HOW TO PAY FOR A SECOND LIFE
Hoffman, white-haired, wide-grinned, and sporting a terrifically loud bright lime blazer, hosted the First Annual Cryonics Symposium in Florida. He organized the event to bring together the great and the good of the industry, and to make money selling life insurance to the gathered immortalists.
On that stiflingly hot weekend in Florida, Hoffman pushed cryonics hard. He greeted almost every attendee like a friend and pointed those he was meeting for the first time to his large brass nameplate. His mannerisms reminded me of a suburban car salesman, while the toothy smile screamed daytime gameshow host. In many ways, Hoffman is a very typical cryonicist. He rejected religion in favor of humanism, a past event forced him to confront his own mortality, and he is fiercely loyal to the community. Hoffman used to describe himself as a libertarian, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, the anti-mask and anti-vaccination views of those with libertarian leanings shocked him, and he now says he’s a “recovering libertarian.”[1]
His symposium was packed with speakers from the world of cryonics, including some familiar names from its history. Mike Perry gave a talk on the origins of the art, and Linda Chamberlain, one of the founders of Alcor, talked about the company. Some of the topics were clearly widely speculative, and others were straight advertisements for cryopreservation companies. In between these talks, Hoffman gave plugs for his business and his book, and, when it came to his own twenty-minute slot, explained in detail how anyone can afford cryonics.
Ettinger and Cooper, the two forefathers of the industry, disagreed on how cryonics should be made available to the masses. Cooper believed it fell to the United Nations to ensure preservation after death was a human right for everyone on the planet,[2] while Ettinger believed corporations and capitalism held the key. Ettinger correctly predicted in his book that life insurance would make cryopreservation affordable for everyone,[3] something Hoffman has now made reality.
Over the course of the weekend, Hoffman was clearly very busy. When he wasn’t presenting on stage he buzzed around making sure the event ran smoothly, while attempting to meet as many people as possible. It was clear this was a man right at the center of the cryonics industry. He held the financial keys to immortality and was happy to hand them over in exchange for a commission. When I grabbed rushed moments with Hoffman, he was in full salesman mode and spoke in soundbites rather than offering the in-depth answers I had hoped for. But even in these brief chats I saw why he’s considered the top cryonics life insurance seller in the world.
Life insurance salespeople shock and spook potential clients every day. They remind them of the fragility of life, try to force them to confront that reality, and then insist on preparing for the inevitable. In that sense the job is quite morose. But Hoffman offers his clients something else aside from fear and alarm: hope. He still reminds clients that one day their hearts will stop beating and they will be declared dead, but the plan he’s selling isn’t quite so bleak. A policy from Hoffman works in much the same way as a regular life insurance policy, but the cash payout when you die goes to a cryopreservation company instead of family, friends, or your favorite charity. It pays a company like Alcor for the preservation itself and the immortal upkeep. Although the money goes to a company, the policyholders themselves will theoretically enjoy the rewards, unlike most life insurance deals.[4] With modest monthly payments (at least initially), immortalists can book their ticket to the future. Hoffman enjoys close to a monopoly in this weird niche of the insurance market.
Hoffman signed up to cryonics himself many years ago and proudly displays his Alcor wristband to anyone who asks. He also practices various life extension techniques, although not to the same alarming extremes some immortalists implement. When the Cryonics Symposium reached an end and the Church of Perpetual Life was restored to its regular Christian appearance, I reached out to Hoffman to talk over a video call, away from the chaotic buzz of hosting an industry event. To my surprise, he was a completely different person to the one schmoozing the crowd of immortalists. He was thoughtful, introspective, and thoroughly likeable.
Hoffman was raised in a Christian home in Indiana. His grandfather was president of the local church-focused Anderson College, and he described his family as “pretty open-minded Christians.” He developed doubts over Christianity early on yet still attended Anderson himself before later moving to Florida to teach fifth grade at a private Christian school. Inwardly, he didn’t see himself as a Christian in a theological sense but did see the benefit of the community aspect of people gathering regularly with the goal of spiritual enrichment.
