10 - How to Reboot Your Corpse

[10]
How to Reboot Your Corpse
S. Karlin, "How to Reboot Your Corpse" IEEE Spectrum, spectrum.ieee.org, March 2010. [Online]. Available: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/how-to-reboot-your-corpse/0. [Accessed: March 16, 2010].

If you're like me and you've seen The Empire Strikes Back forty-seven times, you know that Jabba the Hutt captures Han Solo and places him in a cryogenically-frozen chamber at the end of the film. "I love you," professor Princess Leia, to which Solo coolly responds, "I know." That same premise is being developed by Alcor Life Extension Foundation based in Scottsdale, Artizona. For a mere $150,000, you can have your body cryogenically frozen and preserved indefinitely. If you just want to preserve your head, the cost drop to only $80,000. The idea is to preserve the body until sufficiently progressed technology is able to restore life to the frozen individual.

Alcor's current method of cryogenically freezing a corpse involves cooling the body to -196 degrees Celsius, or the temperature at which liquid nitrogen becomes gaseous. Obviously, the technology to reanimate a previous 'dead' corpse does not yet exist. Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnology expert and director at Alcor, believes that using nanorobots to repair damage done to the corpse is the best way to revive the individual in the future.

Retired philosophy professor and author The Skeptics Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions Robert Todd Carroll opines, "A business based on little more than hope for development that can be imagined by science is quackery. There is little reason to believe that the promises of cryonics will ever be fulfilled."