“The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America’s deep space probes. In a freak mishap, Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William “Buck” Rogers, are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life support systems, and returns Buck Rogers to Earth. 500 years later.” – Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
No comment required.
There is a theme in legend, called “The King in the Mountain.” In this theme, a hero from history awaits. The hero, though wounded, or old, or with a bad case of the sniffles, waits. Generally the hero is awaiting a future time when he will be needed to save the nation he is associated with. One example of this is the legend of King Arthur. Arthur is said not to have died, but to be resting in Avalon for when he is needed by Britain, and then he will emerge from his sleep, his sword Excalibur in his hand, to save Britain. One would assume he has a good mattress for a sleep this long. Whenever I go longer than about 8 hours my back lets me know about it . . .
Since Britain has now outlawed all weapons, up to and including dull butter knives, I’m thinking Arthur would face this fate upon his return. The Royal Navy now has fewer ships than at any point in the last 370 years, so if he avoids arrest he might have his work cut out for him if a group of toddlers decide to take over the UK.
Arthur’s legend dates back at least to 600 A.D., but other regions have similar tales, such as the legend of Holger Danske, a big Danish guy who sleeps and will come to the aid of Denmark when it’s in peril. Like Arthur, he’s asleep in Avalon, and also like Arthur, he’s spent some time (wink-wink) with Morgan le Fey.
Here’s Holger. He looks like he’s pretty buff. I bet he deadlifts like 500 pounds, bro. CC BY SA 3.0, from Wikimedia.
So the concept of suspended animation has been with us for centuries, and most of the time the “suspended animation” has been just your garden variety of time-stopping sleep which lasts centuries and is susceptible to interruption only by current events. Buck Rogers (who went from the 1920’s to the 2400’s fell asleep due to radioactive gas in a mine (in the original story published in 1928).
But I think that Clarence Birdseye® was the real inspiration for those that spend time dreaming about suspended animation. Birdseye™ invented a way to quickly freeze food (in about 1924) so that it retained flavor, texture, and nutrition better. Soon enough, the first frozen dinner was in stores. And in 1931 a young boy named Robert Ettinger read the short story, “Jameson’s Brain” about a gentleman named Jameson that was frozen in orbit. Jameson was frozen for about a million years, and some robots put his thawed brain into a robot. As attractive as the whole “human brain in a robot body” goes, I mean, who wouldn’t be attracted to that?
Ettinger from that moment was fixated on a science he dubbed Cryonics. He even wrote about it in a short science fiction story that was published in Startling Stories in 1948 (it’s pretty rough, but it’s also pretty short). In 1962 Ettinger wrote a book called The Prospect of Immortality. You can find it for free online. His book was pivotal in getting attention to Cryonics, and in 1967 the first corpse patient was frozen. That was one of Ettinger’s ideas – death should be looked at not as a final state (in some cases). Where there was sufficient medical equipment and know-how, he reasoned, death could be considered to be a temporary condition, a setback that could be cured. Die in the Amazon (not Jeff Bezo’s place, the actual jungle) and you’re dead. Die in a modern city near modern medical equipment? Maybe you and Buck Rogers can swap stories about Wilma Deering.
The basic theory is that your brain stores information in such a manner that it’s retrievable after you die. It retains your personality and memory. The basis for this (according to Ettinger’s book) is that rats, nearly frozen, no circulation for hours, were revived. The rats had been taught tricks, like how to vote on a bill in Congress. After being thawed out, the rats remembered the tricks they had been taught. It might be a stretch to say that the personality and memory would be the same, but at least Ettinger had some evidence that it might work.
So, after thawing you might get a new cloned body to put your brain into. That would be cool if we knew how to do any of that. Or we could scan the brain and put your memories and personality into a computer. If we did either of these, we wouldn’t need to store the whole body – we could just store the head. And storing the head is one option if you’re on a budget and not wedded to the “I need my body” thought process.
Or we could fix the original body, if we had a cure for whatever killed you and you weren’t a cheapskate.
Hey, maybe you could have a robot body, too.
How could this possibly go wrong? Peter Weller is our friend, right?
So death goes from being the end to being a temporary stop along the way to the future. But the problem is that people really don’t like being frozen. And their organs like it even less. Freezing cells dehydrate. I had thought that ice crystals formed inside the cells, but my research for this post says that the cells dehydrate, ice crystals form outside the cell walls, and then the resulting salty sludge left in the cell couldn’t support life. Freezing is pretty destructive. Frostbite seems to come to mind . . . .
In the 1980’s, a scientist had an idea: inject antifreeze into the cells and cool them down in such a fashion that ice crystals don’t form and the frozen body becomes like glass:
Don’t dwell on it . . . (I think this image was originated from Alcor, a cryonics firm)
The problem is the “antifreeze” that gets pumped into the organ/body is . . . toxic, which implies that in order to freeze the organs, you have to poison them. And getting the antifreeze into and around the brain (which is pretty dense) is rough – there’s some speculation that the amount of pumping and pressure required to get the antifreeze into the brain might just damage it to the point that it’s useless.
The bet for the future is that we’ll have “new technology” (Nanotechnology? Better beer bongs? High Definition rubber bands?) that will solve the problems associated with freezing the corpses patients in the first place. Also, I give Ettinger credit: he’s frozen at -140˚C (room temperature in Canada) along with both his first wife and his second wife, which might cause all sorts of complications upon thawing.
I first learned about cryonics through science fiction. The noted fiction author Larry Niven referred to frozen people as corpsicles, and his novel A World Out of Time is based upon a thawed corpsicle working as a slave to a totalitarian future government. Which gives him a space ship, for some reason. They gave the corpsicles jobs that Future Serfs won’t do. Maybe they can give corpsicles the job that future people won’t do . . . like . . . saving Britain?
