Episode 55: “The Neutral Zone” (TNG 1×26) and the Past and Future of Cryonics

Posted on by Leave a comment
Screencap from TNG episode 'The Neutral Zone' showing two people in frozen capsules.

Our new episode is available from our Podcast host here: Episode 55

We’re also listed on:

Further Reading:

Transcript

This transcript has not yet been edited for clarity or accuracy; it will be updated soon.

Charles 0:23
Hello and welcome to assigned scientist at bachelors. I’m Charles and I’m an entomologist.

Tessa 0:28
And I’m Tessa and I’m an astrobiologist.

Charles 0:30
And today it’s just the two of us to talk about the Star Trek The Next Generation episode, the neutral zone, as well as cryonics and cryo preservation. More generally, the neutral zone is the 26th episode of the first season of Star Trek The Next Generation and from the Wikipedia page on the episode which normally I would go you know me, I would go to Memory Alpha, but they don’t have a succinct summary. So quote, in the neutral zone, the enterprise is sent to investigate the destruction of Federation outpost near space controlled by the Romulan Star Empire, discovering a derelict Earth satellite with cryogenically frozen humans aboard. Unquote. So there’s kind of two aspects of this episode one of which I don’t care about in the slightest, and one of which I am interested in and the one that I don’t care about at all that I imagine Tesla you also are not Yeah,

Tessa 1:27
no, it’s basically the Federation, the Romulans are upset that someone’s destroying their bases and they never actually explained who’s destroying their bases. There’s kind of a

Charles 1:36
there’s no resolution to that plot. And the most notable thing is just that one of the Romulans is played by Mark Alaimo. Alonzo, I don’t know, but better known to people with taste as gold takot, one of the primary antagonists of the markedly superior Series, Star Trek Deep Space Nine. No offense, any tng heads out there. Listen, we’re all homosexual obsessed with Patrick Stewart in the late 80s, obviously, but one thing that always occurs to me when I revisit tng episodes is that some of them are really good. A lot. A lot of them are not.

Tessa 2:19
Yeah, yeah. It Yeah.

Charles 2:21
So that said, the other aspect of the episode is these three individuals who are chronically frozen, and then are brought to the enterprise and revived Tessa, how did this how did this episode treat you?

Tessa 2:35
I mean, I, it was interesting seeing the people have been revived to our from much closer in our time period, sort of react to the future, which you know, is more of a direct sort of viewer circuit than I think we get in a lot of Star Trek. So that was interesting.

Charles 3:00
Okay, now that we’ve established the episode, it says, Why don’t you treat the people to an abridged history of cryonics.

Tessa 3:09
The idea first appeared in fiction and and a 1931 short story called The Jameson satellite, which is about professor who builds a rocket and tells his nephew to put his body and freeze it in the rocket, and then shoot it in space. And then 40 million years later, long after humanity has gone extinct. Aliens show up find his body and placed his brain in a robot body. And then he goes on and has a bunch of swashbuckling, planetary romance type adventures. And that might have been the end of it except as a child, a guy named Robert Pittenger read this book and just became completely fixated on it, the idea that you could preserve a body of someone after they died, and then potentially revive that person at some point in the future. He wrote the first sort of, I don’t want to say it’s an academic book on the subject, because it’s, it’s really not but the first popular text on the subject called the prospect of immortality in 1962. That basically, kick started the idea. It was very popular at the time, and the counterculture movement, and a lot of people interested in it also, especially in the 70s and 80s, for whatever reason, tended to be very into libertarianism, Austin had to be in the space colonization. And also later on, really gotten to nanotechnology for reasons we will discuss. And there’s a great book on the subject called the visioneers by W. Patrick McCray, if you want to full history of it. And then it just kind of waned in terms of popularity and interest during the 80s 90s. I mean, you’d still see it infection occasionally, but it was considered basically a fringe topic. Up until about oh, about 10 years ago in which the tech bros in Silicon Valley got really into it. So that’s basically the abridged history of the idea of cryonics. The prospect of immortality is just an incredible read. Well, actually, it’s not it’s not particularly well written. But just in terms of the sheer level of optimism and faith in science, which, you know, is the early 1960s. So that’s probably, you know, standard for the time, but editor honestly believed that it was only a matter of time before we not only cured pretty much all diseases, but also, we’re able, we’d also be able to reverse aging, and that we’d also be able to successfully and easily revive people who had been frozen. And yeah, it’s just such an artifact of that time period. And there’s a lot in there that, you know, we could do whole essays on one of my favorite lines, just in terms of the sheer amount that there’s to be unpacked. And it is, he’s talking about how you know, we may be able to reverse aging in the future, there can be no serious question about the trend of events, you and I, as resistivities as people been resuscitated after being frozen may awaken still old for long we’ll gamble with the spring lands, not to mention the young chicks, our wives. And it’s just boy howdy, is there a lot in there?

