preview

Cryonic Suspension Essay

Best Essays

Cryonics

Suzie Q, a twenty-five year old woman, is dying of AIDS. When she learned this, she heard about something called cryonic suspension. A cryonist at the hospital where she gets treatment told her how cryonics freezes people when they are pronounced dead. When the cure for AIDS is developed, she would then be revived and able to start a new life. Suzie Q decided to participate in cryonic suspension and spent her life savings to pay for the freezing process. Five years later, Suzie Q died. The cryonics team flew her to an Alcor Life Extension Foundation where she was frozen. Suzie Q’s family did not know about her plans and were extremely upset because they felt it was impossible to conduct a proper funeral without a body to …show more content…

“Today, a tiny group of biologists is still trying to bring cryonics ‘to its perfection.’ A far larger group of debunkers; however, says cryonics is little more than bogus science, its promise, they say, will never be fulfilled.” (Schaer). Therefore, today's society should not be able to invest in and/or participate in cryonic suspension until it has been proven to be successful and without side effects.

The first reason cryonic suspension should not be used is because of the overpopulation it will cause if and when the patients of Alcor are all revived. Cryonics has been in place since the 1960's, and there are still no successful reanimation plans to prove it will work. Thus, suspended people will probably be frozen for at least one hundred to two hundred years. Many of the patients could be revived at or around the same time. The patients so far are all adults, and therefore, will all move into the work force and the community together. By the time reanimation occurs, there could be thousands of patients in suspension. The majority of cryonicly suspended patients will be left with no immediate family or friends, and would have no place to live. Not to mention that isolation could cause problems of homelessness and unemployment. Everybody has seen the zillions of advertisements for starving children and adults. This problem has no current solution, and as a result the homelessness and unemployment increase every year. The Alcor patients

Get Access