Hundreds of people in the United States are frozen in liquid nitrogen tanks at -196°C, waiting to be resurrected! The youngest frozen person is only 2 years old
The "frozen people" frozen in a tank of -196°C liquid nitrogen are waiting to start a second life.
"Currently, there are hundreds of dead in the United States, including baseball legend Ted Williams, whose bodies are frozen in liquid nitrogen, in the hope that future technology will bring them back to life".
Frozen people are no strangers to us, and they have appeared in science fiction movies such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Interstellar".
Even Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel has signed a deal to freeze himself after death in anticipation of a future resurrection.
This morning, this topic instantly set off a discussion on Reddit, once again attracting a large wave of netizens' attention.
These "legally dead" people are refrigerated in liquid nitrogen tanks at around -196°C, hoping to press the pause button on their lives and wait for their resurrection someday.
Now, what happened to these frozen people?
Nearly 200 frozen people, the cost is as high as 220,000 US dollars
Robert Ettinger, known as the "father of cryonics", mentioned "cryoresurrection" in his book The father of cryonics published in 1962.
In his opinion, death is a gradual process, and if the body is frozen fast enough, death can be reversed!
In January last year, Euronews reported that 199 humans in the United States who had been "legally declared dead" and nearly 100 pets were kept in tanks filled with liquid nitrogen.
These "patients" are only "legal deaths", not biological deaths. They believe that cryonics could be their own lifesaver.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics organization based in Arizona, USA, has built a huge infrastructure to provide freezing technology.
Here, the walls are covered with portraits of frozen people.
These include Hal Finney, a well-known programmer who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2014, and baseball star Ted Williams, who died of a heart complication in 2002.
One of them, Matheryn Naovaratpong from Thailand, lost his life when he was only about 2 years old.
Max More, the foundation's honorary chairman, said, "She was the youngest patient who died of brain cancer. Her parents are both doctors, and the little girl has had multiple brain surgeries, but unfortunately it didn't work."
According to Alcor, for those involved, the cryopreservation process begins as soon as a person is legally declared dead.
At this point, their organs are still viable.
The cryonics team is usually on call for up to a week before the patient dies.
They act quickly to transfer the patient to an ice bath and replace their blood with organ preservation fluid.
Once the patient arrives at Alcor's facility in Arizona, the cryoprotectant or chemical is released into the patient's blood to prevent the formation of ice crystals from causing damage to the organs.
They then cooled the human body to minus 320.8 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 °C) and stored it in a tank filled with liquid nitrogen.
The problem is that, until now, no single family of cryogeneous tissue has known how to wake up a patient who has survived.
However, Alcor, a non-profit organization founded in 1972, firmly believes that "resurrection is possible"!
A 1996 profile photograph shows the interior of a freezer developed to freeze humans
For these frozen people, the cost of preservation is also high.
It is said that the cost of whole-body preservation is $220,000 (about 1.58 million), and the cost of preserving only the brain is $80,000. Most members pay with insurance funds.
Some people even choose to freeze their pets.
Another major company, The Cryonics Institute, has 2,180 members worldwide, and there are smaller companies in Europe, China and Russia.
Other companies are cheaper than Alcor, but their packages often do not include the services of a medical standby team that begins the "cryonic" process immediately after death.
Frozen for 57 years, the world's first frozen man immortal journey
On January 12, 1967, James Hiram Bedford, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, became the world's first frozen man.
Fifty-seven years have passed, and he is still lying in a tank of liquid nitrogen.
It was originally planned to resurrect it 50 years later, in 2017, with advanced technology, but the reality is very cruel.
Bedford, 73, died of stomach cancer, and the virus quickly spread to his lungs a few hours after his death.
A team of doctors and other enthusiasts completed the first stage of freezing in only 7 minutes.
He was put on an artificial breathing device to keep oxygen flowing to his brain, while a vein was injected with dimethyl sulfoxide to replenish blood and protect his organs from freezing.
