before nineteen seventy four is dead dead, except
Speaker 1: for James Bedford, that first person who was put into
Speaker 1: cryo preservation. He is still in cryo preservation, largely because
Speaker 1: he was transferred to the care of relatives for a
Speaker 1: while who were able to uh make certain that his
Speaker 1: his cryogenic chamber was still being serviced with liquid nitrogen
Speaker 1: to keep it at the right temperature, while some of
Speaker 1: the other facilities suffered massive problems. So why were the
Speaker 1: folks before nineteen seventy four thought out in the first place.
Speaker 1: In some cases, it was because the company that oversaw
Speaker 1: their care went out of business. That's a huge problem, right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you are entrusting a company to be a caretaker
Speaker 1: and keep your your chamber at the proper conditions so
Speaker 1: that one day you have a chance of coming back,
Speaker 1: you've got to hope that that company sticks around. And
Speaker 1: that's not always the case. Um. So here's an example.
Speaker 1: Cryo Care, which started off as a cosmetic freezing company,
Speaker 1: was one of those And by cosmetic, I mean they
Speaker 1: weren't looking for cryo preservation. They were looking to preserve
Speaker 1: the appearance of a person, but not to preserve their
Speaker 1: chance to come back to life. So they weren't treated
Speaker 1: with cryo preservatives necessarily. But some of them, the people
Speaker 1: who were put into cryogenic suspension were kind of handed
Speaker 1: over to Cryo Care as the facility to take care
Speaker 1: of the chamber UM in the meantime, And so Cryo
Speaker 1: Care went out of business a couple of years after
Speaker 1: it launched, and the owner ended up turning all the
Speaker 1: patients over to other companies or back to the family
Speaker 1: members who more often than not, uh had the body
Speaker 1: thought so that it could be buried or cremated. Um.
Speaker 1: Quite a few customers thought out after payments dried up,
Speaker 1: which is pretty grim to think about. UM, that the
Speaker 1: money ran out and so they were no longer being
Speaker 1: cared for, and then they ended up having to be buried.
Speaker 1: It's pretty It was pretty expensive to keep people in storage,
Speaker 1: depending upon the company. Now that's not it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: a continuously paid into system like the Cryonics Institute. I
Speaker 1: think it's twenty eight thousand dollar dollars. But it's a
Speaker 1: one time thing. So you pay twenty eight thousand dollars
Speaker 1: and they will care for the cryogenic preservation indefinitely until
Speaker 1: such time as it's it's ready to you know, be
Speaker 1: revived or crouch. The Cryonics Institute no longer exists. Other
Speaker 1: companies it's like a regular payment that you have to
Speaker 1: keep up with. And obviously if that money dries up.
Speaker 1: That's a problem um. In at least a few cases,
Speaker 1: the chambers holding people or sometimes multiple people have failed
Speaker 1: and liquid nitrogen boiled off, as obviously it at room temperature,
Speaker 1: it will just turn into a gas, which meant that
Speaker 1: bodies would end up warming up to beyond cryod preservation temperatures.
