In 1972 Max More saw a children’s science fiction television show called Time Slip that featured characters being frozen in ice. He didn’t think much about it until years later, when he started hanging out with friends who held meetings about futurism. “They were getting Cryonics magazine,” he says, “and they asked me about it to see how futuristic I was. It just made sense to me right away.”

More is now the President and Chief Executive officer of Alcor, one of the world’s largest cryonics companies. More himself has been a member since 1986, and has decided to opt for neuropreservation – just deep freezing the brain – over whole body preservation. “I figure the future is a pretty decent place to be, so I want to be there,” he says. “I want to keep living and enjoying and producing.”

Cryopreservation is a darling of the futurist community. The general premise is simple: medicine is continually getting better. Those who die today could be cured tomorrow. Cryonics is a way to bridge the gap between today’s medicine and tomorrow’s. “We see it as an extension of emergency medicine,” More says. “We’re just taking over when today’s medicine gives up on a patient. Think of it this way: 50 years ago if you were walking along the street and someone keeled over in front of you and stopped breathing you would have checked them out and said they were dead and disposed of them. Today we don’t do that, instead we do CPR and all kinds of things. People we thought were dead 50 years ago we now know were not. Cryonics is the same thing, we just have to stop them from getting worse and let a more advanced technology in the future fix that problem.”

Of course, the premise of cryonics also makes it essentially untestable. Nobody has ever tried to bring a human back to life after preservation. While researchers working on ‘suspended animation’ are finding that they can cool a living being down to appear apparently dead before reviving them, freezing a body for decades is a different matter. More points to studies in which scientists have studied the preservation of cells and tissues and even worms, but scaling that up to a full human body isn’t a trivial proposition. But whether the science is there or not, people are being frozen in liquid nitrogen with the hope of seeing some distant tomorrow.

Death plan

Alcor’s members come from all over the world. Ideally, More says, the company will have an idea of when their members are going to die. Alcor maintains a watch list of members in failing health, and when it seems as though the time has come they send what they call a “standby team” to do just that – stand by the person’s bed until they die. “It could be hours, days, we’ve gone as long as three weeks on standby,” More says.

Once the person in question is declared legally dead, the process of preserving them can begin, and it’s an intense one. First, the standby team transfers the patient from the hospital bed into an ice bed and covers them with an icy slurry. Then Alcor uses a “heart-lung resuscitator” to get the blood moving through the body again. They then administer 16 different medications meant to protect the cells from deteriorating after death. As they note on their website, “Because cryonics patients are legally deceased, Alcor can use methods that are not yet approved for conventional medical use.” Once the patient is iced up and medicated, they move them to a place for surgery.