Can we really pop human beings in the freezer and defrost them decades – or centuries – later, to emerge into a brave new world beyond their wildest dreams? It’s a common sci-fi fantasy: in episodes of The X-Files or Star Trek, bodies are put on ice just before death, or corpses are preserved post-mortem, in anticipation of future medical breakthroughs that can bring them back to life. But in the real world, there are scientists hard at work to make cryopreservation a reality.
A German start-up named Tomorrow Bio recently made headlines as the first company to offer this ‘service’ in Europe. A reported 650 people are already signed up, with six people and five pets already undergoing the preservation process.
Most of those on the waiting list don’t expect to die anytime soon, with an average age of 36. When they do shuffle off this mortal coil, though, the company will be notified (via next-of-kin, or a wearable tracker) and a team will be dispatched with immediate effect to begin the preservation process ASAP, which involved reducing the body’s temperature to -80°C. Preserved patients, or “members”, are preserved indefinitely at a facility in Rafz, Switzerland, for the low, low cost of €120,000.
These patients join around 500 people who are currently preserved in cryonics programmes across the world, and thousands more plan to undergo the treatment, with facilities popping up across the US, but also in Asia, Russia, and Australia. Are they all just getting scammed via the promise of eternal life, or should we all be saving up for a ticket into the IRL afterlife?
For all sorts of grisly reasons, like ice crystals tearing your blood vessels apart, you can’t just freeze a body by conventional means. Yes, cryopreservation involves cooling corpses to sub-zero temperatures – this is what stops the biological processes that cause a body to decay – but they’re treated with what’s essentially “medical-grade antifreeze” to stop them actually freezing.
It’s a leap of faith, though. As Tomorrow Bio explains on its website: “Patients are cryopreserved in the expectation that future technology may be able to revive them and treat their underlying cause of death.” The word “expectation” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, since it’s unclear when, or if, this future technology will arrive.
“Whether it’s 50, 75, 100 years or more,” says the company, “our patients will remain cryopreserved for however long it takes for future technology to advance enough to make revival possible.” Of course preserving bodies, and keeping them that way indefinitely in a high-tech facility, is a costly process, which explains the very high prices. Then again, you’re not going to miss the money if you’re dead.
Luckily, Tomorrow Bio has a solution for members on a budget. While the total cost of full-body cryopreservation runs up to €200,000, they can freeze just your brain for €75,000. This would be very handy if we figure out how to upload brains to cyberspace in the future, too.
These one-time payments have to be paid at the point of death (so remember not to blow all your corpse preservation money on a spectacular send-off). Either way, members also have to pay a €50-per-month fee to cover standby teams, equipment, and research costs.
“Tomorrow Bio is structured to be significantly more financially stable than most companies,” or so it claims. Anyway, should the business collapse while corpses are on hold, they wouldn’t just turn the fridges off and let nature take its course, as patients are stored at non-profit organisations that would keep things up and running. That’s reassuring.
If all goes to plan, then basically, yes. How will they adapt psychologically to the brave new world they come back to life in? Presumably, that’s a bridge they’ll cross when they come to it. On a more practical note, members are already setting up “revival trusts” so that their wealth can carry over in the case that they’re resurrected a hundred years in the future. Funnily enough, the rules and regulations are pretty unclear when it comes to these trusts, not to mention the tax loopholes involved in dying and coming back to life, but it sounds like a pretty likely story: the rich get richer, even in the afterlife.