Speaker 1: One such case involved the remains of a woman named
Speaker 1: Mildred Harris and an eight year old girl named geneviev
Speaker 1: De la Potteri, and the two had been placed in
Speaker 1: a single capsule and stored in a crypt in Chatsworth,
Speaker 1: and the capsule seal was not vacuum tight, and liquid
Speaker 1: nitrogen started to boil off, and it left the two
Speaker 1: without proper preservation for what was quoted as a long interval. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: Chatsworth was considered to be um like a uh like
Speaker 1: like like the Boogeyman of the cryonics industry, because nine
Speaker 1: people were frozen and stored up Chatsworth and all nine
Speaker 1: were ultimately thought and buried later. And so when people
Speaker 1: talk about cryonic disaster or chronic failure, Chatsworth is one
Speaker 1: of the names that pops up because this particular facility
Speaker 1: just had that kind of issue, And by facility, I
Speaker 1: mean they were storing these these uh, these chronic chambers
Speaker 1: in crypts. So it's pretty grim all around. Early work
Speaker 1: had also been really primitive, like I mentioned where you know,
Speaker 1: you didn't have the cryod preservatives, so that was it
Speaker 1: was pretty obvious that that there wasn't going to be
Speaker 1: any feasible way of bringing those back. So there were
Speaker 1: a lot of early failures or shortcomings that um definitely
Speaker 1: created a negative point of view of the cryonics industry,
Speaker 1: something that a lot of the organizations now are working
Speaker 1: very very hard to turn around. Obviously, yes, certainly, And
Speaker 1: one of the things is that cryonics is we We've
Speaker 1: said the word a few times, but it's sort of
Speaker 1: inherently optimistic because it says, yeah, I know, we don't
Speaker 1: have all this stuff figured out now, but we're just
Speaker 1: gonna put all our faith in the future. The future
Speaker 1: they'll figure it out. We're gonna hit pause and by
Speaker 1: the time, uh, we're just gonna wait for a time
Speaker 1: when they figure out how to fix the problem and
Speaker 1: then we'll play again and everything will be fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so that that could be the case, that could
Speaker 1: not be the case with what we're going to figure
Speaker 1: out in terms of how to revive people out of
Speaker 1: thought them safe, how to bring them back, how to
Speaker 1: cure whatever was the problem with them to begin with,
Speaker 1: be it nineteen stab wounds to the back or some
Speaker 1: much more common UH cause of death. But we're also
Speaker 1: making progress with the cryo preservation process itself, and so
Speaker 1: that's something that is kind of heartening about the potential
Speaker 1: future of cryonics is we're learning more about smarter ways
Speaker 1: to cool people's bodies with the hope that they could
Speaker 1: one day be resuscitated right to do less damage in
Speaker 1: the preservation process. So if in fact we do come
Speaker 1: up with a means of reviving people, we haven't created
Speaker 1: more work for ourselves exactly, but we do still have
Speaker 1: a long way to go. And I want to give
Speaker 1: one example of an interesting study I came across recently.
Speaker 1: So in December, there were a couple of scientists named
Speaker 1: Gregory Fahey and that that's the name I've seen come
Speaker 1: up quite a few times in UH in cronics research
Speaker 1: and Robert McIntyre working for a company called twenty one
Speaker 1: Century Medicine, and they published a study in the journal
Speaker 1: Cryobiology explaining this new technique. They had for super cooling
Speaker 1: brain tissue without destroying it, and their their technique is
Speaker 1: called alde hyde stabilized cryo preservation or a s C.
Speaker 1: Actually first read about this in a New Scientist article
Speaker 1: by Helen Thompson from February of this year, and that's
Speaker 1: a that's a good simple explanation if you want to
Speaker 1: look it up and check it out. But let's say
Speaker 1: you you want to freeze somebody's brain. How do you
Speaker 1: do it? Well, as we've mentioned before, you know the
Speaker 1: body tissues have trouble with with ice crystal formation if
Speaker 1: you just super cool it, So you've got to go
Speaker 1: through this process we talked about earlier with vitrification the
Speaker 1: cryo protectant chemicals, but those need to be spread throughout
Speaker 1: the brain very quickly in order to prevent decay from
Speaker 1: setting in while you're doing it, and that causes its
Speaker 1: own kind of damage. So that's where this new technique
Speaker 1: comes in, the a s C. So first, in this process,
Speaker 1: you drain all of the blood from the brain and
Speaker 1: then you perfuse the brain, meaning that you you spread
Speaker 1: a liquid all throughout all of the vessels and little
Speaker 1: nooks and crannies in it. You perfuse the brain with
Speaker 1: a chemical called gluteralde hyde, and this stops decay from
Speaker 1: setting in, allowing them to profuse the cryoprotectant chemicals in
Speaker 1: this case it would be ethylene glycol at a more
Speaker 1: moderate pace, which prevents the damage from this process. And
Speaker 1: once the chryo protectants are added, then you can super
Speaker 1: cool or vitrify the brain down to a hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty five degrees celsius and storied at this temperature indefinitely minus.