Charles 6:25
Yeah, it’s I mean, in some ways, it’s an it’s an intellectual artifact in terms of that kind of optimism. Reading part of the prospect of immortality, I got the same sense that like the same attitude that we see in a lot of Elon Musk fanboys, oh, one and like Republican legislators, and specifically anti choice people and anti abortion advocates, where there’s this very irresponsibly credulous belief in the ability of technological advancements to fix any problem.

Tessa 7:08
Yeah. And that’s probably why cryonics is sort of taken off again, with tech Bros is because they very much constantly out mindset that, well, if we throw enough engineers money at a problem, it can be solved no matter what it is.

Charles 7:21
It is really, I mean, I think there’s, there’s the jokes that we made about how Robert Pittenger was, I believe a physicist and you know, the old chestnut of physicists thinking that they can go into any field at all, and immediately be experts. Yep. No offense to physicists listening, I’m sure that you would never do that. But I do think it is really telling how much and not to get serious about it. But how much like anti trans activists, anti choice activists, cryonics people, people who are not actively engaged with the work of biology as a discipline have this this very inaccurate view of it being much simpler and more straightforward than it is, and a refusal to meaningfully engage with how profoundly messy and complicated Yep, and situational so much of of biological life is, with chronics I think that there’s this this attitude of like, well, we’ve done all of this other stuff, clearly, we’re gonna be able to solve these problems. Right? And it’s like, maybe not, maybe if you freeze the body, that’s, that’s the end of the road. Powell.

Tessa 8:48
Yeah. That’s one of the most fascinating things about it, is that it’s just like, oh, well, you know, if we, if you point out that, hey, you have ice crystals forming in your cells, and pretty much all gonna be shredded, and you’ll be mush if they throw you out. So like, oh, well, we’ll just inject you with antifreeze, basically cryoprotectants and a, assuming that you could properly perfuse the entire body reliably with this anti freeze, which may or may not be a given operationally, there have been some accounts of freezing where like, it was very obvious that they did not get full perfusion. You know, those compounds are also pretty toxic. And you know, even then, it’s, you’re assuming that you’ll be able to flush them out and then restart the brain and body after clinical death. And this is actually why a lot of the people who were in it also got to nanotechnologies when they first realized the difficulties involved with just simply warming a body back up and hoping they’ll spring back to life. They’re like, Oh, well, it’s no problem. We’ll use either these miraculous nanobots to either repair all the damage, or just the skin To the middleman and directly upload the brain, which as we’ve, as we’ve put, we’ve put that up. Yeah, hey, that that’s cheating, that does not count. It’s not the same. It’s not the same, but also more to the point. We don’t even know if we can do that, like reliably. Yeah. You know, that may not the information in the brain may be stored in such a way that it is not amenable to just pumping you full of nanobots, which also may not be physically possible to construct and having them send out I don’t know, LIDAR pulses and mapping your neurons structure.

Charles 10:34
I mean, I think that there are a couple of, of aspects to this conversation. There’s sort of the the physical aspects of cryonics and whether it’s actually possible. And then there is the question of death, and what counts is death and when you’re dead, and then when you’re undead also, and then sort of more to the point of the episode, sort of insofar as there is an interesting kernel in the neutral zone, which, frankly, is not a great episode. It’s the question of, even if you could do this, like, even if you could come back, you get there in the future, they fix all of your physical problems, you’re living on Easy Street, is this actually something that would be good to do either on a broad cultural level? Or a very specific personal level? Like, do you want to go to sleep dead? And then wake up in 300 years?

Tessa 11:34
Right? Because I mean, you know, talk about cultural shock.

