A prolegomenon to any future cryogenics

A prolegomenon to any future cryogenics

A preliminary consideration of ethical, legal, and practical issues

Peter A. Hempel

Cryogenic preservation is already upon us. The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, founded in 1972, has been enrolling clients for over half a century.

Whether the process will provide the promised resurrection is yet to be seen. At this point, none of his clients have been defrosted and revived, nor is there any specific schedule for such an event. (Expectations are, shall we say, somewhat muted.) Nonetheless, the science surrounding it will continue to advance, and we owe it to ourselves to consider the many questions it raises.

Cryogenics questions

Cryogenic fast tracking?

Current practice calls for the client to be legally dead before the process is begun. (A crew can be standing by at the ready if it is clear that death is imminent.)

“Pre-emptive processing” may emerge as a new strategy, along the lines of assisted suicide, to optimize the preservation process, with the usual and all too predictable political battle lines being drawn.

Cryogenic murder?

While “pre-emptive processing” presumably would be done with the full knowledge and consent of the client, what about a non-consensual situation?

Is it murder if you interrupt the power supply and let a cryogenic client thaw, since they have already been declared dead? Would “murderous” intent have any bearing on how the crime was viewed? (Think “Killing Walt Disney” as a blockbuster movie plot-line.)

A proper facility would need to have heavily armed guards stationed all around our cryogenic warehouses, with instructions to shoot first, and shoot to kill. It’s of no use to take the perpetrators to court if they have already succeeded in causing the client to involuntarily defrost – thereby rendering them unable to be resurrected in the future.

Justifying this use of lethal force to a jury might require considerable explanation of the entire process, and of the motivations and expectations of the clients. But this would hardly be the most difficult defense on record – consider, for example, the O.J. trial.

Cryogenic adultery?

If the trophy wife of a superannuated wealthy husband who is cryogenically frozen then decides to enjoy her newfound wealth with a parade of (young and virile) lovers, is that “adultery”?

Suppose she. in turn, were frozen, and by some odd circumstance the two were resurrected at the same time, would he be entitled to divorce her on the grounds of adultery? (For that matter, would they even still be married, or would death have done them part? And presumably, he would no longer be in possession of the vast fortune that attracted her in the first place.)

Cryogenic prenup?

And, what about the wife who has married a much older man in expectation of future wealth when he suddenly announces that he has arranged to be frozen, and his money will be used as a fund to preserve him, resurrect him, and make him comfortable in his new future?

Cryogenic wills?

Remember, these clients are legally dead, so I suspect it would be hard to establish a “living” trust for their future resurrected selves

The Big Freeze

Awaiting medical resurrection

Is there a general sense of a time frame for resurrection? Do people pre-pay for various waiting periods – e.g. 50 years, 100 years, etc.? (Keep in mind that Alcor’s first clients already past the half-century mark.)

What would be the implications of someone being resurrected at different distances from their original lives? Being resurrected 10 years later (or even 5) would already be a major shock in light of today’s rapidly evolving technology.

Being resurrected a century later would be unimaginable; the person would have no relevant skills whatsoever for the new age, and would be of only the most marginal historical interest. Given the amount of documentation currently being lavished on everything that happens, would they have any meaningful historical value? Would their insights matter? How would the limited insights of any individual compare to the much larger set of insights available through interviews and other documentation from people during that period?

Would resurrectees form their own communities, like the Chinatowns and Koreatowns of the present day? Would tourists flock to gawk and to buy their handcrafted art and trinkets?

Pre-Cryogenized?

Cancer treatment – especially radiation, but also chemo and some other medical treatments are very destructive to resurrection potential. Would there be a special kind of cancer-patient assisted-suicide option so that people with forms of cancer that were ultimately untreatable today could check out while their bodies were at their healthiest remaining point?

Would there be doctors who would specialize in cryogenic pre-mort – both in terms of timing and method to allow optimum body preservation? Would there be clinics attached to cryogenic facilities for convenient one-stop service?

Whole-body versus head-only

Is the expectation for those who opt for the more space-saving (and cheaper) head-only option that they will grow a new body for them from stem cells, or that they will find a body donor somehow (say the way organ donors are currently found in parts of China with an ample supply of Uighurs or executed convicts)? What about the considerable potential for a mismatch between the donor body and the head’s original body? (Suppose Walt Disney were given a black donor body, or perhaps even worse, a Jewish donor body?)

What would we do with someone like Stephen Hawking, who might not even want to be resurrected with his original head, but only his brain – preferably in a new head that can talk without an artificial voicebox? And who, on a return visit to Epstein’s island, could be an active participant for a change.

On the other hand, whole-body preservation would face a host of challenges as well. First would be the disease factor. If, for example, they had had cancer that had metastasized, the entire body would be a risk factor. And, in any case, it’s likely that many of the internal organs would be much the worse for wear simply from the cryogenic freezing procedure. Would they perhaps use the skin as a covering for some new kind of body – a flesh donor, or some robotic skeleton?

