Patients are “dead” = Ahhh, so you’re storing frozen corpses. Grotesque. Macabre. Repulsive. Kooky.

Patients will be “brought back to life” = Reawakening corpses. Ridiculous. Frankenstein. Zombies. Unworthy of further consideration.

People (correctly) understand and appreciate that you can’t breath life into a graveyard, that “bodies” are not entities. The future of cryonics, then, might depend on challenging public misconceptions about that very narrow (arbitrary) line between life and death on the hospital bed. I understand that this is a touchy area where the legality of cryopreservation is concerned (ie; cryonics can’t be involved until “legal” death pronounced by third party)…nevertheless, I think it’s incumbent on these organizations to be honest about the underlying rationale behind the practice.

The best case scenario for an individual cryopreserved *today* using technology available *right now* is that he/she is NOT in fact dead! …that the invididual actually *DIDN’T* die on the hospital bed in the first place! Maybe not so good for the courts…but once people appreciate this, they’ll do an instinctive double-take on cryonics.

I think Cryonics would be best served by essentially abandoning speculation about future technology (which is typically what most media people love to talk about- prognostication)… Instead, we should be as IN-YOUR-FACE as possible about what death *is* and *isn’t*.

Don’t use words like “recoverable”….focus on the moment of death. Tell people “Guess what? Your terminally ill mom and dad DIDN’T REALLY DIE when they were pronounced dead in the hospital and the medical staff stopped trying to save them and pulled the covers over their faces.” What REALLY happened was that they entered into a condition of health from which CURRENT TECHNOLOGY is too inept to save them.

Use real-world relatable analogies; soldiers wounded in Iraq who are ALIVE and functional RIGHT NOW whose injuries would have been a death sentence in Vietnam. People who suffer catastrophic brain injuries in car accidents but are kept alive in coma from which they might be able to awaken and go on to return to society.

Go pluck out the highly-trained, highly-skilled ER doctors of 1955 and present them with Gabby Giffords just moments after taking a bullet to the head. If it had been up to them, their course of action limited by the tools they had, Giffords would be in the ground right now.

Point out that this is *real*- limited access to medical technology in some parts of the world means that someone critically injured or ill in sub-Saharan Africa might *actually* be declared dead when the same person could be kept alive in a major city in the US. That’s not a fantasy.

The most highly-skilled doctors and nurses with the best intentions are limited by our pathetic technology *the SAME way* doctors in some poor country might be- Just as better technology *actually* exists but is out of reach of some sub-Saharan doctor, better technology exists out of reach of the best US doctors too; it exists in the future.

Ask if they doubt whether or not some terminally ill or wounded patient who dies today might be saved and kept alive by future technology. That’s the *ONLY* bit of imagination that anyone learning about cryonics must concede.

Once prospective cryonicts understand that the current criteria for legal death amounts to make-believe, that it’s an artificial line drawn by *people* (not God, if you like) and defined by the limits of our technology…then we can offer a solution.

Now that first part may be incendiary, it may be hurt some people, it may be controversial…but I’m convinced that it’s something people can wrap their head around….something that may light a fire under them. Your loved ones *weren’t* dead; they *didn’t* have to be buried or burned; God (whether the God of Spinoza or Abraham) DID NOT decide to “take them,” our current technology FAILED them. Plain, frail, mortal, ignorant *people* FAILED them.

As controversial as that might be if it (or something along those lines) was the unflagging public banner of cryonics in all communications with the media, it’s something that has the potential to establish a raw, fundamental connection with people. A tangible line they can grab hold of and follow, if they wish.

“Bringing frozen dead corpses back to life” isn’t going to cut it.
Once the lay public appreciates that the line between life and death is make-believe, fake, that it depends on technology and not the forces of God/nature…then they are primed to see cryonics as the next logical step; we can’t yet revive people who’ve crossed that threshold, but we can do the next best thing;
stabilize them over the long-term until our technology *GETS BETTER* enough to do something about it all.

I would avoid words like “revive” as well as “recover”; instead, use the word “SAVE”. Instead of musings on exactly what kind of technology will be around in the future, we need only say that we’re waiting for technology to “GET BETTER”…which anyone can agree that it inevitably will.

(hence the following, keywords in bold)
So in other words, cryonics is a way to SAVE DYING (not dead) PATIENTS who are being FAILED by CURRENT TECHNOLOGY and who can be SUCCESSFULLY TREATED by BETTER TECHNOLOGY that WILL EXIST sooner or later.
These PATIENTS are not in storage (avoid that word), they have been STABILIZED for the long-term, however long it takes for BETTER TECHNOLOGY to TREAT THEM.

Cryonics, then, is not unlike what paramedics do; cryonics is *merely* the best form of long-term biomedical stabilization humanity has right now. If cryonics is unworthy of consideration, then you shouldn’t care whether or not paramedics perform CPR on you or your loved ones.

(sorry if it got ranty…just some free flow ideas on how I think cryonics could be better communicated to the public)

Fascinating stuff, Mike.
I’d like to think that Valhalla is Earth circa 2xxx. Hopefully, I’ll see you there.

I can only guess as to its personal significance for you, but interestingly (and perhaps coincidentally), it may have inspired the Suebian knot hairstyle not uncommonly found on Europe’s famously well-preserved bog bodies (as noted in the wikipedia article).

1) Bio-engineering or “wet” nanotechnology
2) space development – O’neill scenario on steroids
3) fusion power – IEC polywell, Tri-alpha, maybe Ni-H solid state LENR (Yes! I’m becoming convinced this is real.)

We’re not going to get “dry” nanotech, the AI/uploading, or the “singularity” at all. We won’t get any of the other fantasy stuff either.

In other words, we’re going to be “biological” for a long time to come. You might as well get used to it. We’re also going to have to work, start businesses, and make money as well, in order to survive. You might as well get used to this as well.

The wild card is (and these are real wild cards, so don’t give me any flak for mentioning them) technology based on Woodward-Mach effects and Heim Quantum Theory. I will know more on the first one come this summer and the second requires superconductor materials that will take another 5 years to develop such that they are cheap enough to do the experiment without breaking the bank.

http://www.box.net/shared/p3idvxvlcb

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/philip-moriarty-discusses.html

This is an interview of a guy who got money from the U.K. government to research the possibility of molecular manufacturing. In short, he thinks “dry” nanotech is not possible for the manufacture of macro-scale objects. “Wet” nanotech, on the other hand, seems to be developing by leaps and bounds.

I think that cryonics must abandon the notion that “dry” nanotech is going to be there to reanimate us. This is why effective brain cryo-preservation is so necessary. The rest of the body can be regenerated using some kind of stem-cell based regeneration therapy or some kind of synthetic biology (maybe the stem cells are synthetic biology). But the brain has to be repaired on an intra-neuronal level, which is more technically demanding than simple cell-based regeneration. We need a scenario where this can be done using biologically-based technology, the less of it needed, the better it is. If the brain really is cryo-preserved at the neuronal and dendrite level, then we might not need this capability at all.

Comprehensive whole body regeneration (e.g. stem cell based) is likely during the second half of this century (like 2080 or something). Repairing of the brain on an intra-neuronal level is going to add another 50 years at least to the time we can be reanimated (mid 22nd century). As a wise man once said “capsule time is bad time” (of course this man is doing capsule time now, but thats a whole other story). One of the purposes of cryonics is to reduce the capsule time.

The other point is that the whole body regeneration is likely to be developed by the bio-medical industry for repair of trauma injury and disease. Development of the intra-neuronal brain repair technology will have to be done by cryonics people themselves (our future compatriots!). The reason is that this capability will not be so popular outside of cryonics and, hence, will not be developed by outside third parties. On the other hand, some brain repair will be developed by outside third parties to cure people of strokes, Alzheimer’s and other neuro-degenerative conditions. So, some of this work might get done for us by outside parties.

Of course, we will have to develop the fully integrated reanimation process that combines all of these repair capabilities on our own. No third party is going to do this for us.