Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 (24 page)

WWW.PHOENIXPICK.COM

Greg Benford is a Nebula winner and a former Worldcon Guest of Honor. He is the author of more than 30 novels, 6 books of non-fiction, and has edited 10 anthologies.

--------------

A FROZEN FUTURE?
Cryonics as a Gamble

By Gregory Benford

For many, the most startling news in summer 2002 was that the American baseball legend, Ted Williams, had been frozen. A close relative turned Williams' body over to a firm that suspends its "patients" in liquid nitrogen. A firestorm of media attention followed.

And so it was. Williams now rests in liquid nitrogen in Scottsdale, Arizona. Some of his relatives tried to stop that but they failed in the courts. There have been several such attempts in the past decades to thwart the wills of the dead, which also failed. It's unclear what their motives might be, though getting the money back into the estate seems plausible.

The USA is the only nation with a thriving industry in cryonics. The underlying hope, that properly freezing people immediately after they have crossed the threshold we call “death” may allow them to be later reanimated, is a bold assertion about the future.

This goal is not scientific, in the sense that the results cannot be checked right now. This is not the same as
un
scientific statements—those which have been tested and have failed.

Rather, ideas of the future are
non
scientific. However systematically arrived at, they cannot be tested today.

Cryonics opens a window into the American mind. It is utopian and pragmatic, since the essential argument is to freeze people with carefully tailored cryo-protectants distributed through the bloodstream into their cells. The technology to "resurrect" by warming the body and curing their disease must lie in the far future, perhaps a century away. This demands optimism few can muster, a faith that the future will both care and be able to work medical miracles.

Response to the very idea is quite emotional, I’ve found, especially among both scientists and the religious—a fervently felt resistance suggesting a deep underlying uneasiness about death in modern society. Imagine a scientist today being rejected from a scientific society because he wants to present research relevant to long–term preservation of whole organisms, not necessarily humans. Yet this continues, as well as widespread views that cryonics is inherently wrong, greedy, or else the work of con men. (This last assumption seems universal among physicians.) Critics usually fail to note that the procedure, which costs around $60,000 for a head-only suspension, is paid by the "patients."

Of course, cryonics is a huge gamble, and I think is best viewed that way.
Skeptic
’s recent piece by Kevin Miller (Vol. 11, #1) follows common practice: interview a cryobiologist, who then cites a transhumanist (not a cryonicist) about techno-optimism. Miller’s scientist, Kenneth Storey, cites extreme standards (cells must cool “at least 1000 degrees a minute”) without backup argument, says “it will never work for organs,” and “they claim they will overturn the laws of physics, chemistry and molecular science”--using the principle of authority without argument. I wrote an entire novel about cryonics,
Chiller,
under the pseudonym Sterling Blake, and dealt with many of these points, and will not repeat them here. Rather, I propose dealing with such claims as cryonics as
non
scientific gambles.

Many thoughtful people discount cryonics because they simply consider it fantastically implausible. But Canadian painted turtles and four species of frogs routinely make it through the winter by freezing, then reviving. These creatures respond to low temperatures by making up a cocktail of glucose, amino acids and a kind of naturally produced antifreeze, glycerol. They manage to move water out of their cells, so that ice crystals form outside delicate membranes. While these animals have special adaptations, their body chemistries are not bizarre. Their methods could be extended artificially to mammals, like us.

Based on such reasoning, cryonics has gathered momentum, largely unnoticed by the world. Over sixty are now suspended in liquid nitrogen, with many hundreds signed up to be.

Many others regard cryonics as creepy and pointless; the notion calls up images of the cold grave, zombies, etc. Still, as eerie ideas go, being frozen strikes me as less horrific than turning into food for worms, or being cremated. (When cremation started out commercially, bodies were burned during a church service. The businesses quickly added organ music, because mourners wondered about the loud bang that often interrupted the funeral. It was the skull of the deceased, exploding.)

So if not especially creepy, is it none the less pointless? That is, are cryonicists making a reasonable bet?

That depends on many factors. Any vision of the future does. To analyze them in more than an arm–waving way, I'll work out here a simple method for quantitatively thinking about future possibility. The method can work on many ideas.

The simplest way to consider any proposed idea is to separate it into smaller, better–defined puzzles. This atomizing of issues is crucial to science, since it is easier to ponder one problem at a time. This approach has been applied to nonscientific questions, many closely allied to science.

***

I'm going to have to use equations here, but they'll be simple. So will my method. If every issue I raise is independent of the other questions, then we can simply multiply all the probability estimates together at the end to get the total likelihood of cryonics working. This probably is not true, but to do better one must know the future in detail.

What kind of concerns enter here? I'll break them down into three categories—the metaphysical, the social, and the technical.

First, the metaphysical. To preserve people's minds, we naturally think of saving their brains. What are the chances that the brain carries the mind? This is the materialistic world view, and the chances that it is correct I'll label with a probability
M
. I'm a solid materialist, like most scientists, so I'd say that
M
=.99, i.e., 99% chance that some vital soul does not leave the body when metabolism stops. There is evidence for this, actually. People cooled down to a state of clinical death on operating tables, for brain surgery, revive with their sense of self intact.

