Do you remember Captain America, the Marvel hero who defied mortality? He woke up after 70 years and survived being frozen all that time. What if I told you that this could happen in real life as well and that Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, has signed up for something similar? What is this all about, and why would he do that?
Is it possible to defy mortality? The fact that we are going to die one day and that our lives come with an expiration date only makes us human. But what if there was a way to defy death? What if what worked for Captain America could work for us in real life?
This method is called cryogenic preservation. What exactly does it mean? What does it have to do with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel? Cryogenic freezing is a process performed on dead humans. For this process to be performed, an individual needs to sign up for it in advance. It is a type of low-temperature freezing carried out by a medical team that stores the organic remains of the body using ice water.
The dead body is then oxygenated using masks and put on a machine similar to a heart-lung bypass. This is done to circulate blood and maintain oxygen. A solution is pumped into the dead body, which essentially works like antifreeze. This is done to stop body tissues from turning into ice crystals so that there is minimal structural damage.
The body is then placed in a liquid nitrogen chamber at a temperature as low as -320 degrees Fahrenheit. Once it is cold enough, the body is transferred to a thermos-like tank filled with liquid nitrogen, where it’ll stay for the foreseeable future.
What happens next? These bodies wait in these tanks until medical technology is able to revive them. Among those who have signed up for this process is billionaire Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal. Thiel has agreed to be cryogenically preserved when he dies. When asked about the same, he responded, saying, “Yes, but I think of it more as an ideological statement. I don’t necessarily expect it to work, but I think it’s the sort of thing we’re supposed to try to do.”
This technology costs roughly $28,000 per person. But after spending such a hefty amount, why is Peter Thiel skeptical about its success? The thing about this technology is that it is still a work in progress. There are three major challenges that it faces: one, it needs to repair the damage done by freezing; two, there is an additional burden to cure whatever ailment originally killed the subject; and three, it will have to reverse the aging process so that the subject has a young, healthy body. Difficult, isn’t it?
Thiel is not the only one betting big on life-extending technologies. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently invested $180 million in a project that aims to extend the human lifespan by 10 years. With rapid advancements in AI, the threat of AI taking over the human race is also advancing. With more and more people signing up for technologies that aim to expand our lifespan, will the human dream of being immortal become a reality? Time will tell.
