Where people go to wake up in the future: Inside a cryonics facility

[Music] our goal is to have reversible suspended animation just like in the movies can you just put me in stasis and wake me up in the future when everything's ok again I hope that I won't have a biological body but I'll have a body made out of nanobots so tell me is cryonics a pipe dream [Music] [Music] let's face it we're all going to die and it'll probably happen sooner than we like but what if there was a way to escape the apocalypse in fact what if we could cheat death altogether freeze ourselves in time and wake up in the future when all of our problems have disappeared the idea of putting humans into cryo sleep is everywhere in science fiction Han Solo trapped in carbonite Captain America frozen in ice but what about the real world can we stay off death through the power of cryonics I've come to Scottsdale Arizona to find out welcome to the Al Khor Life Extension foundation the self-proclaimed world leader in cryonics for just under a quarter of a million dollars Alcor is selling a second chance at life the AL core team looks after nearly 200 people who are waiting to take that second chance one small catch every person preserved here has been pronounced clinically dead but al khor that's just a technicality our best estimates are that within fifty to a hundred years we will have the medical technologies needed to restore our patients to health and function the team at Al Khor refers to its customers as patients and just like patients in a hospital alchohol hopes that in the future they'll be restored to full health when they arrive each body or patient depending on how you look at it goes through a technical process to increase their chances of survival on the other side they're treated with chemicals and drugs carefully called lowered into a giant steel vat of liquid nitrogen and stored at minus 196 degrees Celsius all in the hope that one day they will live again alcor's officers are simple enough but in the middle of this building is possibly the strangest and most unsettling thing I've ever seen a field of stainless steel tanks holding the bodies and heads of a hundred and seventy dead people frozen in stasis how many people in each one of these each one of these has approximately nine patients four whole body patients around the outside and then there's a stack in the middle which holds five neuro patients yes neuro patients people who elected just to preserve their heads not only is it less expensive it also saves on space that would be the neuro can that the patient is in and it of course has identification on it each of these vessels is known as a Dewar a custom-designed insulated tank that's filled with liquid nitrogen and computer controlled to preserve the bodies inside their massive even considering how many bodies and heads they contain but these doers have been designed to protect alcohol's patients for decades why are they so tall I can't help but think that I'm not that tall there's a lot of insulation both around underneath and on top these lids do come off the insulation on the lid comes down almost to here Wow and people often ask us what happens if the electricity goes out it doesn't matter for our patients we do have backup generators to keep our computers running and that sort of thing but these patients are in liquid nitrogen it just sits there at minus 196 Celsius we don't have to cool it the patients are not damaged in any way by a power out it's hard to imagine who would want to sign up for cryonics I figured it would just be sci-fi mad doomsdayers or ultra rich billionaires but the photos of patients that Lynelle cause walls point to a pretty normal looking clientele more than 1200 people have signed up for our core services of the 170 patients roughly three-quarters of men but otherwise it's a fairly even spread retirees mums and dads even a very young girl she had brain cancer and her parents had her cryo preserved they wanted to come over and do a Buddhist ceremony so we put her picture on the capsule for them to have that ceremony my husband is in this Dewar right here and so I come in every now and then say hi Fred how you doing okay let's get this out of the way the science behind cryonics is completely unproven it's a highly experimental experts say there's no way to perfectly preserve the human brain or reverse the biological finality of death but for alcohol being declared clinically and legally dead isn't the end legal death only really means that your heart and your lungs have stopped functioning without intervention doesn't mean your cells are dead it doesn't mean even your organs are dead up until maybe 30 or 40 years ago most people in medicine thought that death was an event on/off switch you're either alive or you're dead it's now pretty well understood that it's a process it takes hours after your heart and lungs stop functioning for you to really be totally dead alcohol says if you intervene early enough and preserve the body as quickly as possible after death there's no reason you couldn't be brought back in the future when science has improved so what exactly do you do to a dead body if you hope to bring it back to life one day well turns out it's not as simple as dropping it in a tank of liquid nitrogen when a patient arrives they are brought in to L cos facility for stabilization this room kind of feels like a cross between a hospital and morgue the initial process varies depending on how long the patient has been dead and whether they were placed on ice before arriving but here the goal is to start cooling the body as quickly as possible and for that they go into a sort of post-death life-support the patient is placed in the ice bath and then covered with additional crushed ice the patient is intubated to restore the lung function and oxygenation to the blood there's a mechanical thumper which is placed on the patient's chest so that the blood starts circulating again and that's important to circulate our protective medications but the real action happens in the operating room where the body goes for cryo protection via surgeons pump blood out of the patient's veins and replace it with cryoprotectant eventually you're just trying to cool them down and you know putting effectively like an antifreeze in Velen exactly is a medical grade antifreeze so that their cells do not crystallize when they go past the ice point so our bodies are made up of about 50 to 60 percent water when that water starts to freeze it forms ice crystals which damage the body's organs and veins but by replacing that water with cryoprotectant alcohol says it can slowly lower the body's temperature and it will vitrify kind of turning into a glass-like state rather than freezing and in that state you can keep a cryo preserved body in liquid nitrogen for decades it takes about six to 12 hours to cool the body and fill it with cryoprotectant ready for long-term storage but the good news it's much quicker if you're just doing it to a head and how long would all of this process take well it doesn't take us long with the whole body because obviously you don't have this as much of a mass so the procedure can frequently be only half as long okay so why would you only preserve your head well the most important things for Alcor is to keep the brain intact that's the core of our memories our personality everything that makes us who we are the idea is that by the time technology is advanced enough to bring a brain back to life we could upload it or even grow a new body from scratch once close to 99% of the water in the body or head has been replaced the patient is