Speaker 1: Is that not what I said? Now you just said, well,
Speaker 1: thank you for correcting me. I mean, if you dropped
Speaker 1: it down to celsius, that's one hot tamali, that's one
Speaker 1: hot rabbit brain. They tested this on rabbit brains, rabbit brains,
Speaker 1: and pig brains. So they found that one rabbit brain
Speaker 1: tissue preserved in this way could be rewarmed without damage
Speaker 1: to the neuronal structure or and this was interesting to
Speaker 1: the synapses between neurons because this uh, this whole preservation
Speaker 1: of the brain state, including the connections between neurons, has
Speaker 1: been identified as one of sort of the holy grails
Speaker 1: of preserving a brain, correctly known as the connectomes sort
Speaker 1: of you know how everything connects. You don't just want
Speaker 1: the cells where they were, You want all of the
Speaker 1: cell connections in place, and this is difficult to do.
Speaker 1: So they did this to a rabbit brain and then
Speaker 1: they rewarmed it, looked at it. They examined slices of
Speaker 1: the brain tissue with an electron microscope, and they said
Speaker 1: that the preservation level looked excellent. Well that's that's encouraging news.
Speaker 1: But uh, I see that You've got a lot more
Speaker 1: notes in this sect. Yes, Well, one thing I found
Speaker 1: is that cryonics kind of like aging reversal research. I
Speaker 1: think the link here might be that both both give
Speaker 1: us the promise of HAPs avoiding death, which we talked
Speaker 1: about recently. Sometimes that lends itself to inaccurate media coverage.
Speaker 1: So I saw some headlines referring to this research that
Speaker 1: made it sound like a rabbit brain had been quote
Speaker 1: revived after cryopreservation. I just want to make clear nothing
Speaker 1: of the kind took place. This was a dead rabbit
Speaker 1: brain that was brought back still quite dead. But what
Speaker 1: was cool about it was that in the freezing process
Speaker 1: they've been able to do this with with very strong
Speaker 1: protection of the cell to cell structure of the brain.
Speaker 1: So two things that came back dead but intact. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the second thing is Joe. Those headlines are going
Speaker 1: to click themselves. But there's they're more complications too, because,
Speaker 1: as you might be able to guess, given its properties
Speaker 1: and what it could do in this research, that glut
Speaker 1: aalda hide stuff is not something you would ever want
Speaker 1: to put into the brain of a person or animal
Speaker 1: who needed to continue living. It's toxic, it's not good stuff.
Speaker 1: So while this process is a great step forward in
Speaker 1: terms of what we know about how to preserve brain
Speaker 1: tissue and it's connect them intact, it doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: we've discovered the secret to perfect to nero cryo immortality,
Speaker 1: because you've you've sort of solved one problem but created
Speaker 1: another one. You've had to fill the brain with this
Speaker 1: poison in order to keep its structure safe from the process. Clearly,
Speaker 1: the the cryonics experts of the future will have some
Speaker 1: sort of brain bath. Well they you know, they do
Speaker 1: talk about that. So they say, well, maybe we're introducing
Speaker 1: we're avoiding one problem that cannot be dealt with by
Speaker 1: future technology, but by introducing another problem that can be
Speaker 1: dealt with by future technology interesting, Uh, but but ultimately
Speaker 1: we don't know, you know, we never know if something
Speaker 1: like this is going to work, So I don't know.
Speaker 1: Cryonics to me is a very interesting realm of human
Speaker 1: technological and side different exploration because it leans so heavily
Speaker 1: on this optimistic impulse it's all it's it's it's a
Speaker 1: field inherently about what we will be able to do
Speaker 1: in the future, which we can't know. It actually reminds
Speaker 1: me a lot of how some of the folks I know, uh,
Speaker 1: this more relevant several years ago than now, we're almost
Speaker 1: dismissive of climate change, not because they didn't think it
Speaker 1: was happening, but because they were convinced we would teck
Speaker 1: our way out of it. Yeah, we'll engineer our way
Speaker 1: out of the problem. I've heard this from people yet.
