Trent
Tompkins

Practical Cryonics

Death has been the one boundary no civilization has crossed. But human history is, in large part, the story of boundaries dissolving.

Practical Cryonics examines cryonics from three angles: the science of what modern vitrification can and cannot preserve; the ethics of whether extending the possibility of life is hubris, desperation, or moral responsibility; and the logistics of how individuals can think rationally about cost, risk, probability, and long-term outcomes without resorting to fantasy or denial.

This book does not promise immortality. It does not claim revival is guaranteed. It asks a narrower question: if death is a process rather than an event, and if that process can be interrupted — what follows from that possibility?

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About the Book

From anesthesia to antibiotics to organ transplantation, interventions once considered impossible have become ordinary. Each advance required a willingness to revise what counted as inevitable. The same question applies here.

Modern cryonic procedures do not freeze patients in the conventional sense. They use vitrification — a process in which bodily fluids achieve a glass-like state without the formation of ice crystals. The ice-crystal objection that most people raise against cryonics reflects a decades-old misunderstanding of the science, not its current state.

The book works through the physics of determinism and consciousness, the history of belief perseverance in medicine, the realistic pathway to revival through cloning rather than cell-by-cell repair, and the practical decisions an individual needs to make today to give cryonics its best chance of working.

Sample Chapter

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”
— Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

I. First Principles

For thousands of years, death was final. Then, in 1957, the first external defibrillation occurred — giving scientists the ability to restart the hearts of patients who, a decade before, would have been pronounced dead. Of course, this technology didn't become available everywhere overnight. Many people who could have been saved by this new technology still died, as the medical establishment caught up to the new reality enabled by defibrillation.

We tend to think of reality as an objective truth. “Be realistic” is the admonishment given to school children and visionaries alike. But reality changes all the time, especially in terms of what is possible. Cars don't drive themselves — or at least not, until they do.

Humans are great at telling themselves they understand reality. Disease? Simple — it's caused by an imbalance of the four humors: phlegm, blood, black-bile and yellow-bile. Or the will of God. Or bad air, or witchcraft, or the devil. If there is one constant through history, it is how rarely people don't have an explanation for something, even if that explanation is completely wrong.

Why does this matter in a book about cryonics?

Because cryonics is a bet. That doesn't mean a gamble. But there are two parts to cryonics. The first part is the actual science of freezing a human body and preserving it in a way that provides for the best chance of future revival. That part can be done with the science we have today, and in that regard, cryonic preservation is a legitimate medical procedure, albeit an experimental one.

But cryonics is also a bet that future technology will make revival possible. People make bets like this all the time — when they buy stock in NVIDIA expecting next year's graphics card will be better than this year's, or when they invest in a biotech startup hoping that their new cancer drug will pass clinical trials. Making these bets requires predicting the future accurately, and predicting the future accurately requires accurately understanding the present. Or luck. Or someone who can guide you through the decision-making process, which I hope to now do.

When I was a kid, I never thought a website like YouTube would be possible. Video files were big. Sharing video files took a lot of bandwidth, and that bandwidth was expensive. The first hard drive I ever bought cost $300 and held 10 gigabytes of data. I thought anyone who tried to let other people upload all the videos they wanted for free would go broke on storage and bandwidth costs. I was, thankfully, wrong. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 — probably not five years after I was sure the idea would be “impossible.”

What I find most interesting about this isn't just that I was wrong, but how sure I was despite having actually very little information. I knew what hard drives retailed for, I knew what a few web hosts charged for bandwidth — but I had no idea what the people selling the bandwidth as part of their retail hosting packages paid for it. I had no idea what advertisers were willing to spend for targeted traffic. And while I knew that the price of storage went down every year, I'm not even sure I factored that into my calculations. I made a bad prediction for the future, because my model of reality was bad.

Author and psychiatrist Jordan Peterson calls these sometimes false and incomplete beliefs that shape our view of reality “fundamental presuppositions.” He emphasizes that these underlying beliefs or assumptions shape our worldview and behavior, often without conscious awareness. When people speak critically of why cryonics won't work, one popular reason that people will give is “ice crystal formation damaging cells.” Yet modern cryonic procedures produce virtually no ice crystals. It is true that this was an early problem with the idea, but tens if not hundreds of thousands of hours have gone into researching the methods used in cryonics today, which produce virtually no ice crystals.

But most people have been taught since birth that death is unavoidable and that “life is short.” Changing that fundamental assumption means adopting an entirely new model of reality. And there is a problem that occurs if one accepts the fact that death is avoidable. If death can be avoided, then it seems logical one should try to avoid it — that means signing up for cryonics, and paying for it, and maybe even realizing that the loved ones you have buried could have lived; that they were the people who could have been defibrillated but were instead pronounced dead on the table.

