WEBVTT - Are Cryonics Cool? 0:00:00.160 --> 0:00:07.160 Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to 0:00:07.360 --> 0:00:15.520 Forward Thinking. Hey Laren, welcome to Forward Thinking. Well that 0:00:15.680 --> 0:00:18.279 podcast that let's in the future and says, have you 0:00:18.400 --> 0:00:22.160 ever seen a turtle get down? I'm Jonathan Strickland and 0:00:22.200 --> 0:00:25.000 I'm Joe McCormick. That that is a good one. Yeah, yeah, 0:00:25.040 --> 0:00:27.720 it's it's it's like a you have to make a 0:00:27.720 --> 0:00:31.440 hop from from the to the artist to the topic. 0:00:31.720 --> 0:00:34.199 So our other host, Lauren voc Obamba, is not with 0:00:34.320 --> 0:00:37.800 us today. She is off exploring the wonders of the 0:00:37.840 --> 0:00:41.320 sewers of New York City to find that mystical turtle gang. 0:00:41.440 --> 0:00:44.720 But she will be back with us next time, hopefully 0:00:44.720 --> 0:00:47.640 with pizza. Right, you never pay full price for late pizza, 0:00:47.960 --> 0:00:52.720 you don't. So let's uh, let's let's let's transition smoothly, 0:00:52.760 --> 0:00:55.800 if we will, into the actual topic for today. This 0:00:55.880 --> 0:00:59.480 is the least smooth thing that has ever happened. That's fine, 0:00:59.280 --> 0:01:02.240 I am used to that. At this point, we want 0:01:02.280 --> 0:01:05.240 to talk a little bit about a topic that plays 0:01:05.360 --> 0:01:08.640 into something we've chatted about many times before. It kind 0:01:08.640 --> 0:01:11.480 of taps back into that that idea of how could 0:01:11.520 --> 0:01:15.480 you attain immortality and we've talked about in lots of episodes. 0:01:15.640 --> 0:01:18.280 There was the Future of Blood Um, there was Who 0:01:18.319 --> 0:01:23.959 Wants to Live Forever? There was Human plus Transhumanism episode, 0:01:24.200 --> 0:01:29.319 and most recently in the Anti Aging Debate episode. And uh, 0:01:29.520 --> 0:01:34.240 there's this whole idea about how can we attain immortality. 0:01:34.280 --> 0:01:35.560 There are a lot of people who think that that 0:01:35.640 --> 0:01:38.720 actually is within our grasp. Ray kurtzwell as the person 0:01:38.760 --> 0:01:40.679 that we talked about a lot on this show as 0:01:40.720 --> 0:01:43.399 one of those people. Or whether whether or not immortality 0:01:43.480 --> 0:01:48.080 is possible at least radical life extension, right, yeah, And 0:01:48.400 --> 0:01:55.000 if not immortality, the idea of living perhaps indefinitely. And 0:01:55.000 --> 0:01:58.320 and uh, one of the fears that people have is 0:01:58.360 --> 0:02:01.000 that what if we do figure out how to do that, 0:02:01.040 --> 0:02:03.480 But I'm dead before that happened. I missed the window. 0:02:03.600 --> 0:02:06.120 So it's only my my darn kids that get to 0:02:06.160 --> 0:02:09.000 live forever. And I die before I get the chance. 0:02:09.080 --> 0:02:11.200 I paid for those jerks to go through school, and 0:02:11.200 --> 0:02:14.160 I don't get to live forever. Right, this is something 0:02:14.200 --> 0:02:18.400 that comes up. So the obvious solution here is put 0:02:18.400 --> 0:02:20.840 me on ice, you know, freeze me, buddy. And so 0:02:20.919 --> 0:02:23.560 today we're gonna be talking about cryonics. The idea of 0:02:23.680 --> 0:02:28.480 using extreme low temperatures and cooling to preserve the human body, 0:02:28.639 --> 0:02:32.480 or more specifically the human brain and sometimes the body, 0:02:32.560 --> 0:02:34.880 with the hopes that in the future it could be 0:02:35.040 --> 0:02:38.200 defrosted and brought right back to life. Right. And then 0:02:38.400 --> 0:02:41.680 the important thing here is that we are talking about 0:02:42.280 --> 0:02:45.600 freezing someone after they have been declared dead, as opposed 0:02:45.639 --> 0:02:49.720 to your entering some sort of suspended animation alien style. Right. 