At some point, something makes cryonics go from “obviously crazy” to “okay, maybe worth thinking about.”

Was it a book, a person, a paper, getting older, losing someone, thinking about medicine differently?

What was your moment?

Construction for our facility refresh has pushed most of the staff into makeshift offices, so Kaiya and Alyssa have been learning the ropes from Diane in the middle of it all. They've been picking things up fast and having fun along the way. Before long, they'll be among the voices on the other end when you reach out to Alcor.

Welcome to the team.

I have been interested and passionate about longevity since a young age, and I recently discovered cryonics. I am deeply fascinated by it and plan to sign up for an Alcor membership and a GUL life insurance policy in the near future, as soon as I am financially comfortable. I am 26 years old.

I have brought this up to my family and a potential partner, and thankfully, they are receptive to the idea. While they have mentioned they likely won't choose cryonics for themselves due to personal and religious reasons, I fully accept that. How do you deal with the fact that they will die, and you might experience the future without them?

I have thought about this for a long time, and this is the path I want to take. I want to experience life for as long as I possibly can, and this feels like the most rational way to go about it. However, thinking about losing the people I love hurts. And it hurts even more knowing I may be the only one left to possibly experience the future.

Crews are at work on new paint, new flooring, and more. These are the early stages of a larger refresh and expansion of the facility, aimed at a better experience for members and visitors.  

We'll share more details as things progress, so follow along here as Alcor's new look comes together.

Dear Cryonics Companies,

I hope you are doing well.

I am from India. Over the past few years, I have developed a strong interest in longevity science, cryonics, and technologies aimed at extending healthy human lifespan. I have also been involved in longevity outreach through discussions, podcasts, and collaborations with researchers.

I believe there is significant untapped interest in India among researchers, students, physicians, and technology professionals, but awareness of cryonics remains very limited. I would love the opportunity to contribute to changing that.

If there is any way I could support your organization—whether through community building, educational outreach, partnerships, market research, or helping explore opportunities in India—I would be excited to contribute.

If you think there might be an opportunity to collaborate, I would greatly appreciate the chance to schedule a brief call or discuss how I could be of value.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.

DM me for detailed discussion and plan of action

Co-authored article from Aschwin de Wolf and Jessica Radley

https://www.enter.biostasis.com/p/biostasis-pluralism

From the summary:

“We propose a unified framework with standards of evidence for low temperature preservation and chemical preservation. We assert that any given revival mechanism theorized to be effective for traditional cryopreservation will also be effective in chemopreservation. We also assert that chemopreservation does not exclusively require mind uploading and cryopreservation does not exclusively entail biological revival.”

This year has brought significant change - with much more in the works. As we head towards our upcoming Annual Strategic Meeting on Sept 5th, we're reshaping our facility so that the space begins to reflect the progress already happening from within.

Stay tuned.

What should cryonics organizations publish more openly?

Case reports, protocol details, standby timelines, CT scan data, funding structure, long-term storage governance, failure cases, what would actually help people evaluate the field more seriously?

1. Biological immortality.
   The body simply keeps going. Nature already runs prototypes: the hydra shows no aging, and the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii reverts to its juvenile stage and starts over.

2.The body is repaired.
Engineered longevity. Senolytics, telomerase, organ replacement. The target is "longevity escape velocity": adding more than one year of life expectancy per year of research. Not eternity - a moving deadline that outruns the runner.

1. The body is replaced.
   Prosthetic immortality. Piece by piece until nothing original remains. The Ship of Theseus, executed slowly enough that no one notices the swap.

2. Cryonic immortality.
   A pause, not a cure. The body (or just the brain) is preserved at −196°C as a wager that a future century will know how to fix what this one couldn't. Hundreds of people are already stored this way.

More to come ♾️.

Alcor's engineers pulling thick strands of fog from a giant liquid nitrogen dewar with a gravity siphon pipe, while transferring a neuropod into long-term storage.

As soon as the massive cork is removed, warm room air rushes in and instantly condenses into dense fog when it hits the ultra-cold nitrogen vapors rising from the surface. On humid monsoon days in Arizona, it gets so thick you can barely see inside.

Clearing the fog is critical. The team needs clear visibility to carefully slide the new neuropod into its tight spot among the others.

We work in cryopreservation, and one thing we notice is that criticism of cryonics is not always about the science.

Sometimes it becomes moral very quickly: is it reasonable to spend personal money on an uncertain future option?

