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Cake or death is
an obvious choice.
Cake.
But being frozen in unproven
cryonic technology or death?
Eh.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey all, Trace here for D News.
Kim Suozzi has joined the
ranks of cryonic pioneers,
and become one of the
few hundred people frozen
in suspension, only to be
thawed out in the far future.
Kim found out she had
terminal brain cancer when
she was in her early '20s.
And on her 23rd birthday,
she posted on Reddit, what
should she do with the last
few months of her life?
And the Redditors had
thousands of comments,
from try LSD to run up huge
debt on your credit card.
But there were comments also
about cryonic preservation.
Her interest was
piqued, and soon,
with the help of some small
donations from Redditors,
and some big donations
from some nonprofits,
she had enough money
to cryonically preserve
her entire body.
Science fiction has long talked
about hyper sleep or stasis
or cryo-sleep or
whatever it's called,
and that technology
does exist today.
But it's less than perfect.
The scientific term for this is
not cryogenics, but cryonics.
Cryogenics is studying anything
that's kept really cold.
But if you put something
living into suspension,
that's cryonics.
As of last weekend, Kim
finally succumbed to her cancer
and was de-animated.
That's what the
cryonic people call it.
And then, she was put
into preservation.
Here's how it works.
First, you're de-animated.
And then, your body
is cooled rapidly so
that you get to a
very cold temperature
without damaging too many of
the tissues if you can help it.
Then you're put into
liquid nitrogen,
and you're left there
for a long time.
People put themselves
in suspension
for a variety of reasons,
anything from fear of death,
love of life, hope for a cure
for their disease, curiosity
about the future, or even
wanting to be immortal.
The thing is, we've got no
way to re-animate people that
have been de-animated.
The problem with the
technology at the moment
is that our cells
are full of water,
and when you freeze water, it
expands and creates crystals,
and that bursts
the cell membrane.
So once we would be thawed out,
we kind of just turn into mush.
That doesn't really stop
people from trying it, though.
Their rebuttal is
that in the future--
the far future, whenever
that would be-- they'll
know how to fix it.
We'll see who's right, I guess.
I mean, we won't
see who's right.
They'll see who's right.
There is a separate process
called vitrification.
That's when you replace the
liquid inside of your cells
with this chemical cocktail
that doesn't freeze and burst
the membranes.
It's been proven to work
on a variety of small bits,
like cells and organs
that are really
small, but not a whole anything.
Cryonics have been
around for a while.
The first institute
started in the 1960s
in my home state of Michigan.
You're welcome, science.
Since then, only a few
others have popped up,
but they're mostly vilified
for being frauds and shysters
because the technology
is unproven,
and no one has seen anybody
successfully re-animated.
Because of that,
most of the people
that work in these
nonprofit organizations
are do-it-yourselfers,
part-timers,
or are just volunteers.
So when you think of
cryonics, you probably
think of slick,
see-through canisters
with people floating,
suspended in bubbly fluid.
But it's not like that at all.
In fact, it's more like this--
homemade gizmos and freezers
in basements.
Don't feel bad for Kim Suozzi.
She did have her doubts.
But she said that you have
to have faith in technology.
Would you cryonically
freeze yourself?
I now it's winter
and it's probably
already cold enough outside,
and you don't really
want to think about it.
But let us know why or
why not down the comments.
It's easy to do.
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