0:02:49.800 --> 0:02:52.240 That might be a cool topic to do a whole 0:02:52.240 --> 0:02:56.079 other time, like general suspended animation. Can can they put 0:02:56.120 --> 0:02:57.959 you in the tube and let you go to sleep 0:02:58.000 --> 0:03:00.920 for sixty seven years on the way to some other planet? It? 0:03:00.919 --> 0:03:04.080 Can you rip Van Winkle it? That's a that would 0:03:04.080 --> 0:03:06.840 be a great companion episode to this one. So we 0:03:06.880 --> 0:03:09.120 thought it might be interesting to kind of go through 0:03:09.360 --> 0:03:14.079 the history of cryonics as well as the theory behind it, 0:03:14.280 --> 0:03:19.320 and then some discussion about is it at all plausible? Um. 0:03:19.360 --> 0:03:23.400 But before we do that, we have to address it. 0:03:23.400 --> 0:03:25.480 It's not in our notes, but we have to address it. 0:03:25.880 --> 0:03:31.359 One of the most well known urban legend stories about 0:03:31.440 --> 0:03:37.680 cryo preservation Walt Disney, Oh, frozen under Pirates of the Caribbean. 0:03:37.840 --> 0:03:39.720 I should have known you were going this direction. That's 0:03:39.760 --> 0:03:41.520 not true. It's not true at all. I don't think 0:03:41.520 --> 0:03:43.920 he was kryo preserved in any manner. No, he was not. 0:03:44.640 --> 0:03:47.240 But that's one of those enduring urban legends I remember. 0:03:47.440 --> 0:03:49.960 Maybe it's not enduring today. I remember hearing it when 0:03:50.000 --> 0:03:52.560 I was a kid. But that is not the case. 0:03:52.800 --> 0:03:56.360 He was not cryo preserved in any way. Um, But 0:03:56.440 --> 0:03:57.840 that is one of those stories that you would hear 0:03:57.880 --> 0:04:00.720 and I love the audacity of but not just that 0:04:00.760 --> 0:04:04.960 he was put into cryogenic preservation, but that he he 0:04:05.160 --> 0:04:09.760 is under a major tourist attraction. Well. I love how 0:04:09.840 --> 0:04:13.200 this is a story that gets repeated in different variations 0:04:13.240 --> 0:04:16.760 throughout our culture, which is the famous or powerful person 0:04:16.920 --> 0:04:19.720 is not actually dead or not dead in the way 0:04:19.760 --> 0:04:22.920 you thought they were. You know, Elvis is still alive, 0:04:23.360 --> 0:04:27.599 Hitler is still alive, right, Yeah, anybody who's I mean, 0:04:27.600 --> 0:04:31.960 whether they were loved or hated, powerful or just well known, 0:04:32.360 --> 0:04:36.080 these these public figures. Uh we we we tend to 0:04:36.160 --> 0:04:38.400 want to come up with stories for why they're not 0:04:38.520 --> 0:04:42.440 actually dead and just rotting in the ground. There there's 0:04:42.480 --> 0:04:45.880 something that happened. And and the cryopreservation version is a 0:04:45.960 --> 0:04:49.400 new uh is a new technological take on this, because 0:04:49.400 --> 0:04:51.560 it used to just be like, oh, you know that 0:04:51.720 --> 0:04:54.600 there was a body double who died and they're secretly 0:04:54.600 --> 0:04:57.480 alive somewhere. But now you can tell the same legend 0:04:57.800 --> 0:05:00.760 while accepting the fact that they did die. You just say, well, 0:05:00.800 --> 0:05:04.200 they're frozen and they could come back, right, So this 0:05:04.279 --> 0:05:07.880 idea dates back quite a way. Is actually, the idea 0:05:07.920 --> 0:05:11.000 of resuscitating a preserved human being is a really old one, 0:05:11.040 --> 0:05:14.479 particularly if you take into account certain religions, and they're 0:05:14.680 --> 0:05:18.640 fact that the the important factors of those religions. Sure, 0:05:18.680 --> 0:05:20.479 and that's not what we're gonna be talking about today. 0:05:20.480 --> 0:05:22.520 And now, that, of course is a very old idea 0:05:22.640 --> 0:05:25.159 and uh, and there are lots of different ways you 0:05:25.160 --> 0:05:27.160 could believe in that. Some people believe in sort of 0:05:27.160 --> 0:05:30.640 the spiritual survival of death and you know platonic dualism 0:05:30.680 --> 0:05:33.719 idea where you have a soul that leaves the body 0:05:33.760 --> 0:05:36.479 on death and survives in some way. And some religions 0:05:36.480 --> 0:05:39.400 also believe in physical reanimation of the corpse at some 0:05:39.480 --> 0:05:42.680 kind of resurrection events or something like that, or reincarnation. 