‍Why Cryonics Makes Sense 

This is a blogpost by Tim Urban on why he thinks cryonics actually might make sense. He begins at his starting point where he believes that it is only for rich, dead people, but later moves on to update his knowledge and opinions on the matter. 

Extract from the blogpost:

“A year ago, I knew almost nothing about cryonics, and my impressions of it were something like this sentence:

Cryonics, or cryogenics, is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.

Now that we all know a lot more about cryonics, let’s bring back our sentence. This is where we were, and we were looking closely at the three words in the red:

“Cryonics is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.”

We can get rid of “rich,” because at least for younger people, cryonics can be paid for with a not-that-expensive life insurance plan.

We can get rid of “dead,” because cryonics doesn’t deal with dead people, it deals with people currently doomed to die given the technology they have current access to. For the same reason, we can also change the wording of “bring them back to life.”

And we can get rid of “freezing,” because cryonics doesn’t freeze people—it vitrifies them into an amorphous solid state.

While we’re here, let’s get rid of “morbid.” Is a vitrified human head floating in liquid nitrogen morbid? Yes. Is it more morbid than being eaten by worms and microbes underground or being burned to ashes? Definitely not. So not a fair word to use.

So that leaves us with a sentence more like this:

Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.”

Read the full post for Tim’s experience of diving into the concept of cryonics. 

WaitButWhy blogpost that breaks down a human life into the activities there is time to do.

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