Speaker 1: So it's one of those things where you you think
Speaker 1: like you sound to me like you're making an excuse
Speaker 1: to not change your behaviors exactly. Well, I mean, I
Speaker 1: certainly hope that we can engineer our way out of
Speaker 1: climate change, but you shouldn't depend on that, right Whereas
Speaker 1: if you're talking about cryo preservation, I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: two are equivalent. Because the person is dead. Right, So
Speaker 1: the person is dead, and you're either going to bury
Speaker 1: the person, cremate them, donate them as a science, whatever
Speaker 1: the person, whatever the person's wishes were, If the person's
Speaker 1: wishes were for cryogenic suspension and or cryopreservation, if you prefer,
Speaker 1: and they had set aside the money to have that happen.
Speaker 1: I don't see it as inherently worse than those other options,
Speaker 1: because there is Even though you might say like this,
Speaker 1: this whole vision is optimistic to the point of folly.
Speaker 1: If you if you think that's true, it's no worse
Speaker 1: than just burying the person or cremating them or anything else,
Speaker 1: although except for the cost, which, depending on what your
Speaker 1: plans are to do with your remains, might be about
Speaker 1: as expensive. Um. But depending on again, on the cryonics
Speaker 1: company that you're talking about. I guess you could also
Speaker 1: argue that you are perhaps funding someone who you can't
Speaker 1: be entirely certain they sincerely believe that what they're doing
Speaker 1: will work. That's in other words, you might be worried
Speaker 1: that you're giving a conman money. Um. Now, well, hopefully
Speaker 1: you do enough research to be able to sell the difference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's It's weird though, right, because you're talking about something
Speaker 1: that has an unproven benefit, and so you could argue that, right.
Speaker 1: But you could argue that exactly because if we had
Speaker 1: already figured it out, then the person wouldn't have died
Speaker 1: in the first place. But if you could argue that
Speaker 1: these these companies, whether they are knowingly engaged in it
Speaker 1: or not, could all be in the snake oil business, sure,
Speaker 1: and so that could be your other objection is that
Speaker 1: you're giving money to people who are selling what could
Speaker 1: turn out to be false hope. The thing is, we
Speaker 1: just don't know right now. It could turn out to
Speaker 1: perfectly work in the future, or it could turn out
Speaker 1: that it's a complete bust. Can I introduce another weird
Speaker 1: concern hit me that goes way beyond all of the
Speaker 1: practical medical stuff we've been talking about. Let's imagine you
Speaker 1: can do all of this. You can revive, you can
Speaker 1: freeze them without damage, you can bring their nervous system
Speaker 1: and brain back online. I still might have some questions, uh,
Speaker 1: like we'd have to go into some weird territory about
Speaker 1: death in the nature of conscious experience, uh, And questions
Speaker 1: like this might be kind of unavoidable in this territory.
Speaker 1: So how about the assumption of continuity of consciousness? Like,
Speaker 1: we don't understand exactly how the sense of continuity of
Speaker 1: consciousness is created, but people are just assuming that if
Speaker 1: they get their brain presumed preserved for a long period
Speaker 1: of time, and then they get it thought out, the
Speaker 1: brain will still be able to somehow reignite that same
Speaker 1: continuous conscious experience you've always had. Um. I don't know
Speaker 1: why that wouldn't be true, but do we At the
Speaker 1: same time, I know that it would be true. Like,
Speaker 1: on one hand, you go to sleep every night, you
Speaker 1: wake up in the morning, and you don't get the
Speaker 1: sense that the person you worry yesterday died and now
Speaker 1: you're a new person. Right, there's some kind of wait,
Speaker 1: you don't get that, there's some kind of sense of
Speaker 1: continuity there. Uh, And the same thing happens. Maybe even
Speaker 1: if you go under general anesthesia for surgery or some
Speaker 1: kind of deep dreamless you know, void of consciousness. Still
Speaker 1: when you come out of it, you do have this
Speaker 1: sense of there there's continuity from person to person. I'm
Speaker 1: still the same person. I can give you a perfect
Speaker 1: example of this that what doesn't date back to very
Speaker 1: long ago, which was when I had that allergic reaction.
