Several hundred frozen people are waiting for a “resurrection”. Few people know what cryonics is

In the mid-twentieth century, the first ideas on how to outsmart death appeared. Currently, several hundred bodies of people who were convinced during their lifetime that the resurrection of the dead are a matter of time are frozen all over the world.

1. 180 frozen bodies are now stored at the American cryonics center
2. They are people who believed that it is possible to “not die definitively”. Before they died, they believed that in some time the resurrection would be quite natural, so they let themselves be frozen
3. We check how cryonics works in practice
4. More information can be found on the TvoiLokony home page

In search of a remedy for immortality

It has now been ten years since Robert Ettinger died. Are you sure? Opinions about his death are divided, and he would certainly not agree with a hasty diagnosis as human death.

Ettinger, an American physicist, taught classes at Michigan State University and a local college after the war. He taught mathematician and physics. As a hobby, he was looking for a means of immortality. And it was this issue that kept him awake at night.

In 1962, he even published a book in which he argued that death was really a cultural and scientific event, and not strictly biological. And whether or not we ultimately die depends almost entirely on the level of knowledge and scientific progress. Until a few decades ago, cardiac arrest was synonymous with death. Today, however, the matter is no longer so obvious, and defibrillators work wonders.

On this basis, Ettinger concluded that together With the progress of science and further research, in a few dozen or maybe several hundred years someone will find a way to immortality. So if medics equipped with resuscitation kits can restore human functions today, why not assume that in some time we will reach a place where rejuvenation will become real, or even – as Ettinger strongly believed – raising the dead?

This is, of course, a utopia in which, however, the American physicist who lived in the mid-twentieth century believed completely. So much so that he founded the Institute of Cryonics. In the organization he had invented, he conducted numerous studies to prove that a man would be able to outsmart death.

At the Institute of Cryonics founded by Ettinger, you could spend 28. dollars, to be placed in something that resembles after death armored sleeping bag filled with liquid nitrogen. In this way «Patients» they are to wait for the moment when science finds a recipe for immortality. By 2011, the institution, funded solely by donations from people fascinated by the prospect of potential immortality, froze 105 people.

On July 23, 2011, Ettinger himself joined this “community of the dead”. Earlier, the man froze his mother and two more wives.

The rest of the text below the video.

Animals freeze and survive

Cryonics is quite popular. Anyway, it is enough to look at how nature deals with the piercing cold and the consequences of being frozen.

Siberian angles, also known as Siberian newts, are a species of amphibians that, as a result of evolution, developed an incredibly effective way to deal with low temperatures. The species described for the first time in Siberia by the Polish exile Tadeusz Dybowski, occurring in Northeast Asia, has no problems with cooling its body to a temperature below zero degrees Celsius. Not only that. Kątozęby can survive in hibernation temperatures down to -35 degrees Celsius and survive frostbite. Jak? Sprawę opisywaliśmy na łamach serwisu komputerswiat.pl.

To achieve this ability, the angle of the tooth produces a glycerol cryoprotectant. Under standard conditions, when the body freezes, the water turns into ice, which expands, tearing the tissues apart from the inside. Cryoprotectants reduce the glass transition temperature of the substance to be frozen, in this case water, or the freezing point in general.

In the book “Man into Superman”, which the Polish philosopher Tomasz Stawiszyński mentions in Newsweek, “Ettinger openly admitted that, firstly, he has no intention of dying, and secondly, in the more or less distant future, medicine will certainly not only be able to to resurrect all of us, but also to provide us with perfectly functioning bodies that look exactly as we want them to. Bodies, let us add, are reliable, non-aging and of course not even suffering from a stupid runny nose – not to mention cancer or atherosclerosis ».

But Ettinger was not the first man to passionately seek a panacea for death. He was a pioneer in this matter James Bedford, an American credited with being the first man in the world to be frozen after his death, hoping to see his resurrection.

Bedford was frozen in 1967 by a mechanic and inventor, Bob Nelson, who placed his body in a wooden box filled with ice after Bedford’s death. He had nowhere to keep the corpse, so he initially placed it in his home. Briefly. Nelson’s wife was furious and told her husband to get rid of the body as soon as possible.

Frozen with open eyes

Interestingly, in 1991 Bedford’s son decided to check what had happened with his father. James’s body was transported to the bathroom in his son’s house. And then to a liquid nitrogen bath filled with polystyrene. As it turned out? After nearly 25 years, Bedford’s body was “well developed, well nourished, and appeared to be younger than a 73-year-old man” with … partially open eyes.

James Bedford’s body was re-frozen and placed in the Alcor facility on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, Arizona, where 145 bodies of other frozen people are now buried, waiting for the resurrection.

Scientific evidence for the resurrection

Cryonics, however, is primarily faith, not knowledge. Modern science does not have clear tools by which to verify people’s belief that they will be resurrected.

The brain remains the biggest mystery. It is not known if it is kept at a low temperature and can store memory, including memories, knowledge of the language, etc. There is also an ethical and psychological thread. Even if science reaches the point where “immortality” becomes possible, what will be the mental condition of such a “frostbitten man” and will he find himself in the times in which he will have to live?

For now, cryonics remains in the sphere of dreams and utopian, futuristic visions. On the other hand, one of the most popular thinkers in the world today, whose books are being sold in large numbers in many countries, Yuval Harari, when asked about immortality, was to say with full conviction that it would be possible soon. Bartosz Węglarczyk mentioned this exchange of views in TvoiLokony.

Harari explained that in the future, medicine will allow for endless replacement of defective body parts as in a hundred-year-old car, but such a service will only be possible for the richest, which will result in new, huge social divisions.

1338 more applicants

Storing the body in liquid nitrogen stops any chemical reactions taking place in it. How does it look in practice? In three places operating around the world where you can undergo cryonics surgery, it looks more or less the same. The body is placed on a special machine. Then it slowly begins to cool down to -320 deg. F in a liquid nitrogen gas chamber. And under such conditions, the body awaits the resurrection.

At the moment, the Alcor center stores the remains of over 180 people, of which about 100 are just heads. Another 1338 people want to rest in a chamber with liquid nitrogen after their death. In total, over 250 people are frozen in the world. In the case of Alcor, the oldest person is a 102-year-old woman. The youngest “patient” is only two years old.