0:05:42.720 --> 0:05:44.359 There are lots of ways to go at it. Today 0:05:44.400 --> 0:05:48.599 we're gonna be focusing on the scientific idea of reanimation 0:05:48.800 --> 0:05:51.000 of the body and the brain, and and one of 0:05:51.040 --> 0:05:54.560 those early ideas. Uh. I mean, obviously you could sit 0:05:54.600 --> 0:05:57.320 there and think of like Frankenstein being an example of that. 0:05:57.360 --> 0:05:59.840 But there is also a nineteenth century short novel titled 0:06:00.160 --> 0:06:03.000 The Man with the Broken Ear. It's written by a 0:06:03.040 --> 0:06:05.520 French author, in which a biology professor puts a person 0:06:05.520 --> 0:06:10.000 in suspended animation by drying him out, removing the water, 0:06:10.360 --> 0:06:15.839 and then turning him into into exactly just becomes the 0:06:15.839 --> 0:06:19.800 the macho man Randy Savage's worst nightmare in that case. Yeah, yeah, 0:06:19.880 --> 0:06:22.839 So at any rate, that this was an idea being 0:06:23.440 --> 0:06:27.640 thought about well before anyone came up with the notion 0:06:27.720 --> 0:06:31.159 of cryo preservation. But the first really serious proposal to 0:06:31.320 --> 0:06:35.880 use refrigeration, or actually even beyond refrigeration we're talking about 0:06:36.080 --> 0:06:40.799 vitrification to preserve humans dates back to Robert Ettinger, who 0:06:40.839 --> 0:06:43.680 published a book in nineteen sixty two called The Prospect 0:06:43.720 --> 0:06:48.159 of Immortality. And uh, in that you can actually read 0:06:48.320 --> 0:06:51.120 that book, including an updated version of that book in 0:06:51.200 --> 0:06:54.800 PDF format on the Cryonics Institute's website. Who is the 0:06:54.839 --> 0:06:59.039 Cryonics Institute? What do you think? It's an organization that 0:06:59.120 --> 0:07:02.480 was founded by it and uh, and obviously it's an 0:07:02.560 --> 0:07:07.440 organization that that promotes and performs cryo preservation. I guess 0:07:07.440 --> 0:07:09.120 what I was asking was, when you get a sense 0:07:09.160 --> 0:07:12.360 of them, do you feel like they're a strong, legitimate 0:07:12.400 --> 0:07:17.520 scientific organization or maybe a little cranky. That's a difficult 0:07:17.600 --> 0:07:21.560 thing to answer. My personal belief we're getting a little 0:07:21.560 --> 0:07:24.760 ahead of this, but my personal belief is that cryonics 0:07:25.040 --> 0:07:32.040 is uh perhaps goes beyond optimistic into wishful thinking based 0:07:32.120 --> 0:07:35.400 upon just what we know right now. And so I 0:07:35.480 --> 0:07:41.400 think that their practices are based upon the most comprehensive 0:07:41.920 --> 0:07:44.720 scientific knowledge we have at this time, but there are 0:07:44.960 --> 0:07:47.920 huge gaps in that scientific knowledge that make a lot 0:07:47.920 --> 0:07:51.360 of very optimistic assumption. Yeah, it makes me think of 0:07:51.360 --> 0:07:55.480 of the underpants gnomes number one, Underpant's number two something, 0:07:55.600 --> 0:07:58.920 number three profit. It feels like there's a lot of 0:07:59.000 --> 0:08:01.320 some things in that. Well, we'll we'll talk about those 0:08:01.320 --> 0:08:03.920 missing steps in this episode. But yeah, the the version 0:08:03.960 --> 0:08:07.320 here would be step one free as you step two, uh, 0:08:07.400 --> 0:08:12.560 step three. Yeah. So Edinger was a physicist and mathematician. 0:08:12.600 --> 0:08:15.040 I say was because he has passed on. He is 0:08:15.280 --> 0:08:19.360 crow preserved, who not only wrote about chronics, but he 0:08:19.400 --> 0:08:23.240 founded that cryonics Institute as well as the Immortalist Society. 0:08:23.280 --> 0:08:25.880 So he was a futurist who was really thinking about 0:08:25.880 --> 0:08:28.520 the stuff, including trans humanism, so covering a lot of 0:08:28.520 --> 0:08:30.640 the topics that we've talked about here on forward Thinking. 