our goal is to have reversible suspended
animation just like in the movies can
you just put me in stasis and wake me up
in the future when everything's ok again
I hope that I won't have a biological
body but I'll have a body made out of
nanobots so tell me is cryonics a pipe
dream
let's face it we're all going to die and
it'll probably happen sooner than we
like but what if there was a way to
escape the apocalypse in fact what if we
could cheat death altogether
freeze ourselves in time and wake up in
the future when all of our problems have
disappeared the idea of putting humans
into cryo sleep is everywhere in science
fiction Han Solo trapped in carbonite
Captain America frozen in ice but what
about the real world
can we stay off death through the power
of cryonics
I've come to Scottsdale Arizona to find
out welcome to the Al Khor Life
Extension foundation the self-proclaimed
world leader in cryonics for just under
a quarter of a million dollars
Alcor is selling a second chance at life
the AL core team looks after nearly 200
people who are waiting to take that
second chance one small catch every
person preserved here has been
pronounced clinically dead but al khor
that's just a technicality our best
estimates are that within fifty to a
hundred years we will have the medical
technologies needed to restore our
patients to health and function the team
at Al Khor refers to its customers as
patients and just like patients in a
hospital alchohol hopes that in the
future they'll be restored to full
health when they arrive each body or
patient depending on how you look at it
goes through a technical process to
increase their chances of survival on
the other side they're treated with
chemicals and drugs carefully called
lowered into a giant steel vat of liquid
nitrogen and stored at minus 196 degrees
Celsius all in the hope that one day
they will live again
alcor's officers are simple enough but
in the middle of this building is
possibly the strangest and most
unsettling thing I've ever seen a field
of stainless steel tanks holding the
bodies and heads of a hundred and
seventy dead people frozen in stasis how
many people in each one of these each
one of these has approximately nine
patients four whole body patients around
the outside and then there's a stack in
the middle which holds five neuro
patients yes neuro patients people who
elected just to preserve their heads not
only is it less expensive it also saves
on space that would be the neuro can
that the patient is in and it of course
has identification on it
each of these vessels is known as a
Dewar a custom-designed insulated tank
that's filled with liquid nitrogen and
computer controlled to preserve the
bodies inside their massive even
considering how many bodies and heads
they contain
but these doers have been designed to
protect
alcohol's patients for decades why are
they so tall I can't help but think that
I'm not that tall there's a lot of
insulation both around underneath and on
top these lids do come off the
insulation on the lid comes down almost
to here Wow and people often ask us what
happens if the electricity goes out it
doesn't matter for our patients we do
have backup generators to keep our
computers running and that sort of thing
but these patients are in liquid
nitrogen it just sits there at minus 196
Celsius we don't have to cool it the
patients are not damaged in any way by a
power out
it's hard to imagine who would want to
sign up for cryonics I figured it would
just be sci-fi mad doomsdayers or ultra
rich billionaires but the photos of
patients that Lynelle cause walls point
to a pretty normal looking clientele
more than 1200 people have signed up for
our core services of the 170 patients
roughly three-quarters of men but
otherwise it's a fairly even spread
retirees mums and dads even a very young
girl she had brain cancer and her
parents had her cryo preserved they
wanted to come over and do a Buddhist
ceremony so we put her picture on the
capsule for them to have that ceremony
my husband is in this Dewar right here
and so I come in every now and then say
hi Fred
how you doing
okay let's get this out of the way the
science behind cryonics is completely
unproven it's a highly experimental
experts say there's no way to perfectly
preserve the human brain or reverse the
biological finality of death but for
alcohol being declared clinically and
legally dead isn't the end legal death
only really means that your heart and
your lungs have stopped functioning
without intervention doesn't mean your
cells are dead it doesn't mean even your
organs are dead up until maybe 30 or 40
years ago most people in medicine
thought that death was an event on/off
switch you're either alive or you're
dead it's now pretty well understood
that it's a process it takes hours after
your heart and lungs stop functioning
for you to really be totally dead
