Posthuman Blues

There's a pervading notion that cryonic suspension isn't "real" since no one has yet to be revived, which is rather like maintaining that Jupiter doesn't exist because no one's ever been there. So the prospect of prolonged life through ultra-low-temperature biostasis is marginalized and scoffed. After all, it infringes on too many social and theological conceits. And it just seems way too macabre, eccentric, far-out. And expensive, which it is.

Some people seem to think that cryonics (almost inevitably confused with cryogenics) is an improbable and rather ghastly last-ditch miracle cure when in truth it's simply a technically sound attempt to create a sustainable temporal ambulance. Others recoil at the thought of their bodies (or heads, in the case of so-called "neurosuspension") preserved in industrial canisters and tended by white-smocked technicians.

So when I read a jeering reference to cryonics in the mainstream press, I'm inclined to grit my teeth. Cryonicists make no fanciful claims and will flatly deny any promise of a utopian future existence.

Critics of cryonic suspension tend to harp on the alleged faith cryonicists invest in molecular nanotechnology, which many scientists foresee revolutionizing tissue- and cell-repair sometime in the next century or two. And perhaps the critics are right, and we won't develop the technology to revive (and repair) cryonics patients before the organizations housing their bodies succumb to bankruptcy. But why not try?





Hardcore transhumanists dismiss people content with "natural" life-spans as "deathists." And they have a point: What constitutes a "natural" life-span? Medical advances continue to push death farther and farther into the future; it's not impossible to imagine a world in which cryonic suspension is rendered obsolete in, say, the next 40 years or so, usurped by genetic therapy and nanotechnologically ensured youth. In that case, the fate of today's cryonics patients will hinge on how effectively modern technology suppresses freezing damage.

It could be that for all of their good intentions, today's cryonicists are irrevocably clumsy when they prepare a deanimated patient for long-term suspension. Or perhaps medical computers of the year 2100 will be sophisticated enough to reconstruct even severely damaged frozen brains, minimizing the frightening specter of memory loss and related dysfunctions.

Mainstreamers balk at cryonics' philosophical implications. Does perpetual youth violate some unspoken tenet? Do cryonics patients forfeit whatever afterlife would otherwise await them (assuming, of course, there is an afterlife)?

And then there are more mundane concerns. Assuming the cryonics gamble pays off and you awake to find yourself alive and (most likely) augmented by future medicine, where do you live? What will you do for money? What good is a brave new world if you don't have any friends or family?

Or what if the future isn't the good place you were expecting? What if, instead of opening your eyes to a world of ecological harmony and cheap space travel, your first sight is of something like the embryo harvesting machines in "The Matrix"?

Ultimately, the so-called "deathists" will live up to their moniker, taking their ideology with them. Which leaves the distinct possibility that today's "cryonauts" will emerge into a world where the line between "alive" and "dead" will be consummately blurred.