0:08:31.240 --> 0:08:33.440 He died in twenty eleven at the age of nine 0:08:33.800 --> 0:08:38.200 two and was cryo preserved. UM and Edinger's premise in 0:08:38.200 --> 0:08:41.320 the book is as follows. This is a direct quote 0:08:41.360 --> 0:08:45.320 from chapter one of his book. The fact, at very 0:08:45.320 --> 0:08:48.400 low temperatures it is possible right now to preserve dead 0:08:48.440 --> 0:08:53.120 people with essentially no deterioration indefinitely. Number two, the assumption, 0:08:53.720 --> 0:08:57.800 if civilization endures, medical science should eventually be able to 0:08:57.800 --> 0:09:01.000 repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing 0:09:01.080 --> 0:09:04.480 damage and senile debility or other cause of death. It 0:09:04.640 --> 0:09:07.000 is that second part, the assumption that a lot of 0:09:07.000 --> 0:09:11.800 people take exception to write the idea that um, just 0:09:11.920 --> 0:09:15.560 because civilization endures, that this is presupposing that what you 0:09:15.600 --> 0:09:19.319 are saying is actually possible. And if it is possible, 0:09:19.640 --> 0:09:22.280 then we agree, yes, we will one day figure it out. 0:09:22.280 --> 0:09:25.560 But what if it is not possible, that's the problem. Well. Also, 0:09:26.000 --> 0:09:29.600 just as stated, I'm sure Eddinger in some way anticipates this, 0:09:29.640 --> 0:09:31.839 but just in the simple way it was stated here. 0:09:31.880 --> 0:09:34.240 I might also take issue with the first part, the 0:09:34.280 --> 0:09:38.480 fact that it's possible to freeze people with essentially no deterioration, 0:09:38.520 --> 0:09:40.840 because I think what that's talking about there is it 0:09:40.920 --> 0:09:44.560 prevents the onset of natural decay. Your body does not 0:09:45.200 --> 0:09:48.600 go into sell death and continue to rot essentially. But 0:09:49.360 --> 0:09:54.160 they're the freezing process inherently does introduce uh quality of 0:09:54.160 --> 0:09:57.120 tissue preservation problems on its own. Yes, we'll talk a 0:09:57.120 --> 0:09:59.720 little bit more about those. Not only that, but there's 0:09:59.760 --> 0:10:04.760 no substantiation to the belief that that deterioration wouldn't have 0:10:04.880 --> 0:10:09.240 some other manifestation, like if the brain is an active 0:10:09.320 --> 0:10:13.480 that long, would would you be able to revive a 0:10:13.559 --> 0:10:16.880 person like you might be able to revive tissue and 0:10:16.920 --> 0:10:19.559 make and the body could technically live again, but there 0:10:19.640 --> 0:10:23.240 might not be a person there anymore. That's a that's 0:10:23.280 --> 0:10:25.160 a good point. I will also bring that up later, 0:10:25.200 --> 0:10:28.319 but we should for a moment take the cry onsts 0:10:28.400 --> 0:10:32.520 point of view, is that the cryonics advocates point of view, 0:10:32.800 --> 0:10:36.080 and say, what is the service claim to offer? So 0:10:36.120 --> 0:10:38.640 the basic claim is that cryo preservation will keep a 0:10:38.679 --> 0:10:42.160 body intact long enough for medical science to advance to 0:10:42.160 --> 0:10:45.120 the point where any damage that was endured by the body, 0:10:45.160 --> 0:10:47.600 including death itself, can be reversed. In fact, it has 0:10:47.679 --> 0:10:51.959 to include death, because cryo preservation is really about suspended death, 0:10:52.080 --> 0:10:56.280 not suspended life. And uh and so not only do 0:10:56.280 --> 0:10:59.720 you have to reverse the cryo preservation process itself, which 0:10:59.760 --> 0:11:03.840 is a tall order, but then also reverse anything that 0:11:04.080 --> 0:11:06.320 led to the person dying in the first place, whether 0:11:06.360 --> 0:11:09.000 it was a terminal illness or some other organ failure 0:11:09.080 --> 0:11:11.960 or whatever it might be. Right. Um, the important element 0:11:12.000 --> 0:11:14.719 here is preservation. The body and particularly the brain has 0:11:14.760 --> 0:11:16.800 to be preserved in order to give the future doctors 0:11:16.800 --> 0:11:19.319 the chance to revive the patient. And this does make 0:11:19.360 --> 0:11:22.240 sense because I mean, if you just if you have 0:11:22.360 --> 0:11:25.280 somebody die, you can't just leave them at room temperature 0:11:25.320 --> 0:11:27.360 and say we'll see if we can revive them later, 0:11:27.679 --> 0:11:29.360 because you're going to come back and they won't be 0:11:29.400 --> 0:11:32.559 there anymore. Well, what is there to revive except their bones? 