Only the good die young, but only the rich and naive believe they can live forever.
A Russian company named KrioRus promises to freeze and store your remains in the hopes of one day achieving immortality. The definitely-not-a-scam procedure is called “cryonics” and involves suspending a client’s brain or cadaver in a large vat of liquid nitrogen at roughly -196 degrees Celsius (or -320.8 degrees Fahrenheit) until such a time that science can figure out how to revive the client. And all it costs you is a measly $36,000.
The head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Pseudoscience Commission, Evgeny Alexandrov, described cryonics as “an exclusively commercial undertaking that does not have any scientific basis,” according to Reuters. Nevertheless, the company has already “cryopreserved 71 people and 40 pets,” per its website, so-called “patients” it houses in a corrugated shed somewhere outside Moscow.
Nothing new here. Sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León has become famous for his (likely apocryphal) pursuit of the Fountain of Youth, but he was far from the first to imagine finding a panacea for eternal life.
Circa 400 B.C., the Greek physician Ctesias, who served the Achaemenid King Artaxerxes II, professed the fountain of youth was in India. Legend holds that Alexander the Great had journeyed to India in the 4th century B.C. and sought the “water of life,” which his admiral claimed kept the natives “free from disease, and living up to a very old age.” Herodotus, too, wrote of restorative waters that gave health and longevity to the Macrobians, a legendary people inhabiting the Horn of Africa: “If the account of this fountain be true, it would be their constant use of the water from it which makes them so long-lived.”
Even the Epic of Gilgamesh, popularly held to be the first great written work, contains within it a search for immortality. Long before Hamlet, Gilgamesh grappled with the prospect of his death in the aftermath of personal loss. His solution was to try to conquer it: “Now that I have toiled and strayed so far over the wilderness, am I to sleep, and let the earth cover my head for ever? Let my eyes see the sun until they are dazzled with looking.”
Personally, I figure what’s the point of eternal life if you have to spend it living in Russia. Faced with such a prospect, I’m with the Dread Pirate Roberts: “Death first!”
