Cryonics

It used to be enough for a man to freeze his vegetables and, after a time, revive them to meal capacity through thawing, or at least an enjoyable temperature for a meal that didn’t look it came from beyond the Arctic Circle. But man, as ambitious and vigilant as he is, will not settle for the ‘Birdseye’ section of the grocery until he can put himself in it, likely without all the blue plastic, though. Some call the process of having one’s body preserved in liquid nitrogen for potential resuscitation or revivification in the distant future when technology reaches a point where this would be possible very forward thinking. I’m afraid I would call it an exercise in futility. This is not to disparage the fascinating quantum leaps in scientific progression cryogenics has afforded – though, not to mention the Pandora’s box that it has opened concerning the preservation of frozen embryos and human sex cells, but that’s another topic entirely – but it is to call for a distinction between the preservation of moss and the preservation of a human being, which is fundamentally philosophical in nature. While modernists would laud the preservation of a body in a tank even Lord Kelvin would think cold as an affirmation of life and its continuation, it is rather an affirmation of death and its having won the final round. Those who have their bodies dunked in sublimating liquid – and I emphasize the passive voice here, for it has to be done for them – are hoping to hide the “Old Maid” trump card under the table and pull it out – or have it pulled out – when it looks like all hope is lost. Unfortunately, they do not realize that they brought “Old Maid” cards to a poker game, and the house (that is, Death) has a royal flush…the house always wins in the long run. The real farce here is the attempt to defy death, or at least redefine eternity; that is, of course, assuming that if it even worked that some future generation would feel compelled to distribute their likely more scarce resources to someone they would have to revive and then feed, and to someone who has already lived a full lifetime anyway at that. There is a better gate to living eternally than liquid nitrogen…