0:11:32.720 --> 0:11:37.280 Right right? The actual deterioration will continue, bacterial will will 0:11:37.360 --> 0:11:39.679 break things down, so you have to slow all that 0:11:39.840 --> 0:11:41.760 or stop it as much as you can. So if 0:11:41.800 --> 0:11:44.000 you assume that the essence of the person is in 0:11:44.040 --> 0:11:47.280 some sense contained in the brain and the nervous system. 0:11:47.400 --> 0:11:52.880 Then the ability to preserve the person's ability or potential 0:11:53.000 --> 0:11:56.320 to come back to life rests in keeping the brain 0:11:56.400 --> 0:11:59.440 and the nervous system from changing from the state it 0:11:59.520 --> 0:12:02.199 was in dr life right, right, If it changes, then 0:12:02.200 --> 0:12:04.880 obviously that and we've seen this right, People who suffer 0:12:04.920 --> 0:12:10.600 brain damage can have different personality issues or intelligence issues 0:12:10.600 --> 0:12:14.280 depending on you know, where the damage was sustained. And uh, 0:12:14.320 --> 0:12:17.200 and that shows that there is this link between the 0:12:17.240 --> 0:12:20.599 brain and the self. I mean, that is that is important. Obviously. 0:12:21.600 --> 0:12:24.120 I think that is a robust finding of modern sciences. 0:12:24.760 --> 0:12:27.360 I'm trying to be respectful of people's beliefs here as well, 0:12:27.400 --> 0:12:30.679 but I mean science would show that the self, the self, 0:12:30.679 --> 0:12:33.760 and the brain are very closely tied together. If not, yeah, 0:12:33.800 --> 0:12:35.480 I mean I think pretty much, no matter what you 0:12:35.520 --> 0:12:38.319 believe about dualism or whatever, the brain is the seat 0:12:38.320 --> 0:12:41.160 of the self in the body. Yes, yes, so clearly 0:12:41.200 --> 0:12:43.160 you have to have a way of preserving that. And 0:12:43.200 --> 0:12:48.160 so crownics depends upon, like I said, an unsubstantiated premise, 0:12:48.440 --> 0:12:52.320 actually more than one unsubstantiated premise, but one big one, 0:12:52.720 --> 0:12:54.960 and that is that long term memory can be preserved 0:12:55.000 --> 0:12:58.680 if the brain is kept at a low enough temperature. Obviously, 0:12:58.720 --> 0:13:00.599 you want to have long term memory preserved because of 0:13:00.640 --> 0:13:02.240 the wise the person is not the person when they 0:13:02.280 --> 0:13:04.080 come back, right, they don't have any memory of who 0:13:04.160 --> 0:13:07.280 they are, then they are not you know, we brought 0:13:07.400 --> 0:13:10.360 Jack back, but Jack's not Jack anymore. This again features 0:13:10.400 --> 0:13:12.880 into some strange questions that I want to ask towards 0:13:12.920 --> 0:13:14.920 the end. Excellent, I can't wait to hear them. So 0:13:15.080 --> 0:13:18.000 there are some surgeries in which doctors will cool a 0:13:18.000 --> 0:13:21.000 patient's brain in order to reduce the metabolic rate that 0:13:21.040 --> 0:13:24.160 the brain is going through. So typically this isn't around 0:13:24.160 --> 0:13:27.160 twenty five degrees celsius, which is seventy seven degrees fahrenheit. 0:13:27.520 --> 0:13:31.880 That's boiling hot compared to the temperatures of cryopreservation. So 0:13:31.960 --> 0:13:35.000 cryonic says, hey, if we can slow metabolic processes and 0:13:35.120 --> 0:13:38.679 see patients make a recovery even after their their brains 0:13:38.679 --> 0:13:43.200 have been put into hypothermia, then if there's no or 0:13:43.400 --> 0:13:46.640 very little negative impact to their long term memory, maybe 0:13:46.679 --> 0:13:50.120 what we could do is freeze the brain. Essentially, vitrify 0:13:50.120 --> 0:13:51.920 is a better word, and we'll get into why that 0:13:52.040 --> 0:13:54.640 isn't later. You don't really want the brain to freeze 0:13:55.520 --> 0:13:58.920 to preserve long term memory indefinitely. And people would say like, oh, 0:13:58.960 --> 0:14:01.520 you made a big jump there to say that, because 0:14:02.040 --> 0:14:04.200 we can cool the brain down to slow down the 0:14:04.240 --> 0:14:08.320 metabolic processes and the person can make a recovery with 0:14:08.400 --> 0:14:10.880 little to no impact on the long term memory, it's 0:14:10.880 --> 0:14:15.040 an enormous jump to suggest that we could stop or 0:14:15.200 --> 0:14:18.920 essentially stop the metabolic process and