Who wants to be immortal ?, Part I

And today we are going to see how you could be immortal. What? Why would you want to be immortal?

I do not know that anymore, it will be up to you to decide if living forever is something good or bad. In any case it is important to clarify that we are not going to talk about total physical immortality, that is, we are not going to talk about how to survive if you throw yourself into a volcano or if you go to space without any suit. Let's talk about immortality referring to physical deterioration.

The human being began to be "human being" when he realized that he was not immortal. We are the only animal aware that sooner or later his death will come.

The animals are not aware of it, they simply feel afraid of the possible threats, but do not think that one day they will die. Thought that, when it appeared in human beings, made us the way we are, the fear of death made us worry about a worse future. He made us reserve food for bad times, he made us value our life much more, he made us develop medicine, he made us invent tools that would allow us to extend our lives, and a long etcetera. Without that knowledge that one day we would die, what would have driven us to use our intelligence? What would have motivated us to make the most of our lives? And today we want to go a step further:

LIVE FOR EVER

And there are many ways to do it, let's start with the simplest to reach the special relativity of Einstein.

Let's start with cryonics or freezing, which consists of the preservation at low temperature of people that current medicine can no longer keep alive. Its purpose is to preserve the bodies of patients to revive and cure them in a future where their diseases can be treated. You can also preserve the brain only, because really everything we are exists within this organ.

And well, it can also be said that it is much cheaper than freezing the whole body. Today some 300 people are waiting to be thawed. The problem with this technique is that it can only be applied when a person is clinically dead, we can not do anything until he ceases to have signs of life.

So really when those people are frozen they are already dead. You have to wait for them to stop having vital signs so at that moment freeze it quickly in containers like this. Liquid nitrogen and temperatures of -192 ° C are used. In addition, substances that prevent the formation of ice are added, avoiding any type of damage due to ice crystals.

Many of the people who are frozen were famous before they died, and well now the 300 that are frozen are all famous by the mere fact of being frozen. However, perhaps the best known case is that of Ted Williams, Baseball player of the American League.

There is a myth that says Walt Disney was frozen, which is not true, because it was cremated and buried in Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks & Mortuaries, California.

This technique presents many problems, most of them however are small and are merely physical, referring to how to perfectly preserve the body without breaking the tissues, despite having used that substance that prevents the formation of crystals, but there is a very big problem that is above all, and is that in a way you do not reach immortality. We only remain dead a few years until they wake us up to give us a few more years of life. Because while you are frozen you do not live, in fact we could lengthen the freezing until the end of the universe, but, would it be eternally frozen to be immortal? Stop to think about it, we also have no idea if the brain can stay alive once it has been stopped, it has been down for so long.

In fact, we have found many frozen animals throughout history, some Mammoths have even been frozen in optimal conditions, but until now we have never been able to revive them. And this implies that it might be impossible to revive the person, although there are alternatives. We could, for example, make a brain scan while it was frozen by copying its brain as it is in a computer ... And this brings us to the second type of immortality in the next post ...