What is 'cryonics'?
Cryonics is the preservation of a patient, a body that has only just died, has only just become legally dead in liquid nitrogen at very, very cold temperatures. The idea here is that at really cold temperatures the decay of the body that happens after death is arrested; it just stops happening. And therefore the body can be preserved indefinitely, certainly for thousands of years. The idea of doing so is that there is a good chance, or at least many people think there is, that in decades to come or centuries to come, we will have such good medicine that we will be able to revive these people. That because they have only gone downhill, they have only decayed a tiny bit since they died, that we will be able to warm them up again and repair the damage that happened and of course repair also the problem that killed them in the first place. I think cryonics is a realistic, reasonable concept because really it's just a natural extension of the work that I'm already doing to rejuvenate the bodies of the people whose hearts are still beating. And it's very important to remember here that death, from a legal perspective, is not a biological phenomenon. The concept of legal death is really just a convenience. It's something that we have so that we can decide whether someone's next of kin can inherit their wealth. But ultimately, what it comes down to is an arbitrary discussion of when someone is in too bad a state for it to be realistic that we can restore them to any sort of health by medical means, such as because their heart has stopped or because their brain has stopped. In actual fact, the difference between the biological state of someone who has just become legally dead as opposed to someone who is just about to become legally dead; there's no difference at all. So, if as soon as someone has become legally dead, we can arrest their decline by cooling them down very fast and freezing them, then we have a pretty good chance of preserving their natural state, including of course, the state of their brain, their personality and memories and so on in such a way that future medicine could indeed revive them and cure them.