bring it back and 0:14:19.000 --> 0:14:22.120 there'll be no effect. Um. The prevailing theory and messine 0:14:22.160 --> 0:14:25.440 is that the brain needs to be continuously active for 0:14:25.720 --> 0:14:28.760 memory to survive. So even in the surgery example I 0:14:28.800 --> 0:14:31.040 was giving, the brain is still active. It's just slowed 0:14:31.240 --> 0:14:35.880 down significantly, but it's not like it's stopped. And so 0:14:36.520 --> 0:14:39.800 it could very well be that the people who are 0:14:39.920 --> 0:14:44.960 arguing for cryonics are absolutely correct in their assumption, but 0:14:45.280 --> 0:14:49.160 we don't have the scientific evidence to prove that yet. Yeah. Now, 0:14:49.160 --> 0:14:51.960 we mentioned at the beginning that this is a fundamentally 0:14:52.040 --> 0:14:55.800 different idea than the idea of suspended animation, like sending 0:14:55.800 --> 0:14:58.880 the body into some form of Often the idea of 0:14:58.960 --> 0:15:02.080 cold temperatures is involved, but not necessarily they're they're just 0:15:02.160 --> 0:15:04.880 different ideas about how you might make a human hibernate 0:15:05.240 --> 0:15:08.680 to stop their metabolism so they don't age, they don't 0:15:08.720 --> 0:15:11.400 need to eat, and stuff like that. Demolition Man, the 0:15:12.160 --> 0:15:15.440 amazing documentary Demolition Man has a lot of that in there, 0:15:15.560 --> 0:15:19.720 or as we said, alien And in these cases it's 0:15:19.840 --> 0:15:23.680 it's not cryo preservation because you're not being preserved. You're 0:15:23.720 --> 0:15:26.640 sort of going into hibernation. You don't die first, right, 0:15:26.760 --> 0:15:31.560 So crime preservation it does involve suspending a person after 0:15:31.640 --> 0:15:34.760 they have died, suspended death as as Attinger argued, it 0:15:34.800 --> 0:15:37.840 should be thought of as as opposed to suspended animation 0:15:39.160 --> 0:15:44.320 because it was it's it's easier to do. For one thing, 0:15:44.520 --> 0:15:47.760 there are fewer ethical concerns, right because the person is 0:15:47.800 --> 0:15:51.720 already dead. So the biggest ethical concern is is it 0:15:51.760 --> 0:15:56.000 ethical for you to ask for money first too, for 0:15:56.040 --> 0:16:00.280 the service that you cannot guarantee will work. So you're 0:16:00.440 --> 0:16:03.920 you're selling something and you don't know for sure that 0:16:04.040 --> 0:16:07.200 what you're selling will ever pay off in the long run. 0:16:07.640 --> 0:16:10.120 That's the only real ethical concern is So, I mean, 0:16:10.160 --> 0:16:12.360 I think that's fine as long as you're perfectly clear 0:16:12.400 --> 0:16:15.320 with people what what the risks are sure. I'm just 0:16:15.360 --> 0:16:17.800 saying that it's it's more ethical. That approach is more 0:16:17.800 --> 0:16:20.640 ethical than saying, hey, uh, you want to live, you 0:16:20.640 --> 0:16:25.960 want to live to see you know, just go ahead 0:16:25.960 --> 0:16:27.920 and jump into this chamber. We're gonna lower your body 0:16:27.960 --> 0:16:32.280 temperature to minus hunter ninty six degrees celsius. Then that's 0:16:32.280 --> 0:16:35.560 gonna kill you, right like, that will kill you, and 0:16:35.640 --> 0:16:38.600 then maybe you can be brought back. That's where the 0:16:38.680 --> 0:16:41.760 ethical concern is, you could not get No one's gonna 0:16:41.840 --> 0:16:44.840 let that fly right. No one's gonna say, sure, go ahead, 0:16:45.000 --> 0:16:46.960 start killing people so that they can come back in 0:16:46.960 --> 0:16:51.800 a hundred years time. Um So, suspended death actually makes 0:16:51.840 --> 0:16:55.720 more sense, and it's easier to achieve from a social 0:16:55.800 --> 0:17:01.080 point of view. Not easier necessarily technologically, but perhaps culturally. 