Редактирование: Transhumanist FAQ Version 3 (раздел)

===What is cryonics? Isn’t the probability of success too small?===

Cryonics is an experimental medical procedure that seeks to save lives by placing in low-temperature storage persons who cannot be treated with current medical procedures and who have been declared legally dead, in the hope that technological progress will eventually make it possible to revive them.

For cryonics to work today, it is not necessary that we can currently reanimate cryo-preserved patients (which we cannot). All that is needed is that we can preserve patients in a state sufficiently intact that some possible technology, developed in the future, will one day be able to repair the freezing damage and reverse the original cause of deanimation. Only half of the complete cryonics procedure can be scrutinized today; the other half cannot be performed until the (perhaps distant) future.

What we know now is that it is possible to stabilize a patient’s condition by cooling him or her in liquid nitrogen (- 196 C°). A considerable amount of cell damage is caused by the freezing process. This injury can be minimized by following suspension protocols that involve suffusing the deanimated body with cryoprotectants. The formation of damaging ice crystals can even be suppressed altogether in a process known as vitrification, in which the patient’s body is turned into a kind of glass. This might sound like an improbable treatment, but the purpose of cryonics is to preserve the structure of life rather than the processes of life, because the life processes can in principle be re-started as long as the information encoded in the structural properties of the body, in particular the brain, are sufficiently preserved. Once frozen, the patient can be stored for millennia with virtually no further tissue degradation.

Many experts in molecular nanotechnology believe that in its mature stage nanotechnology will enable the revival of cryonics patients. Hence, it is possible that the suspended patients could be revived in as little as a few decades from now. The uncertainty about the ultimate technical feasibility of reanimation may very well be dwarfed by the uncertainty in other factors, such as the possibility that you deanimate in the wrong kind of way (by being lost at sea, for example, or by having the brain’s information content erased by Alzheimer’s disease), that your cryonics company goes bust, that civilization collapses, or that people in the future won’t be interested in reviving you. So, a cryonics contract is far short of a survival guarantee. As a cryonicist saying goes, being cryonically suspended is the second worst thing that can happen to you.

When we consider the procedures that are routine today and how they might have been viewed in (say) the 1700s, we can begin to see how difficult it is to make a well-founded argument that future medical technology will never be able to reverse the injuries that occur during cryonic suspension. By contrast, your chances of a this-worldly comeback if you opt for one of the popular alternative treatments – such as cremation or burial – are zero. Seen in this light, signing up for cryonics, which is usually done by making a cryonics firm one of the beneficiaries of your life insurance, can look like a reasonable insurance policy. If it doesn’t work, you would be dead anyway. If it works, it may save your life. Your saved life would then likely be extremely long and healthy, given how advanced the state of medicine must be to revive you.

By no means are all transhumanists signed up for cryonics, but a significant fraction finds that, for them, a cost-benefit analysis justifies the expense. Becoming a cryonicist, however, requires courage: the courage to confront the possibility of your own death, and the courage to resist the peer-pressure from the large portion of the population which currently espouses deathist values and advocates complacency in the face of a continual, massive loss of human life.

References:

Merkle, R. “The Molecular Repair of the Brain.” Cryonics magazine, Vol. 15, No’s 1 & 2. (1994). http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html