Hopefully they invested in all of the top of the line, state of the art technology of the time. But if the quality of that black & white photo is any indication....
One of the scariest things i’ve seen in a horror/science fiction movie is when a woman who experimented on aliens (Tortured them) has the tables turned when they escape/take over.
She knows they have torture methods than would make anything a human could think of seem like child’s play, so she blew her brains out to avoid the torture.
Only to be fully intact a second later through the aliens healing her, so that they could torture her forever.
I don’t know why this story made me think of that.
Somehow this reminded me of George Costanza:
I was in the pool!
Yeah, yeah. Talk is cheap, Slick.
Hey, that's great!
So, he really IS a stiff!
I don’t see how anyone who, having been dead can expect to thaw out and “return to life”. Return to death, maybe.
I doubt very much that bodies preserved in liquid nitrogen will be brought back to life.
I have frozen small vials of cells in liquid nitrogen. The cells must first be suspended in a kind of buffer solution (15% glycerin or dimethyl sulfoxide), which prevents water from forming crystals that destroy cells. Then they must be frozen slowly, over a couple of hours (ideally, with the temperature dropping by 1 degree Celsius per minute). Then they must be placed in the liquid nitrogen. If everything is done correctly, the cells should wake up when thawed—but sometimes don’t. I once thawed a vial of cells that behaved exactly as if they were alive—I could see them attach to the bottom of their flask, and they would change position from day to day, but they did not ever start growing. I threw them away after a couple of weeks. Other vials just never revive.
Given the host of issues that arise when trying to cryopreserve and revive cultures of cells, which are vastly less complicated than multi-cell systems such as human bodies, I have serious doubts that the technology will ever advance to the point where large, intact bodies will be thawed back to life.
I will note that tiny embryos are cryopreserved, and further note that these embryos are small enough that they do not need a circulatory system to distribute nutrients and oxygen throughout the body, and that they have no nervous system to worry about. They are *not* equivalent to adult complex organisms.
An extra complication is that the bodies are, in fact, dead at the time of freezing. Death causes massive tissue damage starting almost immediately. Skin cells can remain alive for hours after death, but brain cells, which are crucial for life as a human, die off within minutes. I don’t see how the cryo process could progress rapidly enough after death to keep the brain cells from dying.
Still, this process makes for interesting science fiction scenarios. That’s its main value, as far as I can tell.
‘Like a steam locomotive, rolling down the track, he’s gone, gone, gone, he’s gone, gone, aint nothing gonna bring him back. He’s gone’.
Related from April 2016:
Crossing Over: How Science Is Redefining Life and Death
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3415427/posts
One has to wonder if Nelson’s so confident in his procedure, why didn’t he freeze himself 20-30 years ago when he would have been a lot younger?
Anthropologist Stanley Shephard (Timothy Hutton) is brought to an arctic base when explorers discover the body of a prehistoric man (John Lone) who has been frozen in a block of ice for 40,000 years. After thawing the body to perform an autopsy, scientists discover to their amazement a real possibility to revive him and their attempt to resuscitate the "iceman" proves successful.--Wikipedia
IMO, there is something creepy about this and un-godly. I get the same creepy feeling about cloning humans and animals.
Now that Trump’s in office, it would be a great time to wake him up. We just won’t tell him what happened during the past 50 years (too embarrassing), except for Reagan winning the Cold War.
. . . and if you did revive him, every last person in the world that he ever cared about would be gone, anyway - and the culture would, I fear, be almost alien to him.Which puts me in mind of the C-Span presentation John McWhorter did on his recent book.
- Words on the Move:
- Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
He explains why English started out from Beowolf and changed to Chaucer and then to Shakespeare and on to the present day - and the future. Very interesting discussion. As the addendum to the subtitle suggests, he discusses (for example) the “Valley Girl” use of “like” and the inverted meaning of “literally.”
“John McWhorter’s Words on the Move has a deeper point than most language books: it’s focused on the ordinary words which do most of the grunt work of communicating, but which we rarely give much thought to. It’s full of little puzzles and surprises that stop us in our tracks and make us aware of the gentle breezes that are always blowing our words hither and yon. McWhorter is awfully good at listening to words and at explaining what he hears there, and his book is so brimming with insights that even as a linguist, I found myself stopping every couple of pages to say to myself, ‘Huh―I never thought of that.’ So will you.”--Geoffrey Nunberg, linguist on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and author of Going Nucular and Ascent of the A-Word
We still don’t have an absolute cure for kidney cancer.
I’ve toured Alcor and have seen his chamber. Great way to kill an afternoon in Scottsdale.
They cant even explain what is the key ingredient, beyond a human body, that makes life. Without that, there is no way to revive people.