To sum up, cryonics can be considered a selfish investment with possibly a very low potential to succeed. However, selfish investments are very common, yet non-cryonicists are not stigmatized as much as cryonicists are for choosing their own life extension over that of other people. It is true that, unlike other selfish choices, we are currently unable to assess whether cryonics will be successful. This is to be expected; uncertainty is, in many ways, the hallmark of progress. Most of the medical treatments and technological devices we now use on a daily basis were inconceivable a few centuries ago. Being able to conceive of something often catalyses a series of events that eventually moves the concept from the world of ideas to hard reality. We do not yet know if cryonics and immortality will eventually become reality, but we know for sure that not trying at all will preclude it from happening altogether. Since the potential gain is high, it seems that cryonics and life extension should not be brushed aside without having first been carefully considered.
Indifference of the Future
The success of cryonics depends to a great extent on the motivation of future people to revive cryopreserved patients and to develop the necessary technological tools to do so. In our world, intergenerational obligations tend to become weaker over time. For instance, one might feel a strong obligation to respect one’s parents’ or grandparents’ wish not to have the family house sold even after they passed away, but this kind of obligation usually weakens after a few generations. The possibility that cryonics will only work in the distant future casts serious doubt on the likelihood that future people will have any interest in reviving people to whom they have no obligation or emotional attachment.6 This objection can be subdivided into a number of different reasons why future generations may not be willing to revive cryopreserved individuals, which we now consider.
No Interest in Spending Resources on Reviving the Cryopreserved
One reason why future people might not want to revive the cryopreserved could be a lack of resources. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that resource scarcity remains a problem well into the future. People continue to suffer from lack of food, clean water, and space in which to live. Most do not welcome the idea of sharing their limited resources with people who had their share of goods and services when they were alive. In this future world, we could justifiably expect that individuals would prioritize saving the lives of their contemporaries over reanimating cryonicists from the (possibly quite distant) past. If such a scenario were to last forever, the cryopreserved would not have a shot at a new life. However, we have reason to believe that resource scarcity of this sort would not necessarily last forever; as history shows, times of poverty and scarcity have tended to alternate with times of plenty in Malthusian cycles of boom and bust. Hence, there is a chance that our future world of resource scarcity would eventually transition into one of plenty, in which we discover new ways to extract resources, for instance, through drastic improvements in terrestrial recycling, solar power generation, or asteroid mining.
In the era of abundance that would follow such developments, future citizens would likely be more inclined to revive the cryopreserved. It is only in a scenario of increasing poverty without a subsequent upswing that revival would become quite unlikely—but in that case, as we will see later in this chapter, it would be in the best interest of the cryopreserved not to be revived into a world where the quality of life is very low.
Even though it is not possible to predict the future by looking at the past, we should at least find some encouragement in an unprecedented trend towards greater prosperity we have witnessed during the past three centuries. We cannot tell with absolute certainty that future people will be wealthier than us, but the fact that we are definitely wealthier than our ancestors suggests that an optimistic attitude towards the future of cryonics is at least not entirely unfounded rational. Moreover, since future prosperity is crucial to the success of cryonics revival, a cryonicist would actually have a strong incentive to help improve the future. Many of our civilization’s most urgent problems, from climate change to antibiotic resistance, stem from the fact that we find it notoriously difficult to truly care about future generations, yet all too easy to care about ourselves. The prospect of actually having a personal stake in the far future could, therefore, help bridge this empathy gap between current and future generations.7
No Interest in Developing Cryonics Technology
It is also possible that future people will discover alternate ways of indefinitely extending human lifespan, leaving them with little or no interest in improving cryonics technology. Life extension through cell rejuvenation, for instance, holds promise for extending life well beyond the current lifespan, possibly to an indefinite length (as we will see in the next chapter). Cryonicists themselves are indeed relying on this kind of technology someday being developed, but since it is not yet available, they need cryonics in order to “live long enough to live forever”.
It is generally assumed that cryonics and life-extension technologies will develop more or less at the same pace. In such a scenario, when rejuvenation and life-extension therapies have become available, cryonics technology will also have developed sufficiently to allow for the revival of the cryopreserved and for the use of rejuvenating and life-extension technologies. However, it is possible that rejuvenation and life-extension technologies will develop much faster than cryonics revival capabilities so that interest in cryonics revival will fall and research will stagnate. In such a scenario, future generations will not have good reasons to invest resources in cryonics because it would be useful only to those few hundreds (or maybe few thousands) of people who have been cryopreserved in the past. However, insofar as life-extension technologies will keep dealing with biological bodies, it is unlikely that interest in cryonics would be lost. Biological bodies like ours will most likely remain vulnerable to accidents and diseases, so cryonics would probably be used in the future to give doctors and scientists enough time to find adequate therapies. Moreover, most revival technologies, such as medical nanotechnology and brain emulation, will likely be developed (or at least pursued) by future generations regardless of their interest in cryonics, since there are other incentives to developing them. So there is a chance that the technology required to revive and heal cryonicists will be developed for reasons that have little to do with cryonics, before potentially being applied to cryonics revival.
