science fiction films. A person is frozen in ice due to an accident. When he thaws out and wakes up again hundreds of years later, he faces a completely different world from before.
The storyline in this science fiction drama is very likely to be played out in real life, but the process is not as smooth as in the science fiction drama.
Freezing
In 1967, American physics professor James Bedford froze himself before his death and paid the cost of freezing for the next 50 years. He became the first frozen person in the world. . According to the plan,
will be thawed in 2017. In fact, scientists have been unable to wake it up after continuous efforts since 2017. Even Professor Bedford is facing the danger of body fragmenting into .
Cryonics in science fiction films
Freezing people
The idea of freezing and awakening people was first born in a science fiction novel. The novel was published in 1962.. Five years later,the world's first frozen person Then he was born.
The so-called frozen person is not completed by pushing the person into the refrigerator as we imagined. It is different from the ordinary frozen of .
First of all, the temperature required for freezing people is far lower than the refrigerator and freezer in our lives. It uses liquid nitrogen for rapid cooling, which is minus 130 degrees .
Liquid nitrogen in the laboratory
Secondly, when the frozen person was frozen, did not completely die. , he was frozen while retaining his thoughts.
Because there is a set of standards for human death in medicine, , the doctor will declare officially dead only after is truly brain dead, . If it is just 's heartbeat that stops, does not breathe, but the brain is still running, it will not It will not be judged as death.
Finally, the maintenance cost of freezing people is very high. It needs to be maintained at minus 80 to 100 degrees . This is destined to require a special container . This container cannot be reached by ordinary refrigerators.
Brain death is the real death
Some people may ask, why should such a low temperature be used to freeze people? This is because the human body contains 60% to 70% water . If it is frozen with an ordinary refrigerator or freezing equipment, the water in the body will freeze , and the ice crystals will pierce the human tissue.
As mentioned before, a frozen person cannot completely die, so every cell in his body must be guaranteed to be intact. The ice crystals produced by slow freezing will pierce the cells of his body. It is very likely that after thawing in the future, the human body will have already Destruction cannot be revived.
uses liquid nitrogen to rapidly cool down to minus 130 degrees, so that the water in the body has no time to form ice crystals, which is equivalent to fixing the cells and ensuring their integrity.
Can frozen people really be awakened after decades?
Cell freezing
Awakening frozen people
According to Professor Bedford’s last wish, he will be frozen until 2017, so American scientists have started working on his awakening plan starting from this year.
However, after working hard for for 2 full years, Professor Bedford did not wake up. On the contrary, scientists discovered that his body would be destroyed if he continued like this. The final plan of
was forced to terminate. Professor Bedford's freezing plan was extended indefinitely by and , waiting for future technology to mature and be awakened again.
The awakened frozen man in the science fiction film
There are many difficulties in awakening the frozen man. Scientists do not know how fast they should be thawed.
Furthermore, awakens the frozen brain , which has never been done before.
Therefore, scientists have no way to deal with Professor Bedford's body, and any risky move will cause irreparable losses.
freezing technology is considered to be the future of . It can allow a person to span hundreds of years.
Freezing is a form of immortality
However, this is only theoretical, and it is difficult and dangerous to operate in practice.
The freezing process must be done against time . The body must be cooled down quickly before the doctor declares the person is brain dead. Otherwise, it is just a corpse, and cooling it has no meaning.
Every frozen person must use a special container to store , which will inevitably require a lot of energy to maintain the extremely low temperature inside. If there is an energy crisis in the future, then these frozen people will face the problem that cannot continue to freeze . as a result of.
Once any accident occurs during the freezing process, their bodies will be damaged to varying degrees, and there will be no hope of recovery in the future.
"Crystal Coffin" for Freezing
Even if you can barely wake up, you will wake up with a mutilated body. What is the meaning of freezing?
People originally set up the freezing plan in order to freeze some diseases that were incurable at the time and save them for cure in the future era of advanced technology.
With the deepening of capital, more and more people are freezing themselves not to cure diseases, but to preserve themselves permanently.
Especially some rich people, they hope to wake up again in a few hundred years so that they can always have all their wealth .
Therefore, some people believe that freezing technology has deviated from its original intention and can no longer be implemented.
Freezing is underway.
The debate over freezing people.
Everyone has different opinions on whether people should be frozen.
Some people think this is an epoch-making technology , and many people are even willing to donate their bodies for freezing experiments.
There are 3 companies in the world that have taken the lead in developing freezing services. The price of each frozen body is more than tens of thousands of dollars , plus the subsequent management fees and maintenance fees , the final cost is .2 million. USD goes up .
But some people say that frozen people are just a empty promise . The world's first frozen person, Bedford, was not awakened. This shows that the freezing technology is currently one-way , can only be frozen but not awakened .
The equipment required for human cryonics is worth a lot of money
And no one knows when this technology will make a breakthrough. If you rashly freeze your not completely dead body now, and you can't wake up later, that will be the same as ordinary people. What's the difference between the remains?
Moreover, some people think that even if they wake up, it will be decades or even hundreds of years after and . How can people who wake up integrate into the new era?
Or most of the people who were frozen are suffering from diseases. If the disease still cannot be cured after he wakes up, , then should he be frozen again?
Obviously, a person's body cannot withstand repeated freezing.
The Cold of Liquid Nitrogen
More importantly, as more and more people are frozen, we have to take out more places to hold these people's bodies.
This consumes more and more energy for , and the later maintenance of is becoming more and more difficult .
For example, the three commercial freezing companies mentioned above, if they have poor management, poor capital turnover, or equipment failure, these frozen people will face the consequences of the complete death of and .
Generally speaking, although freezing technology has been recognized by everyone, not everyone thinks that now is the best time to freeze people.
Today's technology can only be frozen but not thawed. It is more like a journey with no return . It is full of unknowns and scary, but there are also people who are willing to conduct all-or-nothing experiments for this fruitless result.
Extraction of liquid nitrogen
Immortality technology
As mentioned earlier, freezing technology is considered to be an immortality technology in the future. It can theoretically allow a person to live for hundreds of years or even longer.
Essentially, freezing technology is a kind of pause , which allows the body's cells to stop dividing , so that the telomeres at the ends of the chromosomes will not become shorter due to division, and then the person's age will be fixed at a certain age. In an instant .
When he is awakened again, his body's age is the same as when he was frozen, so to some extent this is a kind of beauty-preserving technique .
Freezing can preserve appearance
But someone mentioned that instead of spending a lot of energy to freeze the body, it is better to explore the essence of 's limited lifespan- telomere shortening .
Every time a human chromosome divides, the telomeres at the end will shorten. When the telomeres no longer shorten, it means that the human life span has come to an end.
According to the observations of scientists, human telomeres determine that our chromosomes can only divide 50 to 60 times in a lifetime, which is about when converted to human age.
Of course not everyone can live to this age, because we will encounter many changes in the process, thus shortening our lifespan.
Telomeres on chromosomes
The ultimate human ultimate life span is generally concentrated in 70 to 80 years old .
Scientists have discovered that telomeres are a very magical substance. When we are still embryos, every time a cell divides, it does not affect the length of telomeres.
On the contrary, when we leave the mother body and become an individual, the telomeres begin their own shortening journey.
This is because telomerase is synthesized during the embryo, which repairs shortened telomeres.
In other words, there is no age during the human embryonic period. The telomeres of every dividing cell are the same length. The real age is calculated from the shortening of telomeres after human birth.
Cell division
For humans, which one is better, frozen immortality or telomere controlled immortality?