0:17:01.600 --> 0:17:04.359 Um and Inger in his book pointed out that there 0:17:04.400 --> 0:17:09.240 are different classes of death. He identified five, which miracle 0:17:09.320 --> 0:17:13.160 max would end up being three short because he said 0:17:13.200 --> 0:17:16.720 there's mostly dead, and then there's all dead. As it 0:17:16.800 --> 0:17:18.680 turns out, Inger says, no, no, no, there are quite 0:17:18.720 --> 0:17:21.480 a few. There's clinical death, which typically is when someone 0:17:21.560 --> 0:17:25.920 has stopped breathing and their heartbeat has stopped. That's often 0:17:25.960 --> 0:17:29.520 referred to his heart death. Yeah. Uh, there's biological death 0:17:29.760 --> 0:17:32.040 that Inger would argue in which he said, that's the 0:17:32.119 --> 0:17:36.640 state from which resuscitation is impossible under our current capabilities. 0:17:36.840 --> 0:17:42.040 There's maybe some ambiguity in there purposefully so and I'll 0:17:42.080 --> 0:17:45.000 get to why. Then there's cellular death. That's the actual 0:17:45.119 --> 0:17:48.760 degeneration of cells in our bodies. Uh. There's legal death. 0:17:49.200 --> 0:17:54.520 That's the condition that um uh so discouraging that a 0:17:55.119 --> 0:17:57.840 an attending physician will sign off on a death certificate, 0:17:58.240 --> 0:18:01.560 so essentially saying that a physician has determined that resuscitation 0:18:01.680 --> 0:18:04.480 is no longer possible and signs of death certificate. Then 0:18:04.520 --> 0:18:07.760 there's religious death um. And that definition depends upon the 0:18:07.840 --> 0:18:12.120 religion in question, and it relates to cryonics and how 0:18:12.280 --> 0:18:15.520 the religion frames death, because in some religions it might 0:18:15.600 --> 0:18:20.600 be considered um taboo to even think about cryo preservation. 0:18:21.520 --> 0:18:24.639 So ed Sure argued that clinical death is sometimes reversible, 0:18:24.760 --> 0:18:27.399 the idea that I'm gonna stopped breathing their hardest stopped, 0:18:27.760 --> 0:18:30.959 they can sometimes be resuscitated. Uh, And that the starting 0:18:31.000 --> 0:18:35.760 point for biological and cellular death isn't static. In other words, 0:18:36.119 --> 0:18:39.160 what might have been impossible, it might have been impossible 0:18:39.200 --> 0:18:42.159 to resuscitate someone under certain conditions twenty years ago, but 0:18:42.240 --> 0:18:45.479 today it is now possible. So he says though there therefore, 0:18:45.560 --> 0:18:49.359 the definition of biological death is fluid. It can change 0:18:49.400 --> 0:18:52.520 over time. It gets more and more narrow because we 0:18:52.760 --> 0:18:55.840 find new ways to bring people back. He also argues, 0:18:55.920 --> 0:18:59.000 this is this is evidence to support the idea that 0:18:59.080 --> 0:19:03.720 cryonics works, because if we keep pushing that that limit 0:19:03.840 --> 0:19:07.240 back further and further, why should we ever think that 0:19:07.640 --> 0:19:09.639 there's a limit to what we can do. Well, I 0:19:09.720 --> 0:19:12.920 think there's something to that, but then again, you will again, 0:19:13.040 --> 0:19:16.520 if we imagine someone dead and then left at room temperature, 0:19:16.640 --> 0:19:21.760 you will immediately start to encounter issues because somebody dead 0:19:21.840 --> 0:19:24.080 and left at room temperature is going to start to 0:19:24.280 --> 0:19:28.320 go through the degradation of tissues from which you cannot recover. 0:19:29.080 --> 0:19:31.639 You go through the process of cell death. Like we 0:19:31.720 --> 0:19:34.600 talked about, the individual tissues at every level throughout the 0:19:34.640 --> 0:19:38.200 body start to degrade in such a way that it's 0:19:38.240 --> 0:19:39.879 not just kind of like we don't have a way 0:19:39.960 --> 0:19:42.760 to fix that. Yet. You look at somebody who's been 0:19:42.840 --> 0:19:45.920 dead at room temperature for several days, and there's nothing 0:19:46.000 --> 0:19:48.480 you can think of that you could do that would 0:19:48.520 --> 0:19:51.920 bring this person back. It's like without without having some 0:19:52.160 --> 0:19:56.880 sort of perfect map of their neural Yeah, you'd essentially 0:19:56.960 --> 0:19:59.720 just need to reprint them from scratch. Yeah, if you 0:20:00.160 --> 0:20:02.560 at that point you're talking about cloning anyway. Uh. And 0:20:02.640 --> 0:20:04.399 it's and then you have the argument of well, is 0:20:04.440 --> 0:20:06.080 this the person or is just a copy of a 0:20:06.160 --> 0:20:09.240 