Biostasis (aka Cryonics) Is a Life-Saving Technology
You may not have thought about this before, but cryonics could “save” your life.
When is someone dead?
The theory behind cryonics being a life-saving technology relates to our understanding of death. When is someone actually dead?
100 years ago, if your heart stopped you were considered irrecoverably dead. Today, you wouldn’t be.
Now we’re able to treat someone whose heart has stopped, so long as they are reached quickly enough. Thanks to inventions like CPR and other resuscitative interventions, we are able to treat more conditions that were previously fatal. If someone suffered a heart attack 100 years ago, were they really dead or just untreatable?
So, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that 100 years from now we will be able to treat even more issues. Cancer? Aging?
Just because someone is considered dead today, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “dead” forever.
That’s because, today, when someone is declared dead, medical professionals agree that there’s nothing more that they can do to help the person. But what if there was a way to get them the help they needed, not today, but in the future?
Cryonics uses extremely low temperatures to prevent further cell degradation within a person, once their heart has stopped beating. Cryopreserving someone prevents further cell decay that start after you have died. So, a cryopreserved patient has the time to wait for advancements in medical technology that could treat the cause of their death.
Could you be treated in the future?
Who knows what could happen in the future. There’s no way we can possibly imagine what technological advancements will be discovered over the next few decades. But from current medical research and new fundamental technologies such as CRISPR, a better understanding of nanotechnology and genetic and epigenetic research, the expectations are extremely high. With these technological advancements, the possibilities of the human experience will grow far beyond our wildest imaginations.
We just can’t say for sure what we will be able to achieve. We don’t know what medical issues we battle with today that will be completely treatable in the future. And, if you’re unfortunate enough to die before advancements come to fruition, you won’t be able to benefit from these advancements.
These medical advancements could be a treatment for the cause of your death or a way to restore you to full health. One thing we can be sure of is that cryopreserving yourself is the only possible way that you could potentially see these advances.
Cryonics as a life-saving treatment
The overall goal of cryopreservation is to give people who are untreatable today a chance. As technology advances, more diseases are understood, meaning that more people will be treatable in the future.
In other words Biostasis (aka Cryonics) offers us all a way to “pause” ourselves at the time of death and leave open the possibility of living in the future. Just because we can’t envisage what these advancements and cures will be, it doesn’t mean we should turn our back on them.
