Here’s a link to the article in the screenshot, in case anyone else was interested in reading it like I was: https://www.freethink.com/futurology/cryogenically-frozen-humans
Thanks for this. Quite gruesome, but not at all unexpected. I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine a while back, where I made the argument that water expands when frozen and, since humans are mostly water, freezing a human would crack every vital organ. I’m actually upset to discover I was right.
This is true, which is why preservation does not involve freezing, except for the bad attempts in the 70s the article talks about, which could never work. The bodies are vitrified, not frozen.
Which still doesn’t mean it will work, the technology to revive them doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t have any freezing issue.
there could be a way maybe, by freezing water while keeping it extremely pressurized (extremely), you can make “efficient ice” that occupies less space, called ice VII, I’m not kidding. It would cost literally billions of dollars so not yet feasible, but it keeps my sci-fi loving mind at ease.
Cryoprotectants also do this pretty efficiently – they prevent crystallization, which leads to “vitreous” ice, which has more or less the same structure as liquid water and so doesn’t expand much. I think they do use that when freezing people, but the problem is that even if you fill the blood vessels with pure ethylene glycol, it diffuses very slowly, and it takes hours to get into cells which are far from large blood vessels. They dont diffuse the cryoprotectant in that thoroughly, though, because that’d take so long the body would have started to decay too much.
Edit: oops, the article talks about vitrifying agents. They make it sound like they’re not effective, but as I said above, they’re very effective if you can get them in every nook and cranny of every cell, which is a losing battle.
It’s fine, as long as the temperature stays stable and no further damage is done. We’re not going to revive their flesh. Instead we’re going to chop them off in large chunks. Suspend them in a kind of agar. Then laser off 2nanometer at a time. Scan the surface with 1nm resolution PiFM or better method. That’s going to yield many terabytes of image data that you can turms into a neural map of the entire nervous system. Even mapping this data to today’s LLM would get something roughly able to speak like the corpse. The better this data processing gets the more real the resurrected sentiences will be.
This sounds pretty amazing. Do you have any sources (or process names that I can search)? I would love to read more into the LLM part of your statement. Seriously sounds like scifi, and I’m loving it.
Posting my favorite cryogenics story of all time.
