And This is Why Cremation is a Good Idea

I don’t care how many sci-fi books you’ve read or how many times you’ve seen Han Solo come back in Return of the Jedi– people were not meant to be frozen, at least not in the early 21st century.  Case in point from ESPN:

Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams’ severed head was mistreated at an Arizona cryonics facility, according to details from a new book.  In “Frozen,” Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams’ head, which had been severed and frozen for storage, was abused at the facility.

Johnson claims technicians with no medical certification gleefully photographed and used crude equipment to decapitate Williams.  The severed head was then frozen, and even used for batting practice by a technician trying to dislodge it from a tuna fish can.

Williams, the last player to hit over .400 in a season, died in July 2002 at age 83; his remains were sent to Alcor for cryogenic storage in the hope that future generations would develop the technology to revive him.

The lesson to be learned here?  Cremation is better for the environment and you can avoid having degenerate high school dropouts playing with your remains. Isn’t there a special place in Hell reserved for people who don’t respect the dead?

The science behind freezing people is called cryonics.  I don’t know enough to call it junk science, but let’s look at this rationally.  How ever you slice it, you are trying to cheat death.

There are different types of death and if you are in first two categories then there is a “chance” of coming back:

1. Clinical death is considered the cessation of blood circulation and breathing.  Thanks to CPR, defibrillation and other treatments clinical death is now seen as a medical condition that precedes death rather than actually being dead.  You can be “dead” and still come back.
2. Legal death is a legal pronouncement by a qualified person that further medical care is not appropriate and that a patient should be considered dead under the law. This depends on how qualified the person was.  And the cryonics industry is selling people on the hope that incurable diseases today, won’t be in the future.
3. Information-theoretic death is considered death that is absolutely irreversible by any technology.  Dead as a doornail.

So I’m supposed to pay some scientist thousands of dollars to preserve my body at low temperature (77.15 Kelvin), in the HOPE that they can resustate me in the future.  Because right now human cryopreservation is not reversible- its not currently possible to bring a human being out of cryopreservation alive. And to top it off, in the United States cryonics can only be legally performed on a person after they have been pronounced legally dead.  I don’t see how this benefits anybody other than the shyster willing to stick you in a Sub-Zero.