We are seeing great strides in robotics, including “a robot that can move, eat, and die using artificial metabolism.” Would the pioneers of cryogenics, including Walt Disney and Ted Williams, be content with “almost human” bodies? Is it their brain function (or perhaps their soul) that they want above all to preserve? Or do they do all this in the anticipation of a resurrected sex life? Suppose potential Alcor customers were warned in advance that sex would not be part of their resurrected lives, what impact would that have on their decision to spend all that money just to keep their so-called “minds” alive?

Family customs & visitations

There are families in our culture who commemorate the memories of loved ones with rituals such as lighting yahrzeit candles on the anniversary of a loved one’s death, or going out to visit the graves of parents and loved ones, sometimes on particular days or in some cases as a weekly picnic or whatever. If the loved one is frozen, resting in some unclear legal and religious limbo, what happens to these kinds of visits? You wouldn’t exactly be mourning a “loss.” But neither is it exactly a “celebration of life” opportunity. What the hell?

Even more problematic would be the situation for many families in Asia whose religious practices largely revolve around ancestor worship. If you’re frozen, do you get worshiped? Or do people just go out for ice cream?

It’s all in the mind

Since presumably the point of cryonics is to preserve the mind, what happens if someone develops Alzheimer’s or dementia? Does that render the whole idea moot?

Rethinking “unaliving”

Current practices in cryogenics require the subject to be legally dead before their normal bodily fluids are replaced with anti-freeze for the Long Nap. Obviously, this is a nod to our antiquated thinking about ethics surrounding life and death. And, in all likelihood, waiting for death means we wait until the body and brain have reached final unhealth.

We have evolved our thinking about death to allow people in some states and some countries to choose assisted suicide (“death with dignity”) rather than continue to suffer. If someone is planning to be cryogenically frozen (“cryogenized”?), must we require them to reach a final state of medical decay before we can begin to treat them?

There is, I suppose, also the possibility of theological concerns. Once a person “unalives” (to use today’s increasingly favored euphemism), does their soul immediately depart from their body? If so, then what of the being that is resurrected, however many years later? Are they devoid of a soul? Are they, theologically speaking, zombies? Do they start a new soul?

Cryogenics in the marketplace

The Alcor Life Extension Foundation is already a major player in the cryonic marketplace. Despite the obvious pioneering work Alcor has done, however, it may be that we need to consider fresh alternative approaches to achieve truly transformative breakthroughs.

Lets consider, for example, a hypothetical provider – MedRez – that specializes in a pre-death (proactive) approach.

When a client signs up, MedRez gathers stem cells and banks them and begins growing (according to the client’s budget) one or more clone bodies.

Clients buy shares in the company, along with paying costs for initial services. The money invested in the company goes towards maintenance of operations; the remainder is invested in hedge-fund style investments. When the client is resurrected, the value of their shares should have grown with the market, and the client will have a financial base for their future. Clients also take out life insurance policies with MedRez as the beneficiary.

As MedRez grows its client base, the cost of services and operations should scale down – if a “freeze team” only works one or two days a week, there is a lot of downtime. If they are handling multiple bodies a day, the efficiencies of scale and savings are enormous. Also, since the procedure is “pre-death,” it can be scheduled in advance, rather than waiting for an individual to die naturally.

As their handbook explains:

With MedRez, your Appointment in Samarra[1] takes place in our modern, state-of-the-art medical facilities, and is overseen by a complete staff of degreed and experienced cryogenic and other medical specialists.

The brain is central to all of MedRez’s work. Once the brain has been significantly damaged or compromised, restoration is all but impossible. This is the primary consideration driving our entire pre-death approach to cryonic embalming.

Diseases that undermine the integrity of the brain, such as cancer that has metastasized into the brain, drastically reduce the odds of a successful revival.

Please note that MedRez currently has no way of spooling up electronic records from the brain and incorporating them into a cloned brain. While this is obviously the object of ongoing research efforts by ourselves and others, at this point, the brain you have is the one and only home of who you are. The rest remains for now, science fiction.

MedRez recognizes that as people age, their brains age as well. MedRez has developed a set of proprietary solutions in which cells harvested from the base of the brain can be cloned and can help revive youthful vitality for the brain and for the body as a whole.

Philosophy

We at MedRez do not fear death. Death is a perfectly natural end. We do believe, however, that it can be better managed. We consider that one “natural” lifetime of the traditional sort is not enough for us to realize our full human potential, which we believe could be greatly expanded through the course of two or three or multiple lifetimes. We believe this should be an individual’s personal choice, that same choice that is embodied in the Declaration of Independence’s right to “life [lives], liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The Credo of human progress

“If it can be done, it will be done. Ethics are no more than a fart in a windstorm.”

In evolutionary terms, what we think of as “ethics” represent paradigms for behavior that will be mutually beneficial for all involved [or at least, as many as possible – or, perhaps for those in power]. In political terms, “ethics” too often become a tool to manipulate those who believe that ethics (as defined by other people) are important.

We do not believe that someone else’s “ethics” should stand in the way of your right to choose and to direct your own future and your own future lives.

09/17/25

[1] John O’Hara; retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933]