What is cryonics?
Being frozen is the second-worst thing that can happen to you. The correct term for being frozen is “vitrification.” Many extropic transhumanists have made arrangements for cryonic suspension. Both light and electron microscopy of tissue frozen with current techniques (cryoprotectant infusion and gradual cooling to liquid nitrogen temperatures) indicates that the damage done by the freezing process itself primarily takes the form of relatively large intercellular fissures or cracks which visually fit back together jigsaw-puzzle fashion, rather than small intracellular disruptions. This means the chances are good that a molecularly-precise machine technology should enable us to correct the freezing damage (along with whatever killed the patient in the first place).
Cryonics is a technique intended to hopefully save lives and greatly extend lifespan. It involves cooling legally-dead people to liquid nitrogen temperature where physical decay essentially stops, in the hope that future technologically advanced scientific procedures will someday be able to revive them and restore them to youth and good health. A person held in such a state is said to be a “cryopreserved patient”, because we do not regard the cryopreserved person as being really “dead”.
Cryonics is the practice of cryopreserving a legally dead person or animal for possible revival when future science can cure all disease, can rejuvenate to a condition of perpetual youth and can reverse all damage due to the cryopreservation process. The word cryonics is a neologism invented by Karl Werner in 1965 in connection with the creation of the Cryonics Society of New York. Cryo is a Greek root meaning “cold”.
