Cryonics & Life Extension
If human beings could live longer, they could achieve a greater intellect simply by having more time to learn. One of the problems with present-day human beings is that in general, it takes us a long time to become educated and to learn how to be responsible, disciplined individuals. While it ranges from person to person, it seems as though people start to generally mature in their thirties, giving them approximately fifty additional years of growth before generally entering a cognitive decline.
By allowing a more educated person to exist for longer periods of time, it is a possible outcome that this will contribute to a more stable world as a result of having a collectively intelligent society. One can imagine those who embrace life extension would simply enjoy having more time pursuing what they love doing. Traveling, being with their family, enjoying their favorite hobby, or whatever makes them happy. While life extension could mean living indefinitely until a major accident or cosmic event happens to the point that a person cannot be resuscitated, many people may simply choose to pull the plug, so to speak, deciding they have lived long enough and are ready to die.
With the current societal dysfunction facing humankind, and the great number of inequalities, one could easily imagine this level of life extension creating severe problems, including the total destruction of Earth’s habitat. Right now, our growing population is a major contributor to our climate change problem. We are consuming more, we are polluting more, and it's directly related to our global population. What happens when a large population of people are no longer dying, but people are still being born at a similar rate, one can imagine a population boom like we have never witnessed before.
The good news is, I believe that many people if they so choose, can enjoy the benefits of extended life in the future without dire consequences, but human society will largely need to be a multi-planetary species in order to not overpopulate any one habitat. Spacecraft technology will need to be more advanced than what we are seeing publicly today. Being able to go to Mars is a great start, but it’s not enough. While it is exciting progress that most people appreciate, the actual number of people who would want to go, even if transferring them was not such a challenge, is a fraction of one percent of the human population. No amount of incentive, 400 acres and a 3D printed home for free, no taxes, all the Martian marijuana you can handle, none of it would convince enough people to make that commitment. It might be different in the long term when cities and infrastructure can significantly grow, and interesting things are happening on Mars that are not common or available on Earth. What is most needed is spacecraft technology that will allow us to send people to another Earth-like planet within our galaxy, and perhaps beyond.
Life extension technology, if and when fully functional, seems to offer a few options. These include living longer while you are still alive, staying youthful for an extended period, and even reversing the aging process. Dr. David Sinclair believes while we may not be immortal, that we could live for hundreds of years. Dr. Aubrey de Grey, recently estimated a fifty percent chance that aging could be brought under medical control within 15 years.
A recent and promising study from Tel Aviv University and the Shamir Medical Center in Israel demonstrated that hyperbaric oxygen treatments (HBOT) in healthy aging adults can stop the aging of blood cells and reverse the aging process. From a biological perspective, the adults' blood cells grow younger as the treatments continue. Researchers found that a unique protocol of treatments with high-pressure oxygen in a pressure chamber can reverse two of the main processes connected with aging and its illnesses: the shortening of telomeres (protective areas located at both ends of every chromosome) and the buildup of old and malfunctioning cells in the body.
With advancements in CRISPR and stem cell technology, combined with our recent leaps in understanding mRNA vaccines due to COVID-19, it’s not hard to believe that these methods will help assist in the development of life extension, especially when all three have promising research underway. Its possible life extension will become a reality much sooner than many have predicted. Multiple companies and organizations are pursuing these and other methods of life extension, and it will clearly be done without any extra support from our community. However, investment in such companies and/or organizations could certainly help support progress.
Cryonics is a particular interest of mine. It has value in that it's an available option at present day. While the technology to revive a person is still under development, it’s logical to think that our understanding of science will continue to develop to the level that bringing someone back from the dead, so to speak, would be feasible at some point in the future. As of 2014, about 250 corpses have been cryogenically preserved in the U.S., and around 1,500 people have signed up to have their remains preserved. As of 2016, four facilities exist in the world to retain cryopreserved bodies: three in the U.S. and one in Russia. Alcor is the primary organization leading scientific development in cryonics. Alcor has one facility for the cryopreservation of humans that is based out of Scottsdale, Arizona.
An interesting concept that does not get much attention outside of science fiction is the concept of the isolated brain, which, in short, means keeping the brain alive outside of the body. While a lot could be learned from such experimentation, the main reason for exploring this is the end goal of keeping people alive who would have otherwise died of an illness, for the most part, unrelated to a problem involving the brain. If someone gets into a car accident and would otherwise die, for example, due to blood loss, why not keep them alive with isolated brain surgery? The main reason would be the quality of life. Without having the brain connected to another living body or a robot body, and/or something in between, one might imagine the experience of being alive to be downright disturbing. Without a body, one might have imagery of a brain in a vat comparable to a fish tank. Unless the brain has eyes or artificial eyes, you would not be able to see, and that goes for all your other senses. One might speculate that you could imagine and remember the senses, you could think, perhaps be able to sleep/dream, and you could without a connected body have a brain-computer interface, the type of tool that can assist with quadriplegia. With the addition of a visual aid, you could go online, watch TV, and use text-to-speech software to communicate with those around you, family and friends as well as other visitors and the medical professionals who run the isolated brain facility.
This type of hypothesizing is all speculation; it might be a very different experience. Another option to explore if a body was not available due to technological or personal financial limitations, maybe to put the person (isolated brain) into a self-induced coma to buy time until a body becomes available, and/or to prevent any consciousness of this in-vitro stage which might be too much for a person to handle. It is challenging, I believe, to do these types of experiments without concerns for animal cruelty; however, I think it can be done primarily with animals that are already ill and going to die. With proper anesthesia, it seems like it could be done in a way that is reasonable, especially when you take into consideration the countless lives this technology could save, both human and potentially animal. With that being said, the history of experimentation and science does look very promising for the isolated brain procedure to work well. In 1928 Sergey Bryukhonenko showed life could be maintained in the severed head of a dog by connecting the carotid artery and jugular vein to an artificial circulation machine. In 1963 Robert J. White isolated the brain from one monkey and attached it to the circulatory system of another animal. Most recently in 1993, Rodolfo Llinás captured the whole brain of a guinea pig in a fluidic profusion system in-vitro which survived for around 8 hours and indicated that field potentials were very similar to those described in-vivo.
Another concept is that of uploading your consciousness into a computer. This is significantly more complex and leans more into the realm of science fiction in that it may not be possible, or technically even you as a person, as it seems more like a copy of you. A very interesting concept that involves many transhumanism elements and thought-provoking ideas about the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human. A particular show comes to mind that I think communicates a lot of interesting ideas related to this concept, an Amazon original show called “Upload.” What is interesting about this concept is that a person/computer consciousness is immortal, at least as long as the computers are running, or as long as that individual wants to exist in this way. In theory, the uploaded individuals could interact with people in the real world, and they could have any sort of environment or experience they want in their simulated reality. As mentioned prior, it does seem like if this could work that a person who was on their deathbed and decided to upload their consciousness would die naturally and completely as we are familiar with. However, the digital consciousness would not be that person, but a “consciousness clone” so to speak of that person. They would feel alive and perhaps feel like it was a seamless transition, but in reality, is not actually that person. Of course, the term and idea of reality is still something we have yet to understand, and perhaps never will fully understand.
With all that has been said above, I think science and ethical experimentation should be done to better understand our world and to help offer life-extension opportunities. The most practical approach is to live a healthy lifestyle to live a longer lifespan, invest in companies that are making progress in the field of life extension, and sign up to be a cryonics member through life insurance for a chance at continued life after death. While cryonics organizations like Alcor are leading the way forward, I think the USF could help push their objectives forward and offer extra value by offering more automated and secure underground cryonics facilities around the world.