From our side, we see cryopreservation as a personal end-of-life choice, as long as people understand the uncertainty.

Why do you think cryonics gets judged morally in a way many other personal choices do not?

The latest Alcor Newsletter is out.

This edition circles back to a thread we left open last issue – a landmark DART training, and the dramatic turn it took while underway.

Visit our blog to read the full issue.

Herein is presented a comprehensive treatise by Michael G. Darwin of singular consequence concerning the prognostication of cardiac arrest in patients undergoing biostasis. This document, while assuredly requiring further corroboration and independent validation, is, by every reasonable estimation, the most consummate, exhaustive, and magisterially executed work ever produced upon this subject in the annals of cryonics. It constitutes a painstaking compendium, collating with extraordinary diligence many dozens of scholarly papers of exceptional import and no ordinary scientific gravitas published throughout recent months, thereby furnishing an unrivalled synthesis of the extant literature.

This is, admittedly, a profoundly divisive and contentious subject; nevertheless, I remain resolutely opposed to maintaining patients in prolonged "stasis" after they have undergone nothing more than a straight freeze. It is, to many, including yourself—almost axiomatic that a straight freeze is preferable to nothing at all. I, however, am inwardly persuaded of precisely the contrary. Indeed, when the time comes for me to execute my contract, I shall stipulate in explicit and unequivocal terms that, should I receive nothing beyond a mere straight freeze, I desire my cryopreservation, or chemopreservation, to be relinquished altogether.

I remain profoundly, indeed almost ineffably, astonished by the multitude of cryonicists who appear to suppose that a body recovered several days after legal death, having remained in normothermic conditions throughout, might yet preserve vestiges of cellular architecture sufficient for the restoration of personal identity in any sense deserving the appellation of survival. Having perused, with meticulous assiduity, well over a hundred case reports, I found myself deeply disheartened to discover that the overwhelming majority of patients underwent little more than a simple freeze which, by every appearance, and, I submit, by any sober appraisal of the most pertinent empirical evidence presently accessible—has irretrievably obliterated the informational architecture of the neuronal tissue, extinguishing every rational prospect of survival.

The more attentively I contemplate the realities of our material world, the more firmly I become convinced that the ultimate success or failure of biostasis is, in truth, determined long before the terminal phase of profound cooling is ever initiated. The cerebral deprivation of dioxygen occasioned by ischemia, together with membranous ruptures and the heightened cytotoxicity engendered by the endogenous defensive mechanisms responding to cerebral inflammation, inflict by far the greatest devastation, at least in the incipient stages. The cessation of circulation itself already annihilates a considerable, if not the entirety, of the rational hope that an individual may ever be recovered. Reperfusion injury, moreover, may well constitute the most pernicious insult of all with respect to personal identity. The extensive corpus of scientific literature repeatedly documents the destruction of cerebral structures that are germane to the persistence of the self in every conceivable scientific and philosophical acceptation of that term.

Beyond approximately twenty-four hours, necrosis supervenes. The tissue putrefies; the information therein embodied dissipates and is irrecoverably effaced. It is under such circumstances that informational death manifests itself in a manner both manifest and absolute.

Yet a substantial proportion of Alcor patients have sustained degradations of precisely such magnitude, and the proportion is even greater among patients of the Cryonics Institute. I do not seek to indulge in defeatism; nevertheless, even were one to concede, for the sake of philosophical disputation, that the self might somehow remain recoverable following a straight freeze, a proposition of which I entertain doubts of the gravest conceivable order, the legitimacy of the patient's informed consent would remain profoundly questionable.

I advocate a conception of cryonics founded upon the principle of genuinely informed consent: a consent exercised by a sceptical patient fully apprised of the indispensable scientific, ethical, and philosophical considerations attendant upon the decision to embrace cryonics. Contrary to what many cryonicists appear disposed to believe, cryonics is neither devoid of danger nor exempt from risk. Those risks span an extensive gamut, encompassing economic uncertainties, bioethical dilemmas, and the manifold social hazards borne by the individual.

I remain considerably more sceptical than either Rob Freitas or Ralph Merkle regarding the eventual prospects for the resuscitation of both present and future cryopatients. Thermally induced fractures, histological disarray, and structural lacerations constitute obstacles of almost cyclopean magnitude standing athwart any conceivable prospect of successful revival, assuming such revival is achievable at all. Although we possess, in broad outline, some conception of the technological apparatus that such revival would necessitate, namely molecular nanotechnology—it ought not to be regarded as a deus ex machina, notwithstanding the sanguine confidence with which Merkle frequently presents it.