“While I was never really a Christian cultist, I did get plugged into that whole church thing when I was teaching at the Christian Academy and singing in the choir,” Hoffman recalled on our Zoom call. “But I would find myself singing in the choir and then I’d listen to this sermon, and I kept wanting to literally jump up in the middle of the service and yell, ‘Come on folks, can we not see this as really, truly, bullshit?’ Even though I never actually jumped up and said that, I realized my participating in that infrastructure was inherently kind of hypocritical.”
Hoffman didn’t leave religion altogether, however. He moved to the more open-minded Unity Church, where he met his wife Dawn, to whom he is still happily married. But his drift away from religion was already well underway. He took up a career in insurance, and in 1994, when he was thirty-seven years old, he read an article in Omni magazine about cryonics, a concept he believed to be science fiction. When he learned there had been several organizations quietly cryopreserving people for decades, he quickly became seriously interested. The magazine suggested the expensive procedures could be made affordable through life insurance, and Hoffman realized he could simply sell himself an extra policy and potentially live forever.
Wary of jumping in, he took five or six months to seek out more information on the process, then made the commitment. After becoming a fully fledged member of the cryonics community, companies like Alcor directed potential customers to him because they knew he was both an independent insurance broker and ideologically on board with cryonics. Cryonics members became 90 percent of his business over time, and he estimates around 67 percent of people who have signed up to be preserved by cryonics have gone through him.
Hoffman’s customers first fill out a form on his website which asks for the personal details needed to begin the process. Hoffman then arranges a call, during which he presents three life insurance quotes from cryonics-friendly carriers. His organization fills out the application to the life insurance carrier for the customer. After it’s signed, the customer gets a call from a local nurse within a week or two who carries out a physical examination. Once their health status has been established, the insurance carrier sends a solid offer. Hoffman reminds interested parties that it pays to take out the policy earlier, as they can be rejected on health grounds just as easily as financial.[5]
His battle to the top of the cryonics insurance provider league table has been far from easy. Initially the insurance carriers reacted with scorn, and some still refuse his business today. “I really expected the life insurance companies would embrace this market that I was bringing to the table because these are self-selected, highly educated people who basically are taking every possible step they could to not die,” said Hoffman. “Instead, I found this absolute brick wall of lack of understanding and bias and prejudice that was in many cases, I believe, a religious bias or prejudice. Turns out you become an insurance executive not by huge amounts of outside the box thinking.”
Hoffman regularly encountered two major objections from insurance companies. Firstly, they worried about the “insurable interest question,” where they want to establish if the beneficiary of the insurance claim has a vested interest in a person staying alive. In the case of cryonics, it could be argued the company doing the cryopreserving would prefer them to die so they could cash their policy and begin storing them. Hoffman argues the insurable interest is the policy-holder’s clear desire to live as long as possible, given their immortalist leanings. It’s unclear how the insurance industry would react if the cryonics providers worked out how to revive someone. Would they still accept the same policies, or would they no longer consider cryonics practitioners technically dead? It’s not hard to imagine an insurance company taking the moral low-road to avoid paying out.
The second objection was reputational risk. Insurance providers saw cryonics as a lawsuit waiting to happen and wanted to avoid getting dragged into the negative stories which peppered the industry’s early years. Hoffman was unperturbed and slowly built a rapport with a selection of life insurance carriers who were happy to take his lucrative—if unorthodox—business. Kansas City Life became his preferred carrier. He described the company as “tremendously committed and supportive of what I do,” and the company even featured him in its corporate magazine in an interview explaining the cryonics niche he’d made his own. “They can’t endorse cryonics, but at least they understand this is something that is not going to cause them reputation risk problems, and that I actually bring a really good demographic to the table,” Hoffman said.
He’s one of the company’s most successful salespeople. During our call, he proudly displayed an award he received for the last quarter of 2020, when he topped the leaderboard for sales in the whole United States, beating competition from 2,800 other brokers. But Kansas City Life is only licensed in certain states, so Hoffman must find a different insurance carrier for people in places like New York. This brings back all the problems he faced when he first started out, and a host of questions about insurable interest and reputational risk.
Again, Hoffman told me a lot of these negative attitudes toward cryonics can be traced back to religion. “There seems to be a disproportionate amount of resistance to the idea of cryonics. And I think it is because we are stepping on some toes,” Hoffman said. He sees a “religious undercurrent” in society that undermines the concept, as it goes against some of the building blocks on which a lot of faith is built. “Cryonics is the archetypal, leading bleeding edge of modernity, where we’re basically saying the biggie, the big condition, the human condition, is the fact that we age and die, and we want to fix that. And it may be possible for science to fix that. You don’t fix that through belief in superstitions and religions and everything your mama and your pastor told you, they lied to you because they didn’t know any better.”
Hoffman describes himself as a humanist and says he is anti-religion. Instead of having faith in a deity, he puts all his hopes into cryonics and science to eliminate death.
In 2016, that faith was put to the ultimate test. He woke up one morning and felt a lump on his thigh. Doctors told him he had stage two lymphoma, and that the cancer had spread throughout his body through the lymph system. The cancer hit his spleen the worst. When he saw his scan, there were two glowing red balls visible that even he as a layperson could tell were bad news. “All of a sudden your life changes in a day,” Hoffman recalled. “It was really weird, really pretty surreal. And I of course handled the news with great spiritual discipline, saying ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’ ”
Doctors gave him six rounds of strong chemotherapy, and five years later Hoffman was declared cured.
“Going through the Valley of Death, where you almost die, should make you wiser and smarter and more tolerant of things and all that stuff. And it turns out it doesn’t, which is kind of a rip-off,” he said. “But the fact that I was signed up for cryonics really did give me a much greater sense of peace that I had done everything I could do as a fallback. It also made me super glad that I was smart enough to jump on a bunch of life insurance early, even before I could afford it.” (Hoffman had sold himself additional life insurance to fund cryonics in 1994.) He happily acknowledged his answer sounded like a story any good insurance salesman would know how to tell, but he was completely earnest when describing the sense of relief he felt knowing his body would be preserved and his wife and dogs taken care of. If one of the central purposes of religion is to make you feel better about dying, then cryonics (and the insurance industry) filled any gaps created when Hoffman walked away from Christianity decades before.
Since the inception of cryonics, the ignorance of the rest of the world has exasperated the cryonics community. Hoffman is no different. He admits the chances of reanimation are slim, but he’s still baffled by the majority’s decision not to pursue the possibility. “I’m frustrated and angry that I’ve not been able to promote this mindset more effectively because it is such a reasonable, smart, rational thing to do, and should be adopted by literally tens of millions of people,” said Hoffman. “If there’s not a lot of downside and there’s a whole bunch of potential upside, it’s just a no-brainer for people to do something. But most of them don’t, and I’ve learned to live with that.”
Hoffman will fight for the cause of cryonics until the day he’s put in a cylinder himself and, should he be proven correct, afterward as well. But while he’s enjoyed great success personally, the secret to selling cryonics to the majority of world’s population remains elusive. In response, the industry has switched up its marketing techniques to try and attract more believers. Cryonics was always sold as the key to immortality, but more recently, the major players have shied away from the word entirely.
When I mentioned the title of this book to Michael Geisen, a board member of Alcor, he bristled at the word immortality. On a video call, Geisen spoke with the typical cryonicist self-assurance, as if he’d uncovered a secret others had missed. He told me he doesn’t believe he’ll ever use his Alcor membership, and that by living his life a certain way he can survive for hundreds of years. “I think of Alcor as an insurance policy that I hope I’ll never have to use,” he said.
Geisen first contemplated the idea of extended life when he read Doris Lessing’s cycle of science fiction novels Canopus in Argos. Years later he read The First Immortal, a novel by James L. Halperin, considered educational material by both Alcor and the Cryonics Institute. “Halfway through the book, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the missing piece, because in my plan to live a long life, to eliminate aging, if I got hit by a bus or cancer or something like that, game over. But with cryopreservation as my backup, which I’ve had for over twenty years now, I don’t have to worry about it.”
Despite his involvement in cryonics and life extension, Geisen does not consider himself an immortalist. “In my mind I can imagine going on for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, but to imagine going for hundreds of thousands of years? That’s even beyond my ability to imagine,” he told me. Immortality, he says, is millions and billions of years, and that is “not what cryonics is about.” I couldn’t quite understand Geisen’s viewpoint. If he truly believes he can live for thousands of years, way beyond his natural lifespan, why are millions or billions of years considered so unattainable? It was an argument I never truly grasped.
Geisen’s opinion on immortality puts him at odds with the Church of Perpetual Life, and he was not afraid to speak his mind on its followers. He said some people have a genetic predisposition toward the spiritual. “I think it’s just kind of a bridge for some people who don’t want to, or can’t, let go of religion in their lives. The Church of Perpetual Life fulfills that need,” he said.
Geisen was the first person I’d met from within cryonics to outwardly criticize immortalism and the Church of Perpetual Life, so I was eager to explore Alcor’s rebranding away from eternal life further. Over the years Alcor has entrusted the leadership of its organization to various different characters in addition to Mike Darwin. At the time of the Cryonics Symposium, the British philosopher and futurist Max More led Alcor. When I spoke to More at the event, he worded his answers carefully, as if he was wary of throwing cryonics into a pile of crackpot ideas. He is a huge name in the transhumanist movement and is even said to have originally coined the term transhumanism in his writings. His academic bent brought an intellectual rigor to the company, but a quick search revealed he also spent a good amount of time debating nonbelievers and Alcor naysayers on the internet.
By the time the pandemic shut the world down, More had been set aside for a new leader with a vastly different background. Former Chief Operating Officer Patrick Harris, who spent years in the pharmaceutical industry, took the reins. Harris endured an unconventional and difficult upbringing. He was born on an army base in the state of Washington, then lived in Germany for around five years where, he said, he had a good early life, with exposure to culture, science, and athletics. When he was seven or eight years old, he wrote a letter to NASA trying to convince them he should become the first child in space. The space agency replied with a polite no, but at that young age he was already looking far into the future. That was, until he was eleven, when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. A happy childhood filled with dreams of becoming an astronaut was transformed into a desperate search for ways to cure his mother. He became interested in health sciences and researched telomeres as a teenager. Before he’d finished high school, he attended a genetics conference, looking for hope for his sick mother. By the mid-1990s, Harris, still in high school, was researching bleeding edge technologies and came across the concept of cryonics in his local newspaper. He spoke to his mother and she was receptive to the idea, but they couldn’t afford the cost. After seven and a half years of searching for new therapies, drugs, and technologies, Harris’ mother passed away at age forty-one. Devastated, Harris was thrown off course by the loss. About a year later he found himself homeless and a high school dropout. He described the experience as “pretty traumatic.”[6]
At the time Harris worked at a small local pharmacy, and his boss soon found out he was sleeping rough. Taking pity on his employee, the manager helped set him up in an apartment of his own. Harris immediately saw the pharmaceuticals business as “respectable and stable” and pledged to pursue a career in the industry. He obtained his GED and worked his way up the corporate ladder, studying for an MBA along the way. In 2018, Harris saw a job advertised at Alcor, where he’d become a member that same year. “I had planned to be a member the day that my mother died, which was January 1997. I always knew I was going to be a member. People are familiar with the word procrastinate, and it’s funny how industries take a word and make it their own, so in cryonics when you delay signing up for your membership we call it ‘cryocrastinate.’ I was one of those ‘cryocrastinators,’ ” Harris said.
He initially joined as chief operating officer, taking a hefty pay cut from his Big Pharma salary. “I thought, ‘Man, I’ve been thinking about this since the ’90s, since my mother passed away. I’m an Alcor member and with my experience I could probably help out the organization and its mission, which is the most aspirational goal in human history,’ ” Harris recalled in a phone interview. In the end, it was Harris’ wife who convinced him, telling him they would find a way to live within a more modest budget if he really wanted to pursue the idea. “It was an interesting move from a career perspective,” he said. The Alcor board made him interim CEO in May 2020, and he became the permanent leader in November that year. His background in pharmaceuticals and business make him a wise choice for an organization attempting to be taken more seriously. The old utterances of immortality are long gone, and Harris aims to steer Alcor away from science fiction and toward a health care–based approach.
“My view before I joined Alcor was this was bleeding edge research. I see it as a universal application of an emerging medicine,” he said. “You hear people talking about how we need to perfect this if we’re ever going to do interstellar travel, but what I saw coming from the health care industry is decades focusing on single diseases, whether it’s diabetes or hypotension, which are very prevalent in the US, or on solving one issue, like Hepatitis B. If you can perfect the medicinal application of cryonics, it doesn’t matter what disease state you suffer from. It could be a virus, bacteria, chemical, radiation, physical damage, you could stop and effectively freeze biological time to allow for new treatments to become available to save somebody’s life.
“Medicine is so advanced, but it’s still so early in its evolution. And what cryonics may potentially do, if we can make it work in the future, is just that, give medicine time to catch up with whatever ails us. And I think to myself, my mother who passed away at forty-one from breast cancer, if she were alive today, she would survive.”
The shift toward a more health care–oriented approach suits loyal members like Geisen who take an extremely practical view of death. One of their biggest fears is being too far away from a cryonics facility when they die. Alcor has a set of protocols in place for when one of their members dies,[7] but it seems fraught with potential issues. All of its members wear a bracelet with a 1-800 number listed on it. When the patient dies, physicians are supposed to call that number and receive instructions from Alcor to aid the cryopreservation process. The company immediately sends out an employee to wherever the person has died and eventually transports them to the facility. If a member is given a terminal diagnosis, they are encouraged to move closer to the company’s headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona. Geisen said if he was nearing death, he would immediately move, and he also has a plan for any disease of the brain. “If I somehow got Alzheimer’s where my brain was being destroyed, I would not wait for natural death. I would end my life before my brain was destroyed,” he said, matter-of-factly.
Just like in Mike Darwin’s day, it’s still vitally important that bodies are cryopreserved very soon after death. This urgency has spawned strange cottage industries. One of the presentations at Hoffman’s Cryonics Symposium was by Suspended Animation, a company offering emergency remote preservation services. The two employees giving the talk, dressed in scrubs, traveled to the event in an ambulance decked out for one purpose—to prepare a corpse for cryopreservation. The vehicle parks outside a house, hospital, or nursing home where a paying customer is about to pass on. When the inevitable happens, they spring into action. In a hospital, they push past presumably bemused doctors and begin their work. If the deceased is at home they bring the body back to the ambulance. After draining fluids, icing the corpse, and preparing it for travel, they ensure it reaches the designated cryo facility in good time, even if that means chartering a private jet to move it across states.
All of this makes the modern cryonics business sound polished and professional, and that’s exactly how it’s trying to portray itself. But some of the old issues continue to surface. Competitors to Alcor have emerged around the globe frequently and sometimes bring bad practices with them. KrioRus, the Russian equivalent of Alcor, was in Florida that weekend to report on recent progress and apparently has cryopreserved seventy-eight people and forty-five pets since it was founded in 2003. The presentation failed to mention the crippling war between two founders tearing the company apart that has left one party with control of the company website and the other holding onto the suspended members.[8]
And at the symposium in Hollywood, Osiris Cryonics, a local for-profit company, was ordered by Hoffman not to attend. But they came anyway. Osiris founder Dvir Derhy was arrested in 2015 by the FBI when he attempted to bribe Miami fire inspectors with $10,000 cash stuffed in an envelope.[9] He went to prison for a month. Hoffman, understandably, felt his presence could harm the “fragile edifice the legitimate cryonics community has been trying to build,” but when Derhy arrived Hoffman assigned people to watch him and keep him away from any press at the event.[10]
Murky characters like Derhy threaten an industry with an already compromised public image. For Harris, the challenge of selling cryonics to the masses rests on one aspect—education. “If you look back over history, a lot of people with any new innovation, they quickly jump to an assumption. They want to be an expert, they want to have an answer right away. And no matter what the advancement of technology is, medicine or otherwise, they are quick to judge. And they judge based on very limited information,” he said. “The rise of the internet has educated people in so many different ways, where before that you would be educated based on the orbits and the spheres of people which you were associated with. I think a lot of it falls back to education. Cryonics is a multidisciplinary field. Unless you’re one of the leading experts in the world it’s very difficult to understand.”
But criticism of cryonics also comes from within. One of the most important figures in the history of cryonics has since become a naysayer who walked away from the field completely. Mike Darwin, who performed the cryopreservation of Dora Kent all those years ago, has become a thorn in the side of Alcor, pointing out the organization’s many flaws and demanding they do better. He believes wholeheartedly in the potential of cryonics and the mission itself, but claims the company has failed completely and utterly.
It can be difficult to find an informed critic of cryonics. Most scientists dismiss the concept out of hand, claiming it’s not worth discussing as future reanimation would be impossible. Unfortunately, that means few look into the field in any great depth. But Darwin has a unique perspective. He was there for its formative years and helped shape many of the methods practiced today. In a long, late-night call, Darwin passionately explained the many failures of cryonics, breaking them down to three major arguments: the moral, the economic, and the philosophical.
Darwin’s involvement in cryonics did not end with the Dora Kent scandal. He stepped down as CEO of Alcor but played a significant role in the company and performed the cryopreservation of Jerry Leaf when his former partner died suddenly from a heart attack.[11] Without Leaf to back him up, Darwin was soon forced out of Alcor. But while his operational role was minimal, he maintained his seat on the board and repeatedly took the organization to task. In the 1990s he disagreed with a new policy proposal to incentivize morticians to bring in business for Alcor by paying them a finder’s fee for every body referred for preservation.[12] For Darwin, this was a terrible example of one of his chief criticisms of cryonics—that it’s sold in an immoral manner. “I believe that it’s the cryonics organizations’ duty to ensure that the patients they accept know what is actually involved. They’re stripped naked of the ability to rely on the normal mechanisms that are present to educate people about major life decisions,” he said.
Because cryonics is unregulated, there is no way of going to a government agency and checking whether the company freezing your body has a history of malpractice, fraudulent activity, or even malicious intent. And because the customers are all dead when they finally receive the service they’ve paid for, there isn’t even a Yelp review you can read to gauge how competent a cryonics provider may be. Darwin felt pushing sales in a mortuary was coercing business from mourning relatives lacking the emotional capability to make an informed decision. A friend or relative standing at the side of a loved one’s body would likely do anything to bring them back, which makes hitting them up for business at that time predatory.
“My criteria and Jerry’s criteria, and Alcor’s criteria at that time, for dealing with somebody who came to us who was terminally ill was extensive counseling and evaluation by an independent psychiatrist who we had nothing to do with selecting,” explained Darwin. “The person knew and understood what they were getting into, they were not under pressure or bereaved, and they were making this decision as rationally and informed as they could [be] about any other procedure, medical or otherwise, where there’s a lot of unknown information.”
Darwin also told me cryonics can be unfair to relatives of those who choose to be cryopreserved. “When someone starts dying, you fall back on what you’ve learned over a large time as to how to cope with that,” he said. “Ministers, funerals, flowers, graveside ceremonies, wreath placing. Instead, you have these people who turn up that you don’t know, who occupy the home or are by the hospital bed, and none of the normal mechanisms that are present for people to cope come into play. You can’t sit there for an hour afterward in quiet solitude holding the person’s hand or crying over them after they’ve experienced cardiac arrest. These people swoop in and do all these really invasive and, to someone who isn’t used to it, shocking things.”