person they actually have the experiences that the person had. 0:20:09.560 --> 0:20:11.719 That's a totally different realm of sci fi that we're 0:20:11.760 --> 0:20:14.320 not going to go into in this particular episode. But 0:20:14.480 --> 0:20:18.480 these are these are questions that remain unanswered. Uh. And 0:20:18.600 --> 0:20:22.520 obviously cryonics is all about getting the person into cryo 0:20:22.600 --> 0:20:25.639 preservation as quickly as possible after clinical death. So that 0:20:25.800 --> 0:20:29.480 doesn't happen really after legal death, I should say, yeah, exactly, 0:20:29.560 --> 0:20:32.639 so that you don't have this deterioration of tissue that 0:20:32.720 --> 0:20:36.880 would be at least problematic and at most a complete 0:20:36.960 --> 0:20:39.560 preventative from ever bringing the person back, no matter how 0:20:39.640 --> 0:20:43.520 advanced our technology gets in the future. So the first 0:20:43.560 --> 0:20:47.119 person to ever undergo cryogenic preservation, I mean true cryo 0:20:47.240 --> 0:20:52.240 preservation was James Bedford, and that happened in nineteen sixty seven. 0:20:53.000 --> 0:20:55.359 Now that actually happened a couple of years after, a 0:20:55.400 --> 0:20:58.320 guy named Evan Cooper published a book similar to Ettinger's. 0:20:58.720 --> 0:21:02.560 His book was titled and More Tality Physically Scientifically Now. 0:21:04.359 --> 0:21:08.960 Cooper founded the Life Extension Society and tried to convince someone, anyone, 0:21:09.119 --> 0:21:13.320 to undergo cryo preservation after death. He didn't. He was 0:21:13.440 --> 0:21:18.080 getting really of antsy about it. He was like, fifty 0:21:18.119 --> 0:21:20.680 million people die every year. Couldn't one of you say 0:21:20.760 --> 0:21:23.399 that I want to be cry o preserved? Uh? It 0:21:23.480 --> 0:21:25.480 starts out like he had a little air of desperation 0:21:25.520 --> 0:21:27.359 around him because it took a couple of years before 0:21:27.400 --> 0:21:33.119 he finally had an opportunity. Um he uh. He actually 0:21:33.160 --> 0:21:37.119 even said that the the organization would pay for the 0:21:37.200 --> 0:21:41.800 cryo preservation so the family of the deceased would not 0:21:41.960 --> 0:21:43.920 have to foot the bill for it, because he just 0:21:44.000 --> 0:21:47.120 wanted to get things started. One other person had actually 0:21:47.160 --> 0:21:50.040 been placed in crowd genning suspension temporarily. So there was 0:21:50.280 --> 0:21:52.760 a woman whose identity was never revealed, so we don't 0:21:52.800 --> 0:21:56.280 have a name, but the time between her death and 0:21:56.680 --> 0:22:00.359 the crowd preservation process was considered too great that she 0:22:00.480 --> 0:22:04.000 had spent too long out in uh In and sort 0:22:04.040 --> 0:22:07.240 of I think she was in a mortuary. So she 0:22:07.359 --> 0:22:09.720 wasn't like she had um, it wasn't like she was 0:22:09.800 --> 0:22:11.840 being stored at room temperature, but still wasn't a temperature 0:22:11.880 --> 0:22:15.159 cold enough for a cryo preservation. And it was it 0:22:15.280 --> 0:22:18.639 was cold enough to slow deterioration, but not to stop it. 0:22:19.320 --> 0:22:22.399 And so she was eventually removed from suspension and buried. 0:22:23.200 --> 0:22:27.240 So she doesn't really count as far as people in 0:22:27.320 --> 0:22:31.600 the cryonics field are concerned. Bedford was a psychology professor 0:22:31.600 --> 0:22:33.960 who passed away at the age of seventy three before 0:22:34.040 --> 0:22:38.320 being frozen. The Chronic Society of California performed the procedure 0:22:38.480 --> 0:22:43.800 and it's a it's kind of interesting, Um, he is 0:22:43.840 --> 0:22:48.560 still frozen. Uh he You can read all about James 0:22:48.640 --> 0:22:51.520 Bedford and they actually did a transfer I think in 0:22:51.680 --> 0:22:57.280 n which involved a thorough check to make sure that 0:22:57.600 --> 0:23:00.720 everything was as it should be and acording to the 0:23:00.840 --> 0:23:05.000 stuff I read, Uh, he was in good shape. Um, 0:23:05.400 --> 0:23:08.880 still frozen or vitrified as we should say. I keep 0:23:08.960 --> 0:23:10.600