Cryonics for Beginners or How to get a head in life

My can of beer (yes I still haven't made that batter for fish and chips) in plastic ice

I picked my fake ICE today. A few days ago I went to the Tilt sale. Since the show is not being renewed for another season they were having a sale on all kinds of stuff. Clothing, lamp shades, large over sized dice, metal cookie containers shaped like bowling balls, poker chips, picture frames, all kinds of surplus stuff.

My big purchase was a tub of ICE complete with an ice bucket. One of those plastic buckets that you would find at at hotel. The nice thing of having fake ice is that you can shoot it without worrying about it melting. Good for continuity and less messy. The only problem with this ice is that it doesn't float. D'oh!

Which brings me to cryonics. Last thursday I went to the Toronto cryonics meeting. I expected to be surrounded by egg heads explaining how to cheat death by prolonging the life of humans by freezing them and bringing them back to life when a cure for whatever death causing disease was found. There were about 24 people that said they were going to show up via the internet meet up post. In the end however, only five people showed. And really only four of them were egg heads in the topic. Me being the fifth.

One guy, and I can't remember his name, was pro freezing and was telling me how he was trying to get insurance to freeze his head once he "died" of heart problems or non head crushing injury. Yes I brought that up. What happens if your head cannot be used? I wonder if that was from something I saw on futurama? ah well.

Because there's no place in Canada that does this he was checking out insurance in the States. The company Alcor was to be given money and his head should things take a turn for the worse. Oh right, the reason that only the head was to be frozen is mainly money. To freeze a whole body would cost a lot more.

One of the main problems with cryonics is when freezing the body, or organ(s) the cells are punctured by the water turning into ice and poking through the cell membrane. The process that addresses this that companies like Alcor are working on is called vitrification.

Supposedly a rabbit kidney was vitrified and restored with success. It's a far cry from the human brain but serves as a stepping stone at the very least to something seen in Futurama. If successful on a human scale the organ donar industry could make leaps and bounds in terms of storing extra parts.