Life Everlasting

Maybe it's fitting that on Easter Sunday, when millions are celebrating the last time someone rose from the dead, I found myself listening to a National Public Radio program about cryonics. Normally I eschew NPR, full as it is of dreary arty bollocks, lefty liberal apologetics and "black-only" racist programming, but it has its moments, and today contained one of them. The program looked back to the early days of cryonics in the sixties, when some bloke called Bob Nelson started freezing people and storing them in the charmingly ridiculous hope of reviving them later. The technology wasn't there at the time, but who knows what will be possible later, and I couldn't help thinking what a horrific thing that would be.

The idea behind cryonics is that most people who die aren't really "dead" according to the "information theoretic" definition of death, since their identity and memory is still preserved in their brain tissue at the moment of clinical death. As minutes or hours go by the brain will decompose and identity would be lost, but in theory if you froze someone who died of something like a heart attack you could revive them later.

Let's leave aside all the scientific questions about how long you could wait to freeze someone, what you'd need to do to preserve the body tissue and all that other stuff. For a start it's arse-clenchingly dull to anyone who's not into cryonics, and I have a suspicion that anyone who is into cryonics is a nutter. Frankly, I couldn't be arsed to research the subject. But let's think about this for a bit. What if it worked? What if people didn't die but just went into stasis for a bit and got revived later?

For a start it's not as though the world is short of people. The population is now estimated at 6.7 billion; when I was a kid I remember being told it was about 4 billion. Even without cryonics we're going to run out of places to put them all, and land to grow food for them. About 60 million people die every year, but even if you only consider the "wealthy" ones the number isn't small. 2.5 million die annually in the US. Assuming that cryonics becomes possible and affordable just imagine the additional land that'll be given over to gigantic frozen warehouses for all their corpses. And what are the eco-weenies going to say about the huge amounts of electricity being used to refrigerate all these bodies; instead of returning their carbon to the earth they'll be using fuel for centuries. Bear in mind that it's not necessary to prove that you can revive people for there to be a market here - there's no shortage of idiots willing to be frozen just on the off-chance of future success.

Let's hope the idea never works - with the birth rate at 75 million per year (a net of 15 million over the death rate), even if we only revived 25% of the stiffs we'd be looking at doubling the population growth.

And what would we get at the end of it? Statistically speaking an awful lot of people die when they're old. I've seen old people: forget the problem with all the senile ones, just think about how they spend their time now. Revive them and before you know it we'll be knee-deep in wrinklies. They already retired so what are we going to do? Pay them another pension until they die (again)? You won't be able to move at WalMart, and forget trying to eat during the early bird special. The economic might of the United States will be devoted to the production of dentures, incontinence pants and arthritis drugs. The promise of cryonics is that we get to see a wonderful future, beyond our dreams, but the revived pensioners are just going to moan about how much better it was in the old days so what's the point?

That's the trouble with people - they don't think things through. Everyone wants to live forever but I'm afraid that doesn't work. Instead of people trying to extend their lives indefinitely wouldn't it be better if we enjoyed life while it lasted, embraced death when it came, and realized that millions of drooling carcases, kept alive only by advanced medical intervention, should be sent on their way? Today millions remember how two thousand years ago someone got nailed to a cross so we wouldn't have to fear death anymore. Doesn't seem like it worked, does it?


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison