In some countries, people can pay for cryonics services for themselves and their loved ones. Such practices are not regulated in many countries. Do you think such services should be banned?
Technologies nowadays improve so fast that it’s hardly surprising that we can fly halfway across the globe in less than a day, sent messages there almost instantaneously, and planning to get out of our planet in the centuries to come. However, one aspect that few people think about, the technology to beat death! Cryonics offers this possibility and people are using its services. However, some thinks that it should be banned as it is a pseudo-science and it’s not regulated in many countries. But as people all over the world want to live longer, I strongly believe that the services of cryonics should not be banned.
The concept of cryonics needs to be defined first. The principle of cryonics postulates the seed of life, the memories, hopes and dreams are encoded in the structure of the brain (Best B. P., 2008). When the brain structure gets destroyed, the person dies along with it, irreversibly. So cryonics aim to preserve the brain structure as perfectly as possible using something called “cryoprotectants” that can form non-brittle glass in low temperature, thus avoiding the formation of ice crystals that will destroy the brain cells. To avoid legal complications, currently cryonics are done only on the clinically dead, where breathing or blood circulation stops. The brain survives for another 6 minutes and during that period; the process of cryonics is carried out.
I repeat my reason, the service of cryonics gives hope to further the reaches of mankind against the most fundamental aspect of nature, the disease called clinical death, so it should not be banned. It is similar to the case of a comatose person, as long as the person is still alive, because there is a small chance for the person to recover again and live on. Cryonics depends on future technology to either extract the data encoded in our brains to robotic bodies or nanotechnologies that can repair almost all bodily damages, making a person as healthy and young as long as possible. The dependence on future technology is the main reason cryonics is called a pseudo science and called out to be banned. True, it had to depend on the future, but if the services are discontinued, there is no hope of reviving at all. Twenty years ago there was no cure for some cancers, but now there are some cancers that have a higher success rate to be arrested and patients may be “cured”. So the service has to be continued, for the slim, but ever present chance of reviving the clinically dead.
Cryonics is also a form of time-travel, travel to the far future. It’s the only time travel machine available to men as the technology for close to light speed travel is still undiscovered. Time travel definitely has its benefits. Not only can our descendants be able to observe and obtain real life people from their ancient history, the biology of our body and the bacteria we carry can serve as experimental data to test the theory of evolution. The cultural studies can be improved based on the different assumptions of each patients of cryonics and observing how the pattern of culture, sociology, develop and evolve with time. The most important part is of course that the patients all come from different times of history and therefore a thorough study of the history of mankind can be conducted. The person who is revived can also learn the advances in the basic sciences and the comfort of future technologies, possibly being able to live the rest of his life in utter bliss.
Cryonics spurs research and therefore shouldn’t be banned. The future technology are not just left to the future, the more people receiving the service of cryonics, the more motivation there is to conduct research in the areas of nanotechnology, robotics, information technology, neuroscience, human anatomy, material designs (to produce the best cryoprotectants material). These researches will most probably produce side products that might pay off its own cost and yet advance one of men’s deepest dreams. For example nanotechnology may produce the cure for AIDS as small nanobots can be sent into the blood stream to destroy the AIDS virus. Robotics advancement might replace hard labour and make it possible to colonise and terraform another planet.
In conclusion, cryonics shouldn’t be banned because not only it provides hope to recover from clinical death, it also acts as the most practical time travel machine available and spurs on research to reach greater heights that benefits other fields.
Works Cited
Best, B. P. (2008, November 2). Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice. Retrieved February 11, 2009, from PubMed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18321197
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