No Interest in “Homo sapiens”
In another, perhaps more speculative future scenario, Homo sapiens as we know them could disappear altogether and be replaced by more advanced “posthumans”. Such individuals might have little interest in bringing back to life the cryopreserved members of a different, less evolved species. They might view humans much in the same way as we view monkeys, lizards, or even worms. Our species may also have major deficits in other ways, such as being unable to breathe the earth’s atmosphere as it has become in the distant future. The cryorevived may thus have to live in special, expensive facilities, or perish. Meanwhile, human intelligence level could be too low to function independently in the posthuman world, so that the cryorevived would have to receive constant assistance in order to survive. In any case, if future posthumans come to think of humans as worm-like, they might have little interest in reviving them—except, possibly, for a few representative specimens, who would live more or less as laboratory or zoo animals. The rest might simply be killed or otherwise discarded when it is determined that they are of no further interest.
But even in a less dark scenario where future individuals are not hostile towards the cryopreserved, we have to acknowledge that the capacity to socialize with future posthumans would depend, to a large extent, on the differences between the cryorevived and the future people.8 If we were to be seen in the same way we ourselves view dogs, it might actually be possible for some socializing to occur. But the disparity with our posthuman stewards could be much greater still, comparable to that between ourselves and, say, mosquitoes—which would make it q
uite difficult to bond and develop meaningful relationships with our superiors. It is also possible that they would try to enhance us and make it easier to fit within their societies, but it is hard to predict whether they would have any interest in doing so and whether they could actually succeed. And even if the posthumans were extremely benevolent towards the cryorevived, they might be unable to understand their need for friendship and love, or what a meaningful life is to them—just as we are too different from mosquitoes to make anything but highly speculative assumptions about how to optimize their well-being (assuming we were interested in doing so). One might argue that this comparison is not accurate because future persons would probably have technology allowing them to make accurate assumptions about our well-being, for instance, through realistic simulations of human brains. If so, it seems like the best hope for cryonicists to lean on in this context.
In another possible dystopian scenario, future persons could think of cryopreserved people as slaves and bring them back only to use them for scientific experiments or to perform jobs that the posthumans would find too tiring or humiliating. Humanity has a long history of underestimating the moral value of species or races that are considered “other” than the dominant one. We cannot be sure that posthumans would not make the same mistake.
Cryonicists seem to think that, regardless of these possible dystopian scenarios, the community growing around cryonics would provide a certain safety. On their website, Alcor explains that they constitute a community that includes both living and cryopreserved members. The healthy and living cryonicists have close ties with the cryopreserved ones and work to make the revival possible. Once some people are revived, there will be more members seeking ways to revive the ones who are still cryopreserved, and to whom they feel connected, perhaps in virtue of relationships they had during their life before cryopreservation. The success of cryonics is hence largely dependent on the strong sense of community of the cryonics group: “The plan is not for ‘them’ to revive us. The plan is that we, the Alcor community, will revive ourselves” (Alcor, n.d.).
Desirability of Being Revived in the Future
In an optimistic future scenario where future humans or posthumans revive the cryopreserved, there could still be circumstances that would make the life of the cryorevived very painful and, in some cases, not worth living at all.
For instance, as mentioned above, it could be that revived cryonicists would only be able to survive if housed in special facilities resembling hospitals. Perhaps to forestall some intractable psychological trauma, they would have to be drugged to a permanently numbed state that made them incapable of appreciating that they actually “travelled through time” and were alive again. Or maybe their bodies, affected by the time spent in liquid nitrogen in ways we cannot foresee, would suffer from unbearable pain that could not be remedied in any way.
More generally, it is possible that the future world would be an unpleasant and dangerous place in which to live. Wars, climate change, or political and social events might turn the planet into something no human would care much to inhabit, notwithstanding humans’ capacity for adapting to difficult circumstances. Under such circumstances, the cryorevived might choose to be euthanized, and cryonics would then have been a failure and a waste of resources despite being technically successful.