alcohol says if you intervene early
enough and preserve the body as quickly
as possible after death there's no
reason you couldn't be brought back in
the future when science has improved so
what exactly do you do to a dead body if
you hope to bring it back to life one
day well turns out it's not as simple as
dropping it in a tank of liquid nitrogen
when a patient arrives they are brought
in to L cos facility for stabilization
this room kind of feels like a cross
between a hospital and morgue the
initial process varies depending on how
long the patient has been dead and
whether they were placed on ice before
arriving but here the goal is to start
cooling the body as quickly as possible
and for that they go into a sort of
post-death life-support the patient is
placed in the ice bath and then covered
with additional crushed ice the patient
is intubated to restore the lung
function and oxygenation to the blood
there's a mechanical thumper which is
placed on the patient's chest so that
the blood starts circulating again
and that's important to circulate our
protective medications but the real
action happens in the operating room
where the body goes for cryo protection
via surgeons pump blood out of the
patient's veins and replace it with
cryoprotectant eventually you're just
trying to cool them down and you know
putting effectively like an antifreeze
in Velen exactly is a medical grade
antifreeze so that their cells do not
crystallize when they go past the ice
point so our bodies are made up of about
50 to 60 percent water when that water
starts to freeze it forms ice crystals
which damage the body's organs and veins
but by replacing that water with
cryoprotectant alcohol says it can
slowly lower the body's temperature and
it will vitrify kind of turning into a
glass-like state rather than freezing
and in that state you can keep a cryo
preserved body in liquid nitrogen for
decades it takes about six to 12 hours
to cool the body and fill it with
cryoprotectant ready for long-term
storage but the good news it's much
quicker if you're just doing it to a
head and how long would all of this
process take well it doesn't take us
long with the whole body because
obviously you don't have this as much of
a mass so the procedure can frequently
be only half as long okay so why would
you only preserve your head well the
most important things for Alcor is to
keep the brain intact that's the core of
our memories our personality everything
that makes us who we are the idea is
that by the time technology is advanced
enough to bring a brain back to life we
could upload it or even grow a new body
from scratch
once close to 99% of the water in the
body or head has been replaced the
patient is gradually called to minus 196
degrees Celsius from there they go into
the long-term care room and that's where
they stay
[Music]
[Music]
walking through a room full of fog
surrounded by dead bodies and severed
heads it felt like I was walking through
a graveyard I found it really hard to
believe these people would be coming
back to live and walk among us and I'm
not alone in fact one neuroscientist
says the evidence points to a pretty
grim outcome for the people who get
Cryer preserved Ken Hayworth has a PhD
in neuroscience and he's a former member
of al khor he founded the brain
Preservation prize to challenge the
cryonics community to prove that they
could preserve a brain without damaging
it and according to Hayworth no one has
come close so I've seen examples of
animal brains that were preserved under
ideal laboratory conditions by a
technique that's very similar to what
they say they use in cryonics companies
they didn't show ice crystals but they
showed a tremendous amount of shrinkage
there was probably a lot of damage and
to those structures that encode memory
but if cryonics was your one hope for
waking up in the future then there might
be some good news Hayworth says he has
seen evidence of a way to preserve brain
so that the neural connections stay
intact it's a technique called aldehyde
stabilized cryopreservation it almost
instantly glues together all the
proteins in the brain now you're as dead
as a rock at that point you're ain't
coming back but the advantage of that is
it glues all of them in position it
doesn't destroy information that means
that in the future you could potentially
scan upload and even simulate that brain
but there's a catch you ideally need to
do it while a person is living what's
the downside
well the downside is that it kills you
but then again everything kills you I'm
not sure that this is the solution for
me I needed a second opinion so I
decided to make one final stop the
apartment of neuroscience at Columbia
University in New York I needed to know
is death really the end could we
actually preserve and restore a human
brain without any damage Ken Miller is a
