A friend invited a new guy to Easter brunch. He’s an American doctor, who focuses on research, in particular on cryopreservation, i.e. getting frozen at the moment of death so that if medical science figures out the cure for the disease that killed you, they can bring you back.

I thought this was the stuff of sci-fi, but no, it’s being done now in the U.S. and in other countries like China. Check this BBC story out if you doubt me.

It’s not as expensive as I’d imagined — $200,000 in the US and $400,000 in China because the companies here figure the rich would pay that. To get just your brain frozen, it’s  $80,000. You can get tissue or animals frozen too.

While they haven’t yet developed the technology to thaw someone out, they have succeeded in unfreezing frogs and other simple animals.

There are already a few hundred people who’ve been frozen including these folks.  One company that does this, Alcor has over 1200 people signed up for future freezing. You can put cryopreservation into your insurance policy.

I just can’t get over this. I wouldn’t want to be frozen, though as a child watching sci-fi shows I thought it would be cool (no pun intended). But now . . . no thanks.

Who knows what sort of world you’d wake up in? Even if you could convince a good number of family and friends to sign up, there’s no guarantee you’d all wake up at the same time and even if you did, you could find yourself in a very odd or hostile world. Also, before they freeze you, you must be declared legally dead. How is someone declared legally undead?

Yet some people are signing up. Would you?