It is not clear, of course, whether and how any of the above scenarios would happen, but we cannot rule them out. Depending on how unpleasant life in the future world would be or would be perceived to be, the cryonicist would need to decide whether they want to keep living or just end their life once and for all. In such a gloomy scenario, despite cryonics having succeeded in transporting cryonicists to a future world, we would have to agree that it would still have been a failure, as it would not have enabled cryonicists to add any valuable time to their life. And even though some cryonicists might consider having at least a peek into the future as a better outcome than not seeing the future at all, they would still probably agree that things did not exactly go according to plan.
Trouble Adapting Even to an Objectively Better World
It is also possible that the world of the future will be far better than the one in which we currently live. Indeed, certain historical trends seem to indicate that we are headed in this direction (Pinker, 2011). At the very least, it seems that our lives are, on average, much more comfortable and safe than the lives of our ancestors. If the quality of life is going to increase steadily over time, the future might be wondrous indeed.
We might succeed in developing rejuvenating therapies that extend our lives for millennia and more. We might develop enhancement technologies that make us smarter, faster, and better at doing just about anything. Robots might replace humans at most jobs. Future people could then go on a permanent holiday if they wished, or have the time and resources to take up any job they fancy, and at their own pace. That waking up in such a world would be a very positive experience seems like a no-brainer. Indeed, curiosity about the future, together with optimism about the future, is a common reason why people make arrangements for cryonics.
But even in an idyllic scenario, life might still be difficult for the cryorevived. The environmental, cultural, and political changes that occurred over centuries or millennia might cause them to feel extremely out of place, confused, and uncomfortable. Old people today already struggle to fit in a world where the digital revolution has radically changed the way people communicate, work, and spend their leisure time; yet this is nothing compared to the stupendous changes a revived cryonicist might encounter. A sense of alienation could pervade their existence, and navigating such a different cultural and social landscape could be daunting, if not downright traumatizing. Cryorevived people could, of course, find comfort in each other’s company, but if the number of cryorevived were tiny, alienation might still override.
Cryonics optimists usually meet this objection by comparing their planned future experience with a journey in today’s world or in times past. Waking up after being cryopreserved, they say, could be similar to moving to a new country that is far from the sights, sounds, and people with whom one is familiar. Indeed, it might not be that different from moving from Europe to Australia more than a century ago, where lack of internet communication and cheap airline flights made the journey much more arduous and stressful than it would be now. The first Europeans who moved to Australia had to adapt to a different climate and environment and create new social and family connections, and the cryorevived would similarly need to adjust to—and, to some extent, shape—a new world for themselves. But the eighteenth-century colonists eventually found a way to deal with their new life, and it is possible that the cryorevived would also end up building new relationships and ultimately enjoy their new existence.
Besides, one possible solution to the adaptation problem would be signing up for cryonics with at least another significant person, be it a partner, a family member, or a good friend. Some features of being alive again in a world that is radically different might still be distressing, but sharing the experience with a loved one would make the whole less of a burden and more of a gift.
But even without a significant other to share the experience, the future could still be well worth it. The lonely cryonicist could accomplish much in a few centuries to make life worthwhile and eliminate negatives. One possibility might just be to gradually erase older, unpleasant memories, or even good memories which still caused distress for other reasons. Some memories of life before cryosuspension—say, of loved ones who did not get cryopreserved and are now gone—might cause so much distress that it would be preferable to forget them. People in their 80s and 90s today often have few memories of their lives as teenagers, so the sort of partial forgetting we are talking about does have its precedents in our world. Overall, the family and friends whom a cryonicist would miss upon revival would probably seem less central to their lives as they became several centuries old, and the pain caused by the absence of the departed would be replaced by
the joy of sharing a new life with others.
It could also be argued that the destruction of memories is bad and should be avoided if possible, as these are, in effect, historical records which ought to be preserved like other records of the vanished past. The cryonicist who is unhappy because of remembering too much (including memories of departed loved ones who were not cryopreserved) could elect to have certain memories blocked or made inaccessible, but not erased.9 One variant of this would be to copy these memories and store them in a safe place before they are erased from the owner’s brain. That way, the memories might be restored, when the cryonicist has lived many long and happy centuries and has matured to the point that remembrance will no longer cause distress. The maturation process itself could involve an increase in intelligence, understanding, and wisdom. A world of posthumans who neither age nor die could offer many opportunities for meaningful and rewarding activities, from solving mysteries of the cosmos to sampling the vast smorgasbord of conscious experience.
The Ethics of Cryonics Page 6