Many people have dreamed of living forever but for science fiction writer and physics teacher Robert C.W Ettinger it was a life’s mission. Ettinger who died this past weekend was a founder of the cryogenics movement and was frozen along with both of his ex-wives with hopes of one day being brought back to life. Do you think that people who are currently frozen will ever live again?
Ettinger, widely considered the founder of the cryogenics movement, is being stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen in a facility just outside Detroit, along with 100 other "immortalists" who were frozen at death. Ettinger wrote The Prospect of Immortality in 1962, arguing that people would become nobler and more responsible if they were going to live forever — and if the world got too crowded, everyone could take turns going into suspended animation. He told the New Yorker last year that his frozen clients are "not truly dead in any fundamental sense."
Link
I wonder if they just dumped him into liquid nitrogen, or if they replaced some or all of his blood with the glycerin/DMSO mixture that is needed to stop ice crystals from forming and shattering the cells? My bet is they didn't. Of course, even better than that would have been for them to use their liquid nitrogen to produce liquid propane, which doesn't allow ice crystals to form all on its own, and doesn't boil when exposed to warm things (the boiling can disrupt the cells). This is a method that we use in my lab for cryofixation for electron microscopy. It ensures that there is no damage to bacteria or cells that we are imaging.
- Joseph Heller, Catch 22
99.999% of the population are dumber then rocks and could offer little to no factual data about the hows or whys of this time period.
"If they froze him, then he's not really dead." That would only (possibly) be true if they froze him alive, but they didn't. They froze him after he died. A dead frozen guy is still a dead guy.
"if they replaced some or all of his blood with the glycerin/DMSO mixture that is needed to stop ice crystals from forming and shattering the cells" It doesn't work. Replacing the blood with these fluids stops the blood exanding on freezing and damaging tissue, it does nothing to replace the water in other parts of the body. The end result being that the freezing and thawing process causes (currently) irreprable damage. I read a paper which suggested that the biggest challenge is probably repairing the damage caused by the freezing and thawing process.