How much money would you pay for a chance to come back from the dead?

Cryonacists will give you that chance for 28 grand.

Now, granted, it's a small chance. A near zero chance.

And by that I mean near enough to zero that it may as well be zero chance. But, a chance.

Here's what they'll do for you, for that price. When you die, they will freeze your body.

Ideally, they will send a representative to your deathbed so they can put you on ice the moment you pass.

They will use a respirator to keep oxygen flowing to your brain while you are approaching freezing temperatures.

Then they'll put you in a bag to stop your skin from getting damaged and put your body into a tank of liquid nitrogen,

where it will be stored indefinitely. The goal of all this is to stop your body from completely

disintegrating, as it would naturally. Why are they going to all this trouble? Well,

they're hoping that future advances in technology will allow doctors to resuscitate frozen bodies,

and that advances in medicine will allow doctors to fix whatever went wrong with you.

And that when those advances arrive, they'll just thaw you out, fix you up with whatever newfangled technology they have in the future,

and send you on your way. It's essentially Pascal's wager. You are gambling for a shot at the afterlife.

But instead of betting your belief in God, you're betting the last 28 grand you'll spend on sci-fi.

Now, cryonics has been criticized as quackery, a way of scamming people who are scared of death.

And frankly, I think such cynicism is appropriate. Even if I knew for a fact that reviving

frozen bodies would be possible in some distant future, I would not feel confident,

investing my life insurance with one of these companies, since most of them, probably all of them, from a business perspective,

simply won't survive long enough to see the day.

Regardless, today, we're going to talk about proof of concept.

The Wood Frog. Lethobate's Sylvaticus.

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