gradually called to minus 196 degrees Celsius from there they go into the long-term care room and that's where they stay [Music] [Music] walking through a room full of fog surrounded by dead bodies and severed heads it felt like I was walking through a graveyard I found it really hard to believe these people would be coming back to live and walk among us and I'm not alone in fact one neuroscientist says the evidence points to a pretty grim outcome for the people who get Cryer preserved Ken Hayworth has a PhD in neuroscience and he's a former member of al khor he founded the brain Preservation prize to challenge the cryonics community to prove that they could preserve a brain without damaging it and according to Hayworth no one has come close so I've seen examples of animal brains that were preserved under ideal laboratory conditions by a technique that's very similar to what they say they use in cryonics companies they didn't show ice crystals but they showed a tremendous amount of shrinkage there was probably a lot of damage and to those structures that encode memory but if cryonics was your one hope for waking up in the future then there might be some good news Hayworth says he has seen evidence of a way to preserve brain so that the neural connections stay intact it's a technique called aldehyde stabilized cryopreservation it almost instantly glues together all the proteins in the brain now you're as dead as a rock at that point you're ain't coming back but the advantage of that is it glues all of them in position it doesn't destroy information that means that in the future you could potentially scan upload and even simulate that brain but there's a catch you ideally need to do it while a person is living what's the downside well the downside is that it kills you but then again everything kills you I'm not sure that this is the solution for me I needed a second opinion so I decided to make one final stop the apartment of neuroscience at Columbia University in New York I needed to know is death really the end could we actually preserve and restore a human brain without any damage Ken Miller is a professor of theoretical neuroscience at Columbia University and when it comes to the promise of cryonics he's not convinced so tell me is cryonics a pipe dream in my opinion yes according to Miller we're a long way from understanding how the human brain works so working out a way to perfectly preserve it and revive it in the future that's a long way off the most basic answer to how the brain works is we don't we don't know we know how a lot of pieces work we know how neurons work at least a lot about how neurons work in my opinion it's at least thousands of years before we wouldn't know and really understand how the brain works it's just a complexity it just it levels on levels and levels and levels it's beyond really the imagination okay but even if we could find a way of perfectly preserving our brains and uploading them in the future I still had one question if I found a way to chronically go to sleep and then be woken up in the future would I still be Claire I think so but it's a funny question because of course if it was all information that you got up into a computer that was somehow running and making something feel like Claire well we could have a million of them on a million different machines and each of them would feel like Claire but immediately just like twins start having divergent experiences and becoming different people and so all these different Claire's would immediately start having different experiences and becoming different Claire's but while Ken Miller says with thousands of years away from understanding the human brain back in Arizona Alcor CEO max more has a different view I do believe that what makes you who you are can be brought back in the future so long as you've got cryopreserved under reasonably good conditions I think everything important is hard coded up here so long as we retain the structure over time we hopefully will reach a point where we can actually restore the function so right now what we can do is preserve the structure we cannot reverse the process today but I think it's not doesn't violate laws of physics as a matter of time and better technology cryonics isn't cheap at 220,000 dollars for a full-body or 80,000 for a neuro preservation it's a high price to pay for hope Moore also says there are no guarantees with cryonics Alcor doesn't exactly let you choose which day you want to be woken up still I guess your chance of waking up from here is probably better than if you go to the crematorium you know I think what we're doing is we're killing people who could potentially be preserved we're just throwing them in the ground and having been eaten by worms and bacteria or we're burning them up and to me that's kind of crazy when we could give them a chance if they want it do you see this then is kind of the ultimate insurance policy it really is actually real life insurance I mean you think about life insurance is actually death insurance pays out on death this really is life insurance is it's a back-up plan in case you don't live long enough till we figured out the biology of Aging but while critics say people like the team at Alcor are trying to play God more simply wants to push the bounds of what's possible if people say well it's unethical to try and live longer makes me scratch my head so compared to what what is the right lifespan you've got to the Bronze Age and people died in their 20s and 30 used to be go back at all oh yeah like a century ago and people died in their 40s is 70 right is 80 right there is no you know privileged answer to that so I think it's ethical to give people the opportunity to live as long as they choose to live in good health they can decide when their time is up before coming to ELQ or I thought people who believed in cryonics were kind of mad I'm still not convinced on the science and I think we're a long long way of bringing a dead person back to life but after being here I realized maybe they're just adventurous members of people who are not afraid of that they can look at as a grand adventure you know take some getting used to the future but I'm looking forward to it I hope that I won't have a biological body but I'll have a body made out of nanobots so it's sometimes referred to as a nanobots swarm or a nano cloud and it will be much more durable I can be as beautiful as I want to be I won't be old any more already thank you listening to Linda Chamberlin it's clear that she really cares about her patients and she's passionate about cryonics for her and the rest of the team at Alcor cryonics might be a long shot but it's still a chance at this stage putting myself on ice and sleeping through the apocalypse just isn't an option which means there's only one more way I can think of to escape the end of the world and it's going to take a giant leap to get there you [Music] you

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,098,142

Rating: 4.8630776 out of 5

Keywords: CNET, Technology, News, Tech, science, hacking the apocalypse, hta, episode 5, ep 5, claire reilly, cryonics, suspended animation, apocalypse, documentary, docuseries, limited series, cryogenics, alcor, alcor life extension, life extension, explainer, explained, stasis, doer, liquid nitrogen, cryonics society, death, preservation, preserve, live forever, kenneth hayworth, neuroscience, neuroscientist, max more

Id: zw6qT2GN0Ao

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

CNET/CBS Interactive reserves all rights to any CNET publication and logos.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.