Cryonics and the foolhardy scheme for eternal life
They tried to keep me quiet, they tried to put a lid on my diatribe of rebellious no-nonsense straight talk - but the insidious plots of the elite will not hold back what cannot be dammed: the indisputable, unequivocal truth. You're back with the Informed Observer.
In the thicket of summer fun, informed reader, I'd like to discuss something on the creepy side. It's not October 31st, but pseudo-scientific types are trying to make Halloween everyday because there's an underground movement to resurrect the dead.
I'm not talking about the religious has-your-soul-been-saved resurrection. I mean these creepy crawlers are in the process of trying to resurrect a DEAD body. This is scientific, Frankensteinian hogwash to the untrained ear, but the world is full of these anarchists who want nothing but to fill our world with a potential for egalitarian truth into a LAND OF ZOMBIES. I'm talking the walking dead. I can sense you're a bit skeptical, but I ask you to follow me on this roller coaster because I've got a load of good ole fashioned veritas waiting at the end!
Let's start with a little word association. When I say "Alcor", what comes to mind? Environmental-crazie-former-vice president nutso? (Not even CLOSE) How about an organization in operation since the late 1960s in Arizona dedicated to preserving dead bodies in ice - otherwise known as cryogenic preservation - in the hopes of one day resurrecting them? It's true. LOOK IT UP. (http://www.alcor.org) These folks are serious and they've got a horde of loonies with PhD and MD surgically attached to their last name. Dead bodies kept "alive" in blocks of ice is enough to make you shiver, but there's more.
Ever see Vanilla Sky? Remember "Lucid Dream"? It's not gone that far (YET), but these crazies are talking about sticking people in Antarctica to cool for several hundred years or so until they come up with the cure for cancer. And Alcor aren't the only ones in on the game. There's a whole market to become a human ice cream bar. Plus, there's the price: around $150,000-$250,000 for the whole body, around $50,000-$80,000 for just the head. Just the head. What am I? Zordon? (By the way, do you think that's what Zordon was? The future of cryonics, eh?)Listen, I'd love to live forever as much as the next guy, but read the fine print and use the old head muscle for a while and you'll see what they're talking about isn't immortal life. Well, sort of. You can wake up in the future...if the future feels like waking you up.
I can see some of you out there in spite of my rhetoric still have googly eyes over this whole thing. Well, put the tracks on right there. There's two words I want to throw your way and I expect you to catch them: BRAIN DAMAGE. After all, what's better than waking up from a thousand year sleep than waking up from said sleep with massive brain damage? Quite a blast, eh? Read on.
How do you know that the person thawed will be you? The brain is a sensitive object and any of those little wires called neurons that fray as a result of the freeze could end up losing precious memories, motor functions or vital parts of your personality. You could wake up a monster. Not to mention the possibility that we could freeze a monster; somebody with the personality of Stalin, Hitler or that fart tart Kim Jong Il.
Or, say you get froze and the process goes hay-wire a.k.a. the Chatsworth Disaster, when 24-year-old cryogenically frozen Stephen Mandell was accidentally thawed at a cryonic center in Chatsworth, California in the 1970s. Author and feisty intellectual Michael Shermer points out that even if they thaw you the result would be something like thawing out strawberries frozen for a hundred years: a gooey mess! The scientists don't tell you that. It's because the water within the cells have crystalized and the whole composition of the body has been transformed. The building blocks have been turned into oatmeal is what we're saying here. Of course, none of that info while you're forking over the dough.
Still, people are signing up for this. Folks unhappy with the fate of human beings since the beginning of time are jumping on point this supposedly fast track to the future. Now, I hear you saying to me, "Informed Observer, what the hell's wrong with that? Who doesn't want to live forever?" There's nothing wrong with wanting eternal life. Hell, I'd finally be able to finish a game of Sudoku. But what says the future really wants us? The planet's rapidly filling to capacity with homo sapiens, the fossil fuels are burning down to empty and we want to put folks on ice to add even more trouble to the future? A bunch of zombies wandering the earth just cause they didn't feel like kickin' the bucket like everybody else?
No way, no how. This is a bad idea. It wouldn't surprise me if these wacko Raelins were tag-teaming with the human popsicle people to create a super race. If anything should speak against bringing people back from the dead, it should be the chance that this guy might live forever.
Don't give in, reader. Fight the power, educate yourself, know the truth.
This is The Informed Observer signing out.
3 comments:
That actually seems kinda cool
Ok-- we have a view by this bloger that corresponds with the overall trend but the problem here is that in the field of cryobiology, we DO have some success "in principle". And that's the basis for the possibility of sheets of neurons containing microtubles that might lend itself to preserving the most complex organ-- the human brain. This diatribe against cryonics is really ineffectual-- but at least cryonics is being addressed. The latest preservation experiments are being done by the Owada group in Japan, if you're interested.
Join me in a discussion if you want--
http://www.network54.com/Forum/642067/
Thanks for your comment, but The Informed Observer is meant as a satirical presentation of overly conservative views...Our left-side satire column will premiere in September!
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