professor of theoretical neuroscience at
Columbia University and when it comes to
the promise of cryonics he's not
convinced so tell me is cryonics a pipe
dream in my opinion yes according to
Miller we're a long way from
understanding how the human brain works
so working out a way to perfectly
preserve it and revive it in the future
that's a long way off the most basic
answer to how the brain works is we
don't we don't know we know how a lot of
pieces work we know how neurons work at
least a lot about how neurons work in my
opinion it's at least thousands of years
before we wouldn't know and really
understand how the brain works it's just
a complexity it just it levels on levels
and levels and levels it's beyond really
the imagination okay but even if we
could find a way of perfectly preserving
our brains and uploading them in the
future I still had one question if I
found a way to chronically go to sleep
and then be woken up in the future would
I still be Claire I think so but it's a
funny question because of course if it
was all information that you got up into
a computer that was somehow running and
making something feel like Claire well
we could have a million of them on a
million different machines and each of
them would feel like Claire but
immediately just like twins start having
divergent experiences and becoming
different people and so all these
different Claire's would immediately
start having different experiences and
becoming different Claire's
but while Ken Miller says with thousands
of years away from understanding the
human brain back in Arizona
Alcor CEO max more has a different view
I do believe that what makes you who you
are can be brought back in the future so
long as you've got cryopreserved under
reasonably good conditions I think
everything important is hard coded up
here so long as we retain the structure
over time we hopefully will reach a
point where we can actually restore the
function so right now what we can do is
preserve the structure we cannot reverse
the process today but I think it's not
doesn't violate laws of physics as a
matter of time and better technology
cryonics isn't cheap at 220,000 dollars
for a full-body or 80,000 for a neuro
preservation it's a high price to pay
for hope Moore also says there are no
guarantees with cryonics Alcor doesn't
exactly let you choose which day you
want to be woken up still I guess your
chance of waking up from here is
probably better than if you go to the
crematorium you know I think what we're
doing is we're killing people who could
potentially be preserved we're just
throwing them in the ground and having
been eaten by worms and bacteria or
we're burning them up and to me that's
kind of crazy when we could give them a
chance if they want it do you see this
then is kind of the ultimate insurance
policy it really is actually real life
insurance I mean you think about life
insurance is actually death insurance
pays out on death this really is life
insurance is it's a back-up plan in case
you don't live long enough till we
figured out the biology of Aging but
while critics say people like the team
at Alcor are trying to play God more
simply wants to push the bounds of
what's possible if people say well it's
unethical to try and live longer makes
me scratch my head so compared to what
what is the right lifespan you've got to
the Bronze Age and people died in their
20s and 30 used to be go back at all
oh yeah like a century ago and people
died in their 40s is 70 right is 80
right there is no you know privileged
answer to that so I think it's ethical
to give people the opportunity to live
as long as they choose to live in good
health they can decide when their time
is up
before coming to ELQ or I thought people
who believed in cryonics were kind of
mad I'm still not convinced on the
science and I think we're a long long
way of bringing a dead person back to
life but after being here I realized
maybe they're just adventurous members
of people who are not afraid of that
they can look at as a grand adventure
you know take some getting used to the
future but I'm looking forward to it
I hope that I won't have a biological
body but I'll have a body made out of
nanobots so it's sometimes referred to
as a nanobots swarm or a nano cloud and
it will be much more durable I can be as
beautiful as I want to be I won't be old
any more already
thank you listening to Linda Chamberlin
it's clear that she really cares about
her patients and she's passionate about
cryonics for her and the rest of the
team at Alcor cryonics might be a long
shot but it's still a chance at this
stage putting myself on ice and sleeping
through the apocalypse just isn't an
option which means there's only one more
way I can think of to escape the end of
the world and it's going to take a giant
leap to get there
https://youtu.be/zw6qT2GN0Ao
Nice work
ReplyDelete