The one death-related phrase she will not abide, will not let into her house under any circumstance, is “cryonic preservation,” by which is meant the low-temperature preservation of human beings in the hope of future resuscitation. There are ways of speaking about dying that very much annoy Peggy Jackson, an affable and rosy-cheeked hospice worker in Arlington, Va. She doesn’t like the militant cast of “lost her battle with,” as in, “She lost her battle with cancer.” She is similarly displeased by “We have run out of options” and “There is nothing left we can do,” when spoken by doctor to patient, implying as these phrases will that hospice care is not an “option” or a “thing” that can be done. She doesn’t like these phrases, but she tolerates them. That this will be her husband’s chosen form of bodily disposition creates, as you might imagine, certain complications in the Jackson household.
“I am a hospice social worker. The. I see people dying All. And what’s so good about me that I’m going to live forever?”. I work with people who are dying all the time. Time. “You have to understand,” says Peggy, who at 54 is given to exasperation about her husband’s more exotic ideas.
It would have been decades ago, before the two were married and before the births of their two teenage sons. “I was surprised by her response,” he recalls, “but that’s because I am a nerd and not good at predicting these things.”. The provenance of this disagreement remains somewhat hazy, as neither Peggy nor her husband, Robin Hanson, can remember quite when he first announced his intention to have his brain surgically removed from his freshly vacated cadaver and preserved in liquid nitrogen. With the benefit of hindsight, Robin, who is 50 and an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, will acknowledge that he should have foreseen at least some initial discomfort on the part of his girlfriend, whom he met when they were both graduate students at the University of Chicago.
If he is in a chair, the chair is moving with him. Robin is the kind of nerd who is very excited about the future, an orientation evident on his C.V., which lists published articles like “Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence” (on why robots will give us growth rates “an order of magnitude” higher than we’ve currently got), “Burning the Cosmic Commons: Evolutionary Strategies of Interstellar Colonization” (on what behaviors we can expect from extraterrestrials) and “Drift-Diffusion in Mangled Worlds Quantum Mechanics” (it’s very complicated). His enthusiasm is evident in the way he talks about these ideas, hands in the air, laughing amiably every time he brings up the distance between his own theories and those of the mainstream.
It’s also living quite a bit delayed into the future.” Peggy’s initial response to this ambition, rooted less in scientific skepticism than in her personal judgments about the quest for immortality, has changed little in the past 20-odd years. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are practically a cliché. Robin, a deep thinker most at home in thought experiments, says he believes that there is some small chance his brain will be resurrected, that its time in cryopreservation will be merely a brief pause in the course of his life. “Cryonics isn’t just living a little longer. “I’m just really terribly curious,” Robin told me in January over Skype. Peggy finds the quest an act of cosmic selfishness.
Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.”.
Drive a used car if the cost of a new one interferes. Robert Ettinger is the father of cryonics, his 1964 book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” its founding text. Cryonet, a mailing list on “cryonics-related issues,” takes as one of its issues the opposition of wives. So why is this happening?”. “She is more intelligent than me, insatiably curious and lovingly devoted to me and our 2-year-old daughter. (The ratio of men to women among living cyronicists is roughly three to one.) “She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted and generally spooky,” wrote one man newly acquainted with the hostile-wife phenomenon. Premonitions of this problem can be found in the deepest reaches of cryonicist history, starting with the prime mover. “This is not a hobby or conversation piece,” he wrote in 1968, adding, “it is the struggle for survival. Divorce your wife if she will not cooperate.” Today, with just fewer than200 patients preserved within the two major cryonics facilities, the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute and the Arizona-based Alcor, and with 10 times as many signed up to be stored upon their legal deaths, cryonicists have created support networks with which to tackle marital strife.
Separate bank accounts prevent her from having to see the money spent on annual dues, and the two manage to avoid bringing up the subject at home. And so Peggy expends a certain amount of psychic energy trying to ignore Robin’s cryonics arrangements. It’s not worth it.”. When he dies (“which he will,” Peggy adds), it will fall to someone else to call Alcor and explain Robin’s wishes to the hospital staff. The United States is not necessarily an easy place to take up the banner of letting go; we’re likely to call it “giving up,” and there is of course no purer expression of this attitude than the pursuit of cryonics. “But I’ve seen people in pain. Heads and bodies stored in steel tanks, awaiting the moment when medicine advances to the point where tissue can be repaired and bodies revived, are pointedly referred to not as remains or cadavers but as “patients.” A stopped heart is seen as no good reason to stop fighting for your life. “My husband has said, on numerous occasions, ‘Choose life at any cost,’ ” Peggy says.
He would like to live in a futarchy, and an effective cryonic preservation would improve his chances of seeing one. As an economist with an interest in political institutions, Robin came up with the concept of futarchy, a form of government in which prediction markets would be used to determine the viability of various policies. But I think of myself as the kind of person who is willing to suffer quite a bit of change in lifestyle, culture and context if it’s a matter of that or extermination.”. “Our ancestors came across the oceans,” he says, “went across the continent. He also talks about what it means to be the kind of person willing to do what it takes to survive. Many people, most, didn’t do those things.
“We spend most of the semester talking about how people are obsessed with taking any small chance at living longer,” Robin says. His students rarely accept this framing. Like many cryonicists, he says he thinks of bodily preservation as experimental end-of-life medical care, and it is within a medical context that he typically introduces the subject of cryonics to his health economics class at George Mason. “And then when we get to cryonics, it’s: Well, who needs to live longer? What’s the point of living anyway? Why can’t we solve global hunger?”. Robin’s expertise extends to the economics of health care, a domain in which enormous amounts of money are spent on experimental procedures with only a small chance of extending life.
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