After completing these works, a few days later, the research team placed his body in an insulated container filled with liquid nitrogen.
However, Bedford's frozen journey was bumpy.
By 1970, due to the poor performance of the incubator, he was transferred to a new facility. Allegedly, the only way to check if the incubator is still frozen is to monitor the tubes for frost.
But in 1976, the facility was unable to maintain the maintenance required to continue freezing.
So Bedford's son, Norman, took him to a commercial refrigeration company in Emeryville in a U-truck.
Bedford was transferred in 1991
Later, Bedford was moved from one cryopreservation facility to another, and finally in 1991, the cryonics company Alcor took over his remains, where they are still kept today.
How to freeze?
Freezing technology, which sounds like just freezing the human body, is much more complicated than simple freezing and thawing.
After the patient is declared legally dead, the body will be immersed in an ice bath by the medical team on standby.
The deceased's blood is then replaced with a cryoprotectant, which reduces the risk of crystals forming in the body after death.
In this process, mechanical CPR equipment is used to ensure blood circulation and medication is used to protect cells from damage.
Maintaining blood pressure is essential for survival, as is the organ donation process. This prevents the person from regaining consciousness, or a blood clot can form.
Strictly speaking, technically, the bodies of these people are not "frozen", but "vitrified".
So, why not frozen?
The reason is that once the body cools to below freezing, the solution will not crystallize, but will become thicker and thicker.
It is like a glass block that holds all the cells in place without any changes in the internal structure, so it does not cause any damage.
"At about minus 110 degrees, the body becomes very strong, without any biochemical activity and certainly no neural activity," the scientist said. So at that point, whether you wait a day or a hundred years, you'll be the same as you were at the beginning."
The corpses are gradually cooled and stored at a temperature of -196°C (or around -321°F) in a special container filled with liquid nitrogen to prevent the corpses from decomposing.
The corpses will then be kept indefinitely until science advances to the point where they can be resurrected.
A special ambulance for transporting frozen bodies was presented at a conference in Madrid in November 2022
Alcor CEO Moore said science was moving in the right direction, but progress was not as fast as he would like.
Earlier last year, scientists at the University of Minnesota successfully thawed and transplanted mouse organs for the first time in history.
The cryonics industry relies on the assumption that one day, death will be reversible.
Not only does it need to be able to bring people back to life, but it must also be able to heal the cause of death.
1000 years later
But technology that comes back from the dead can also pose a lot of problems.
The first is the question of the identity of the patient, if a person is really resurrected after 1000 years, who is he?
If Queen Elizabeth II were to be cryopreserved and resurrected, would she be queen again?
Moreover, if a person is to wake up in a few hundred or even 1,000 years, it will be very challenging to integrate into a completely unfamiliar world.
Moreover, it is uncertain how to ensure that the company that implements freezing will still exist in a few hundred years.
Alcor protects the future of patients through a Patient Care Trust that acts as an independent entity to manage and protect the funds of cryopic patients.
There are very strict rules for the management of funds, and no more than 2% of the funds can be withdrawn per year.
Alcor CEO Moore said that in his experience, registered patients are people with a very strong "adventurous spirit".
Netizens are hotly discussed
The most heated question discussed by netizens is, is it possible to resurrect the dead?
But many optimistic netizens believe that although resurrection from the dead is not possible now, just as no one would have believed that they could talk to anyone on earth in real time at any time 100 years ago, it may be easier to resurrect from the dead than to teleport.
"But there's a reason why humans have been on Earth for so many centuries and still haven't figured out what aging and death are all about. 」
Under a BBC program about frozen people, the first thing many netizens are most curious about is: "How is this job treated?"
"But the souls of those who died will laugh at the idea in heaven. 」
Resources:
https://x.com/CreepyOrg/status/1756713957971091540?s=20
https://www.reddit.com/r/StrangeEarth/comments/1aoct0y/there_are_currently_hundreds_of_deceased_people/