Speaker 1: I blacked out, and in that I have no memory
Speaker 1: of anything that happened between the moment when I blacked
Speaker 1: out in the moment when I regained consciousness. I appeared
Speaker 1: to be conscious because my eyes were still open, but
Speaker 1: I was unresponsive. Um, and I have no memory of
Speaker 1: that that that what could have been five seconds, it
Speaker 1: could have been five minutes, it could have been an hour.
Speaker 1: I have no clue. And uh, and yet I definitely
Speaker 1: feel like I'm the same person that I was before
Speaker 1: the allergic reaction, except for the fact that now I
Speaker 1: can't eat trump. Yeah, yeah, okay. But so this is
Speaker 1: the same kind of question we've talked about before with
Speaker 1: like could you transfer your mind into a hard drive? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean what if you could, But you couldn't create
Speaker 1: a continuous conscious experience. So yeah, there's a copy of
Speaker 1: your brain and it can behave like you did, but
Speaker 1: you're just gonna die and that's just the end of
Speaker 1: your consciousness and you're dying. Thought might be gosh, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of a jerk. Yeah that's a possibility, right, And
Speaker 1: now's yourself. Now there's another jerk in a computer somewhere,
Speaker 1: and you don't get to be that jerk, just like
Speaker 1: not only do I not get to be that jerk,
Speaker 1: but that jerk is effectively immortal, right yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: And so now we've never vitrified somebody's brain for two
Speaker 1: hundred years and brought it back to life. I guess
Speaker 1: it's just seems reasonable to assume that that if you
Speaker 1: brought that brain back to life, somehow, the first person
Speaker 1: ex perience of the owner of that brain originally would
Speaker 1: somehow be reignited, it would come back with it. But
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, is that the case. That's
Speaker 1: what happens when you go under general anesthesia for a
Speaker 1: certain number of hours. But can we just assume the
Speaker 1: same thing would happen if you are dead for two
Speaker 1: hundred years? Well, I mean I think if you were
Speaker 1: to preserve the connect home, yes, because I would believe
Speaker 1: that the self would be represented in that that connection,
Speaker 1: of that series of connections within your neural system. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't have any problem understanding that it would be
Speaker 1: that it would be like you, that it would have
Speaker 1: your memories, that it would behave like you. But I
Speaker 1: guess what I'm talking about is that continuity of conscious experience?
Speaker 1: I think I think it, Assuming it all works the
Speaker 1: way they envision it working, I would imagine it would
Speaker 1: be not unlike the experience of waking up after what
Speaker 1: you perceived to be dreamless sleep, where you have no
Speaker 1: memory of the sleeping part, but you remember what happened
Speaker 1: the day before, Only in this case it would be
Speaker 1: two hundred years in a day ago. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't think that. I think that's not an unreasonable assumption.
Speaker 1: But it's just weird that we've we've never experimented within
Speaker 1: saying even there's to know, right it's in another way
Speaker 1: right now for us to know. The only way to
Speaker 1: ever find out is if we in fact reach a
Speaker 1: point where we can revive someone from cryo preservation and
Speaker 1: then say, so, tell me about yourself. On a similar note,
Speaker 1: can you imagine how alien and weird it would be
Speaker 1: to be revived in a time decades removed from your own,
Speaker 1: where everyone you have known is gone, and perhaps even
Speaker 1: two or three generations after everyone you have known is gone,
Speaker 1: they're also gone because it's been that long. Depending upon
Speaker 1: how long it takes us to get to a point
Speaker 1: where assuming this is possible, we figure it out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, what if you're cryo preserved and then you're
Speaker 1: brought back after the singularity or something like that, and
Speaker 1: you the world is just unrecognizable and you're like, well, great,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be a janitor, except I can't be because
Speaker 1: all the robots have all the jobs and I'm really
Speaker 1: just a sack of meat that's been left behind by
Speaker 1: everybody else. And congratulations, you'll You'll live as obsolete forever.