On the practical side, there’s a fair argument to make that cryonics is economically doomed. Financial problems have plagued the industry since the days of Bedford’s freezing. In most businesses, bankruptcy is not the end of the world. But in cryonics, it can lead to customers decomposing, their dreams of a second life snatched away. Alcor appears from the outside to be in a better state than ever before, but there are still doubts around the economic principles underpinning its business plan. If an eighty-year-old goes to Alcor and pays $200,000 to have their head preserved, then dies a few years later, there’s no problem. But if a healthy thirty-year-old buys a life insurance policy from Hoffman and signs up, there’s an issue. The thirty-year-old is unlikely to die for at least another forty years or so but is committed to paying $200,000, just like the eighty-year-old. That sum will look pretty measly in forty years’ time, given the rate of inflation. For comparison, something that cost $200,000 in 1950 would cost $2.1 million in 2021. Cryonics organizations don’t seem to have accounted for that massive change in the value of money. Unless the likes of Alcor are continuously supported by very wealthy backers, they may not have enough money to keep the lights on and the bodies preserved.
Darwin’s final point of contention with cryonics is philosophical. The practice was born out of science fiction and quickly moved into a fringe area of science, but has always flirted with the mystical. Cryonics, by its own admission, relies on future technology to solve the most pressing problem: how to reanimate a person.
This task will fall to the scientists of the future, but it’s easy to get carried away with what they’ll be able to achieve. “Once you have that problem, these god-like, all-powerful creatures on the other end, and you’re relying on them, the tendency is to rely on them completely. And this reduces the front end of the procedure to ritual,” said Darwin.
That means the cryonics companies of today can ignore science and best practice as they take increasingly large leaps of faith that the future will fix any mistakes. For example, if a corpse has been dead a week and has decomposed normally, by most cryonicists’ logic they are unsavable. But if you were to put an increasing amount of trust in the science of the future, you might conclude that they could salvage something from even a completely decomposed corpse. “There’s merit to that, I’m not denigrating it completely, but the consequence of it is it has an absolutely corrosive effect on progress, on trying to improve the state of the art. It prohibits you from establishing any standards. It locks you into some ritual that will only evolve when there’s pressure from the outside,” Darwin told me.
And worrying cases continue to emerge. According to Darwin, this erosion of principles and best practices is already evident. On September 6, 2019, Alcor member A-1100, a lifelong Alcor supporter, died with no suspension team nearby. He was shipped from Florida to Arizona by air freight, with no ice and no refrigeration. When he arrived at Alcor, his body was reportedly 68 degrees Fahrenheit, just under room temperature, with hope of reanimation all but lost.
“He wasn’t a lovable guy, but he was honest, he sincerely believed in cryonics, and he put a lot of money into it and never did anything to hurt anybody,” said Darwin. “And if you treat your own people that way, what have you become?” (The case is noted on Alcor’s website but without detail. Harris said a more thorough case report will be published at some point in the future after a third-party review. He also said the company was unable to make a statement on a specific case. It should be noted that Hurricane Dorian was affecting travel at the time of the Alcor member’s death.)
The types of characters attracted to the practice of cryonics continually threatens to undermine any credibility it has. A series of celebrities are rumored to have been cryogenically frozen, including most famously Walt Disney, but there still hasn’t been confirmation of any well-respected people of note to add to the cryonics testimonies. In 2019, a report by The New York Times revealed that the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein had been obsessed with several controversial fringe sciences.[13] One of those was cryonics. Epstein was reportedly determined to have both his head and penis frozen, a terrifying thought—and another extremely damaging PR disaster for the industry.
Cryonics is one of the biggest parts of any immortalist’s game plan. But it’s hard to see how the practice in its current form can possibly achieve its goals. Nearly every cryonicist I spoke to expressed their shock that more people had not signed up to have their bodies or brains preserved. But given the chaotic history of the industry, it’s no surprise the take-up hasn’t been higher. For now, cryonics is destined to remain a fringe undertaking, at least until some kind of breakthrough is made on the reanimation side. There are no signs of progress any time soon, and that means cryonics practitioners need an awful lot of faith to sign up and maintain their memberships until they die. There are a lot of reasons to believe cryonics will ultimately fail, and even those within the industry acknowledge it is a long shot. The move away from science and medicine and toward some kind of religion could lead the community away from standards, regulations, best practices, and scientific rigor, and toward shoddy amateurism which will make their revered future scientists look back and wince.
The concept of faith in cryonics made me remember another, much older, game in town offering immortality and resurrection. Florida’s immortalists gather every month in a church—but just how close to a religion are they really?