Ask A Genius 1058: Cryonics, or cry-me-on-phonics
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/02
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the field of cryonics and the practical reason you couldn’t be dead in liquid nitrogen?
Rick Rosner: Well, I got part of me frozen in liquid nitrogen. I hope it saves me from worse shit. But reading about how it works makes me less optimistic about having myself frozen as a newly dead person because I thought all you had to watch out for, or one of the main things, was when you get cryonically preserved so you can be resurrected at some point in the future. The main risk was that the water in and between your cells freezes and crystallizes, crystallized water cuts like a knife and all your cells are shredded.
So before you get your temperature dropped, you’ve got to get a lot of the water out of yourself, and you have to drop your temperature faster than crystals can form. That was the main deal and an addressable issue. A company, 21st Century Medicine, has cryonically preserved rabbit kidneys and thawed them out, and they work. A rabbit kidney isn’t nothing. It’s, what, two inches across? They can do it. You can cryonically preserve two-dimensional structures like the eyes’ lenses because you can get at them.
To ensure that the whole thing freezes, not freezes, but gets cold simultaneously. It’s not called freezing. It’s called vitrifying. Freezing is when stuff crystallizes, but vitrifying is when you cool it so fast that it forms a glass without crystals. It’s easy to do with two-dimensional things because you can access the whole surface, but a rabbit kidney is three-dimensional.
So they can do that, which is a promising sign. But I read the five things that cryonic ablation destroys. Something through freezing only takes a little of this terrible stuff; it creates bad osmosis. As the water freezes in the cells or external to the cells freezes, it creates salts that get pulled osmotically into or out of the cells.
So I’m still in if there’s no better alternative than having myself cryonically preserved when it’s my time. I will still do it, but, yes, it’s very fringy. I hope to last long enough for better solutions or for cryonic preservation to make headway to the point that it can preserve larger organs. But yes, it’s fringy, but it’s also not that expensive. The last time I priced it, it was a hundred grand or even less if you do just your head. So it’s a cheap bet to make.
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