Speaker 1: It's it's a weird thing to consider. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: one of the things that is interesting about this show
Speaker 1: is that we get to look at all of these
Speaker 1: different ideas and hypotheses um and when you take each
Speaker 1: one in in turn and you just examine it, you know,
Speaker 1: completely secluded from all others, you can start making some
Speaker 1: pretty broad statements about your opinion whether or not it's
Speaker 1: feasible or not feasible. And then if you start to say, well,
Speaker 1: let's just assume that these other things we've talked about
Speaker 1: do become reality, how does that impact this other thing
Speaker 1: that we're talking about now, And you start to realize
Speaker 1: that if in fact, all the topics we cover and
Speaker 1: forward thinking all word to come a pass, it would
Speaker 1: be a really weird future. Yeah, I mean I feel
Speaker 1: like sometimes when we're trying to think about what the
Speaker 1: future implications of a certain technology or line of research
Speaker 1: would be, it's almost as if everything else stayed the
Speaker 1: same as it is today, but just that one thing
Speaker 1: works out. And this is why predicting the future is
Speaker 1: is so difficult to do, right, because not only can
Speaker 1: some other element come in and affect what you're thinking about,
Speaker 1: and it's completely impossible to anticipate. Therefore, there's no way
Speaker 1: to make an accurate prediction because you cannot anticipate this
Speaker 1: other event, but you're also often taking this thing out
Speaker 1: of context, the context of the world that we live
Speaker 1: in and the other things that can affect it. Uh
Speaker 1: and and thus it makes it even more difficult to
Speaker 1: make predictions of what the future will be. Um. But
Speaker 1: if we didn't do that, we wouldn't have this gig,
Speaker 1: so we kind of have to. But yeah, it's I
Speaker 1: propose it that we replace it with a ultimate fighting gig. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna need to get into some shape. Then. I'm
Speaker 1: in a shape right now, but it's not one that's
Speaker 1: good for ultimate fighting. Uh. Well, you could just could
Speaker 1: be cryo preserved and come back at a time where
Speaker 1: it's easy to get in shape instantly, right, right, Or
Speaker 1: maybe come back at a time where everyone is just
Speaker 1: physically weaker than I am. Mentally they're all there, but
Speaker 1: physically they're just pathetic. And then I could just run
Speaker 1: rampant over the finally year time to be a total bully. Right,
Speaker 1: It's what I've dreamed of for all these years, so
Speaker 1: so much lunch money. Who knows how, maybe that's what
Speaker 1: I would dream of. Cry preservation. Actually that's the thing,
Speaker 1: the other thing, right, Like, if you're freezing someone to
Speaker 1: the point or vitrifying them to the point where you
Speaker 1: have halted the metabolic process, well, I guess we can
Speaker 1: be pretty certain that you wouldn't have like decades long dreams. Everything,
Speaker 1: I mean, everything would be done. I mean, if you
Speaker 1: don't dream under general anesthesia, I can't see why you
Speaker 1: would dream after being dead and frozen. Yeah, I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure that you wouldn't have to worry about waking up
Speaker 1: and like, because I think there's probably some science fiction
Speaker 1: story out there where someone wakes up from uh probably
Speaker 1: more likely suspended animation than crywd preservation and talks about
Speaker 1: the horrors that they saw that they witnessed while they
Speaker 1: were in that. Um. If you want to watch an
Speaker 1: incredibly goofy movie about this, you should watch Sleeper, which
Speaker 1: is a early Woody Allen movie in which he is
Speaker 1: put into he has woken up after being in cryod
Speaker 1: preservation for decades and finds out that all the things
Speaker 1: that we believed in the in the early seventies about
Speaker 1: health and wellness are are false and uh and that
Speaker 1: he should have been smoking and drinking the whole time. Um. Yeah, fantastic.
Speaker 1: It's a very goofy, goofy movie. But at any rate, guys,
Speaker 1: if you have any thoughts about this, or you have
Speaker 1: suggestions for future episodes, you get in touch with us
Speaker 1: and let us know our email addresses FW thinking at
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Speaker 1: really soon. For more on this topic in the future
Speaker 1: of technology, I'll visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to
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