Next, what are the odds that our brain
structure
tells the whole story? That is, that your Self is not the product of continuing electrical activity in the brain? Here, too, the cooled patients seem to show that though their brain rhythms cease, they persist when revived.

Further, some people have gotten jolts of heavy current which completely swamped their delicate internal electrical circuits. This happens to hundreds of people struck by lightning every year in the U.S., and occurred in routine shock treatments earlier in this century. They survived with memory intact, except for short-term recall.

Our minds, then, are somewhat hardwired, though rewritable programs inscribed in the cells of our brains. So I'll set this probability that our Essence is in brain cells, not momentary brain activity, at
E
=.99.

Finally, there is the chance that your Self can make it through the process of being frozen down to liquid nitrogen temperatures. The trick is to get to the brain quickly, before it degrades.

Several years ago a boy survived drowning in a cold lake, reviving after an hour spent clinically dead. Even if cryonically suspended immediately—which means being perfused with a glycerol–type solution to minimize damage while being cooled—there lurk the huge unknowns of what this perfusion does to your memories. Studies show that the most damage is done when brains are rewarmed. Neuronal membranes are ripped, pierced. Even so, experimental animals revive with memories intact. And the perfusion technology will certainly improve. Let's be optimistic and put the probability that the Self will persist through this Transition process,
T
, at T=0.9.

Then the metaphysical factors,
MET
=(.99)(.99)(.9), or just about 0.9.

Next, the social issues. First, what are the odds that your brain (and body, presumably—but the Self is in the brain, remember) will make it to some far off revival time without some accident thawing you out? Call this
S
, the chances for Survival of your brain.

Many issues enter here. Presently, all cryonics patients are kept in steel containers, carefully watched. This hasn't always been so; financial failures doomed several to thawing in the two decades after Ettinger's pioneering book. But none have been lost in over a decade, and the first man frozen (a professor named Bedford, incidentally) is still coasting along at 77 degrees above absolute zero after 35 years. Given that cryonics is far more sturdy now, let me set the brain survival odds S=0.9.

Sure, one can say, but what about the odds that society as a
whole
will make it through for, say, a century? Call this factor
O
, the
O
dds against civilization itself being rich enough to not make cryonics impossible. This includes the chances that society will turn irrational, or break down (war, economic depression), or will take a fervent dislike to science, or to cryonics itself.

The economics of cryonics are modest. Liquid nitrogen is the third cheapest fluid, after water and crude oil, and is widely useful, so it will probably be available in even damaged economies. Of course, even democracies can decide to suppress those arrogant enough to spend their money on a chancy voyage across time into an unknown future. So I will set the Odds of social continuity allowing cryonics at
O
=.8. Probably in Europe this number should be much lower.

Ah, but what if the cryonics organizations themselves don't last? This is a real worry, because the collapse of Cryonic Interment Inc. in California during the mid–1970s lost suspended patients.

The longest-lived institutions in human history have been religious, with the Catholic church arguably holding the record at nearly 2000 years. Cryonics has some of the aura of a religion, with deeply persuaded people sustaining a long–range hope of personal salvation. Maybe that will help.

Still, greedy corporate directors could someday simply find it more profitable to keep tapping the assets left behind by the patients, rather than investing in reviving them. (See Simak's
Why Call Them Back From Heaven?
for a plausible argument that this would indeed occur.)

Or somebody could simply embezzle the funds, a la Enron. The more popular cryonics becomes, the bigger will be the spoils. Call this probability of cryonics organization failure
C
, and my guess is that
C
=0.5—a fifty–fifty chance that the whole shebang will go under. After all, we 're talking about a wait that could be a century. How many of today's corporations are that old? About one percent.

These social factors I estimate at
SOC
=(0.9)(0.8)(0.5)=0.36, or a bit better than a third.

I can hear the tech types impatiently asking,
can it be done at all?
And there's the rub. From the METaphysical to SOCial factors we come to the issues which blend the two—is revival TECHnically possible, given the social and philosophical assumptions?

Cryonics began with no clear idea of how revival could be done. That gave rise to a standard joke, about how many cryonicists it took to screw in a light bulb. The answer was none—they just sit in the dark and wait for the technology to improve.

The rise of nanotechnology over the last decade has made it the favored mechanism for cryonics. Nanotech envisions self–replicating machines of molecular size, programmed with orders to repair freezing damage, bind up torn membranes, and generally knit together the sundered house of a frozen brain.

There appears to be no fundamental physical reason why such tiny machines can't be made on the scale of a billionth (nano–) of a meter. The rewards of developing such handy devices would be immense, a revolution in human society (which is why the SOC issues intertwine with the tech ones, as I'll discuss below).

Not only must this marvelous technology appear, but we must survive its flowering. This is tricky; runaway use of nanotech could produce virulent diseases or everything–eaters that could wipe us out. Modern, Promethean technology, like nuclear physics, shares this daunting property.

I suspect that we will take at least fifty years, and more plausibly a century, to develop nanotech able to repair freezing damage. The good thing about being frozen is that you aren't going anywhere; you can afford to wait.

Given these immense uncertainties, I put the chances that the Technology will arrive and we will survive it at
T
=0.5.