Our civilization spends trillions of dollars each year on medicine to keep people alive. It seems to work pretty well; we live something like twice as long as our ancestors did, and although those years often face more limits than those of youth, it’s plain that living longer, healthier lives is worth pursuing.
I don’t know whether I’ll live to be elderly. But I intend to live as well as I can, for as long as I have, and it seems to me that most folks would choose the same for themselves and their loved ones, at least so long as the balance of joy and suffering does not tilt so sharply towards the latter as to make living intolerable.
Modern medicine has worked its share of miracles. It used to be the case that when someone’s heart stopped beating, they were unequivocally and irrecoverably dead. Today we have CPR and defibrillators and pacemakers, and it’s no longer such a sure thing. Many diseases that would have been a death sentence a century ago have been reduced to mere inconveniences today, if they have not been outright eradicated. People have even been revived after being drowned in a cold river, with no heartbeat for over an hour.
To secure so much life for ourselves and our loved ones has been one of civilization’s proudest triumphs.
But we are not yet finished. Cancer yet consumes us, pandemics yet plague us, aging yet withers us.
These afflictions too may be defeated in time. Cancer cells are different from regular cells in ways that we can use. Plagues and parasites can be defeated, by antibiotic or vaccine or more targeted means. Even aging is an accident of nature, as contingent a fact about our biology as cancer, strokes, or heart disease. Given long enough, medical science may one day conquer all these lethal threats the way it conquered smallpox.
Some folks can’t wait that long. So now seems like as good a time as any to talk about cryonics.
Until a person’s brain has dissolved into a pile of warm mush, they are only ever mostly dead. There’s a form of treatment that takes advantage of this fact, cooling a patient down to levels that would normally be fatal, but taking steps to preserve the cells anyway. It’s called cryonics or cryopreservation. Much ink has been spilled about the viability of the science, and I won’t get into that here. But you ought to know that the option exists.
Modern medical science cannot revive a person so preserved. There’s no guarantee we’ll ever be able to do so. But, just as there’s nothing in principle preventing us from finding a comprehensive solution to cancer, there’s nothing in principle preventing a sufficiently advanced civilization from restoring such a patient to the fullness of health, if humanity survives the coming decades. The advantage of cryopreservation is that, done properly, one can afford to wait for a very long time, for modern medicine to come up with a miracle for the only-mostly-dead.
It’s experimental. It’s expensive. Perhaps most damning of all, it’s weird.
But I am not yet finished. And I don’t find these to be compelling reasons not to take cryonics seriously. Lots of treatments are experimental; this doesn’t stop us from trying them. Lots of treatments are expensive; some costs are worth paying. And as for the weirdness, well, going metaphorically on ice seems to me no stranger than going to the earth, or to the sea, or to ashes, when one’s body can no longer support itself.
I don’t know how many people will be motivated to learn more by a post like this, let alone motivated to act on it. But if you’ve made it this far, I want you to know that each and every one of you is worthy of life and that to deprive the future of your presence would be an unutterable tragedy. I want to encourage you to, at the very least, give serious thought to signing up for some form of cryopreservation, or to talking with an elderly relative about the option. Because your life is a precious and beautiful thing, because so much may one day be fixable, and because there is so much life yet to be lived…
…and you are not yet finished.
More: https://nectome.substack.com/p/preservation-pre-sales
Even more: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E9xfgJHvs6M55kABD/less-dead
Final note: I have no financial connection to any cryonics organization, am not being paid for any of this, and swear on my life and honor that my motives for writing this post were that life is wonderful, dying sucks, and if only one in a thousand people listens to me then maybe, just maybe, I’ll have saved someone’s life this way.