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(It is hoped that these notes will be of assistance to anyone who is asked for a press interview etc. Make a printout of them and give them to the journalist involved. Suggestions for alterations and additions are welcomed, and updated versions will be posted to the Cryonet from time to time.)
Press Notes: Cryonic Suspension
What it is: Cryonic suspension is the process where people are frozen the moment legal death is declared, with a view to being restored to an active healthy life in the future when science has advanced to a stage when freezing and aging damage and the cause of death can be cured.
Answers to Common Queries and Misconceptions:
‘People cannot be revived by present-day science’. It is not present-day science but future science that will repair the freezing damage and what caused death.
Legally, as people cannot be revived by present day science, it is considered murder to place a living person into cryonic suspension. Therefore it cannot be carried out on a live person. Legally it is regarded as a sudden event, and therefore we can freeze the client as soon as possible after this event; but in reality death is a process rather than a sudden event fixed in time. CPR, for instance, was not invented till the 1950’s. Prior to that, people were given up for dead in cases where today cures would be commonplace. Therefore it is not unreasonable for people to be revived in the future from states that we today would regard as "non-living"..
There is no problem with power cuts. Cryonic suspension uses liquid nitrogen dewars (containers), and electricity is not directly involved in the process. The dewars are topped up every fortnight.
There is no way anyone could be conscious while in cryonic suspension. All molecular activity, and hence all brain activity, ceases at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Hence you will not feel cold, or notice the passage of time.
Cryonics is not a waste of money. In fact it requires the reverse, because people save and invest their money so that they leave an estate sufficient to pay for it. When a person is put into suspension, only part of the funds are used immediately. The rest is invested to provide an income in order to pay for liquid nitrogen and other care. In any case, the total cost of a suspension with the Cryonics Institute is comparable to buying a car, and people are not usually criticised for spending their money on a car. And a suspension can be paid for through insurance funding, which can amount to no more than hundred dollars or more yearly, in many cases.
Cryonics does not interfere with God's plan of a resurrection. People are already – routinely -- revived after what was once regarded as clinical death. Success in reviving cryonics patients would merely be proof that they weren't irreversibly dead in the first place.
Cryonics societies are not duping people into paying a lot of money for a service that cannot be guaranteed. In fact, they go out of their way to explain to clients that survival cannot be absolutely guaranteed. This is in contrast with many other established activities, for example national lotteries which take your money with incredible odds heavily against you ever winning anything at all.
Cryonics is not only for the rich. Although the prices of some organisations are rather high, they are easily affordable by anyone with a job, even when young. The Cryonics Institute is by far the most affordable of all, at $28,000 for full body. This amount can be paid upon legal death with life insurance and/or a moderate savings and investment plans. The Cryonics Institute's costs can easily be met by the family man on average earnings, and are probably costs less than activities such as smoking, eating out regularly, annual holidays, motoring costs etc.
People will be willing to revive Cryonics patients. Even today, vast sums of public money are spent on health care for the aged, even when an expensive operation results in only a short addition to life.. The human species places great value on life. Cryonics patients will be funded by their cryonics organisations, not public funds. A likely route to revivals is a now-young science known as nanotechnology, and it promises to be intrinsically inexpensive.
Population pressures will not prevent revivals. In fact the growth of population is leveling off because of affluence in the developed world, and AIDS in the undeveloped. But if the population does go on growing, a society with the ability to perform cryonic revivals will doubtless also have the capability to colonise space and currently inhospitable areas of the earth. Longevity will increase, with or without cryonics, and the cryonics component of population pressures will be minor.
Although it is preferable, suspension does not have to be performed within a few minutes of death. Deterioration is a result of atoms in the body moving to the wrong place, and as long as sufficient information remains to put them back in their right places by nanotechnolgy, then the patient can be restored. Clearly if the brain is rotted or burned, then information for restoration is lost. However if looked after carefully and according to especially designed protocols, current scientific studies suggest that suspension can occur hours or perhaps even days after death.
The future will be better than the present. Although many people seem to think the past was better than the present, this does not stand up under serious scrutiny. Often one learns about the past from the writings of well-off people, and indeed the lives of the rich may have deteriorated a little. However freedom from many previously prevalent diseases, better working conditions, and more leisure time and opportunities, distinguish present day living from the past. When one considers television and video, for example, the average person has better access to entertainment than monarchs of the middle ages and earlier!
There will be no problem with integrating with future society. To start with there will be more than one person revived, so reanimated people will have people from their own time with them, and future members of their cryonics organization supporting them. Training will most likely be provided as part of the reanimation process. We should also recall the example of people from primitive civilisations in the third world who have successfully integrated with modern civilisations after emigrating, and the many European immigrants who came to America.
Email us at: cryonics@cryonics.org
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