That is a painful realization to accept, especially when one considers how many deaths could have been avoided with cryonics. But again, this is not a unique situation. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in the past died simply because doctors and surgeons didn't wash their hands. It was not uncommon for a doctor in the 1800s to go from autopsying a diseased corpse to delivering a baby, often killing the mother in the process. But even when a Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, discovered the problem and implemented a solution that was shown to work, doing things differently meant accepting that they had done them wrong in the past. One doctor, upon realizing he had unknowingly caused the deaths of so many patients, including his niece, felt so much guilt that he committed suicide. It wasn't just denial — the hygienic procedures were more time-consuming and expensive for the hospital than doing nothing. It was easier for those in charge to pretend as if the data showing the effectiveness of the new procedures was flawed or simply did not exist.

Belief perseverance describes how we continue to hold onto established beliefs even when faced with clear, contradictory evidence. We tend to prioritize our initial conclusions and resist changing our minds. It is easier to just concoct a reason that cryonics can't work. And so, people readily believe that ice crystals form in cryonics patients and cause damage that can never be reversed.

Except, this doesn't happen. Modern cryonics patients are not frozen so much as they undergo a process of vitrification, where the fluids in their body achieve a glass-like state without the formation of ice crystals. This can be confirmed by looking at other vitrified specimens of brain tissue under a microscope. Any ice crystals — especially those large enough to damage cells — would be easily visible, and they simply do not occur with modern cryonics methods. But the people looking for a reason for cryonics not to work aren't particularly concerned about advancements in the science. The idea that humans, no matter how advanced, would be forever thwarted by the one-time formation of ice crystals that may puncture the linings of some cells seems to both overstate a minor problem and understate the much larger one of actually bringing a frozen human being back to life. It also assumes that cells will need to be fixed — an assumption based on a model of reality which I believe may be deeply flawed.

In his book published in 1964, The Prospect of Immortality, Robert Ettinger, the “father of cryonics,” makes some predictions about the future state of cryonics and how revival may be possible. Many of these predictions have aged badly. Others have fared better — for example, organ transplants and transplants from animals, known as “xenotransplantation.”

Building on this idea, I believe that the path to reviving cryonically preserved individuals may not require the methods Ettinger envisioned. Instead, the future of cryonics might lie in leveraging cloning technology — a field that has already shown remarkable promise. Rather than focusing on repairing the damage at the cellular level within the original body, we may find that creating a new, genetically identical body provides a more efficient and feasible solution.

Science already knows how to completely replace your entire body — every cell of it — with a new, cloned version. This isn't even cutting-edge science. Dolly, the first cloned animal, was created in 1996. The reasons that a human being has not yet been cloned are legal and ethical, not technical. If ethics and laws were removed from the equation, a person with the resources could, with current technology, create a clone of themselves and swap out failing or cancerous organs with relative ease. It is this step — and not the reanimation of a frozen corpse — that I see as the fundamental problem of revival.

II. Understanding Free Will

In classical mechanics — the physics of Isaac Newton, and even in special relativity — there is a concept known as determinism. Determinism is the belief that the current state of a “system,” whether it is an apple falling from a tree or a planet rotating around a star, is caused by its previous state. If one knew all of the properties of all the items in that system, they could predict with complete accuracy the progression of that state. This model works for large, inanimate systems.

Unfortunately, physicists have tried to argue that this is true of all systems, including those involving sentient lifeforms. But sentient lifeforms have free will and are conscious — and neither of these two clearly observable truths are explained by modern physics.

The obvious thing for physicists to do would simply be to accept that determinism only applies to systems that do not contain conscious life — that the rules governing a falling apple are not the same rules that govern conscious choice, in the same way two magnets sticking together is caused by a fundamentally different force than the one that sticks an apple to the planet earth. Instead, they have taken the much more human approach of insisting that all that they know is all there is to know. That what we perceive as free will is an illusion, and that our actions are just caused by the states of the neurons in our brain and electricity flowing through it.

We know at the quantum level, determinism breaks down. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, articulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927, states that the position and the velocity of an object — even as simple as a photon or electron — cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory. At the quantum level, the world is one of probabilities, with exact positions only being knowable at the time of measurement.

For cryonics, this debate is crucial. Quantum indeterminacy may be the mechanism by which free will and consciousness manifest themselves, and the potential role of quantum effects in the brain may affect how we approach the challenge of maintaining personal identity through the cryopreservation process.

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About the Author

I wrote Practical Cryonics for one simple reason: I have a daughter.

Eventually, it became obvious that the book I was looking for did not exist. So I wrote it.

At its core, Practical Cryonics reflects a simple conviction: if death is a process rather than an instantaneous event, and if future technology may one day reverse what medicine cannot today, then choosing preservation is not an act of desperation. It is an act of reason.

When I imagine the best possible future, it is not wealth or status that comes to mind. It is time. Time with the people I love. And if there is even a small chance to have more of it, that possibility is worth taking seriously.

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ROI Comparison (2024–2025 data)

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