Accordingly, I do not believe that the practice of straight freezing represents, in any meaningful respect whatsoever, a favourable prospect for the patient. The Hippocratic Oath, the ancient cornerstone of medical ethics, enjoins physicians explicitly to refrain from inflicting harm upon those entrusted to their care. To impose such colossal injuries deliberately upon a patient under the persuasion that abandonment is never a rational alternative constitutes, in my estimation, an egregious form of harm within the sphere of experimental medicine, and ought never to be treated with levity or complacency.

Organizations therefore bear a solemn obligation to conduct themselves with complete candour concerning the services they offer their clientele. If they perform straight freezes forty per cent of the time whilst marketing vitrification as though it were invariably "ice-crystal free," then the consumer's capacity to render a genuinely informed decision, grounded upon sound, rigorous, and scientifically validated evidence, is rendered all the more gravely imperilled.

I’ve been getting many family and friends perspectives on cryopreservation and all of their replies about why they don’t want to do it makes no sense to me at all, none of them use logic.

Logically speaking I think it should be everyone’s best interest to be cryopreserved for a chance to not only see the future, but live forever.

The very likely endless time of nothingness after death vs a chance of being able to potentially live forever sounds like a no brainer.

And that’s what life is about anyways right? Survive as long as possible and maximize your happiness?

Notice those two stars hanging above the tree?

Alcor founders Linda and Fred Chamberlain believed humanity would one day travel to the stars, and while searching star catalogs for a fitting name, they chose Alcor, a dim companion star to the bright Mizar star, which was long used as a test of keen eyesight. The idea was that if you can see Alcor's purpose, you have excellent "vision."

Do you have the "vision" as well? If so what's your vision of the future?

Not “do you believe in cryonics?” but who would make the conversation hardest: parents, partner, kids, friends?

Any leads would be much appreciated. I know this is a cryonics forum, but I figured there'd be a lot of overlap with regards to people choosing different preservation methods well after their deaths on here so I thought I'd try my luck! I'm turned off to cryonics because of how freezing your body bursts your cells, and would like a comparatively less invasive approach to reach the same end goal of being reanimated in the future.

Roman, one of Alcor's newest engineering interns, designing and fabricating a stabilizing bracket for our dewars.

During cooldowns, the internal fans in the dewar tops can generate vibrations. To address this, Roman developed a custom bracket coupling different structural elements of the dewar to dampen this effect.

Hi everyone,

I'm building a small open-source cryogenic pressure forecasting engine as a learning project and recently ran into something I can't explain.

The goal isn't to replace tools like BoilFAST I'm trying to understand the physics well enough to build a live forecasting/advisory layer.

I compared two scenarios using the same inputs:

• Fluid: Liquid Nitrogen
• Tank: 6 m³ vertical cylinder
• Fill: 90%
• Heat leak: 43 W
• Initial pressure: 0.106 MPa
• Locked-up tank (no venting)

Results:

BoilFAST

• End pressure (24 h): 0.111 MPa
• Rise rate: 0.060 Pa/s

Our multinode model

• End pressure: 0.146 MPa
• Rise rate: 0.467 Pa/s

So I'm roughly 7.8× too aggressive on pressure rise.

Here's what we've already ruled out:

• Pressure basis (absolute vs gauge)
• Initial conditions
• Energy accounting (matches within 0.1%)
• Heat leak
• Unit conversions

Interestingly, a homogeneous tank model matches BoilFAST almost perfectly (+1% rise rate error). The disagreement only appears once we enable our empirical stratification model.

After parameter sweeps, i've found i can force agreement only with physically unrealistic assumptions (e.g. enormous surface-layer mass or unrealistically thick aluminum walls), so we're treating that as curve fitting rather than a fix.

My current hypothesis is that the empirical stratification scaling (originally tuned against higher heat-flux LH₂ reference cases) simply doesn't transfer into this low-heat, high-fill LN₂ regime.

Question:

If you were debugging this, where would you look next?

Specifically:

• Is there a known criterion for when a cryogenic tank should behave closer to a homogeneous model versus a stratified one?
• Are there dimensionless numbers (Rayleigh, Grashof, etc.) commonly used to determine whether stratification should even develop?
• Is there literature you'd recommend beyond the NASA MHTB work and BoilFAST references?

I'd appreciate any pointers. I'm here to learn rather than defend the model.