Charles 11:37
Yeah. So yeah, let’s begin with the physical aspects, which was also we’ve already been talking about a little bit, as far as I can tell, the general consensus of like, not to be insulting, but grounded individuals, seems to be that the physical challenge of preserving the whole human body in a state where it would be able to come back without being riddled with a ton of new problems. Maybe at some point in the future, that might be possible, but it certainly is not possible now.

Tessa 12:16
Yeah. Or honestly, in the foreseeable future. And I will also point out that we are not discussing here actual medical techniques using induced hypothermia. Well see

Charles 12:27
this is this is what I was about to say, which is that cryonics as a whole is not grounded in reality. Yeah. But, but the idea for chronics didn’t come out of nowhere. Right. And so there are some techniques that are that maybe you recall, some of the things that cryonics are trying to do that are actually real things that people do, for example,

Tessa 12:54
yeah, for example, emergency preservation and resuscitation is basically if it’s sort of a bit of heroic medicine, where if you’ve sustained, massive physical trauma, gunshot wound car accident, there are protocols, they’re not very often used, but there are protocols where they will lower your body temperature to about 10 degrees Celsius above freezing, so you’re not truly frozen. But you’re definitely in deep medical hypothermia.

Charles 13:22
I mean, putting that into Fahrenheit because we’re red blooded Americans.

Tessa 13:28
So yeah, about 4045 degrees Fahrenheit, right. And

Charles 13:32
the normal internal temperature is like in the 90s.

Tessa 13:36
Yeah, 9798. And that does indeed, slow down metabolic reactions, which is also the idea behind cryonics is that, you know, you slow down these biological reactions, in the case of products, it’s to prevent, like, just decay, your corpse rotting, in the case of this medical technique, and discussing, it’s to reduce the oxygen consumption of the brain and therefore stave off brain death, which, and you know, these sorts of situations would normally occur within a couple of minutes. Using this technique, you can stretch it to about an hour or so, which the idea is it gives trauma surgeons more time to operate and patch you up. So that, you know, just don’t bleed out in the table and die. They, as soon as they’re done, they raise you back up to like, close to normal temperatures, and then gradually raise you up over the course of that two days to normal body temperature and before they like, bring you back to consciousness. So, you know, that is what I think that sort of thing is probably what cryonics is aiming for, however, because they are so determined to preserve you for hundreds of years. They step across the threshold from doable to very, very questionable.

Charles 14:49
Yeah. And as as you’ve reference, I don’t know how explicitly people are I think we all have a, we generally we have We’re all familiar with refrigerators. So we have a sense of a cooler temperature, preventing decomposition and rot. But I don’t know how much the actual mechanism of what’s happening there is clear to people. And it’s because these low temperatures, as you said, cease. There is like a temperature range in which biological reactions can happen.

Tessa 15:32
Yeah, that basically, and a lot of it’s just basic, like thermodynamics. Most chemical reactions happen more slowly, if the temperature is cooler. And this is especially true for biology. Well,

Charles 15:45
don’t get just thinking about now we’re into thermodynamics. Yeah, we’re not gonna get too deep into the weeds with this, just physicists are gonna get a big head, they’re gonna think, see, our expertise is irrelevant. But yeah, I actually just worked on a script about permafrost, which was very cool. And particularly how you get these permafrost mummies of these, like whole organisms, in some cases, like they’ve uncovered multiple whole body baby mammoths from like 10s of 1000s of years ago that are in incredible condition, because they’ve just been frozen for this whole time. But notably, they, when they thought they did not come back to life, right. So there’s that. And then another idea that I wanted to mention briefly is a lot of theories like cryonics Institute’s and including the prospect of immortality, they make reference to the success in in particularly, like fertility medicine, of cryopreservation of sperm, or embryos, and like holding that up as an example of something that was frozen, gets D thawed, then goes on to perform its biological function successfully. I mean, among ideas, is that these are among the less, it’s not a whole organ. It’s a cell or a couple of cells. So like, don’t get up on too high.

Tessa 17:24
You’re talking orders of magnitude more complex than, you know, a fully grown human being

Charles 17:28
right, especially because sperm cells are basically, in my recollection of cellular biology. sperm cells are basically as simple as you’re gonna get. They’re small, and they have almost nothing. Their only job is to just transfer DNA. And even sometimes, that flying does not work. But there is another process that sometimes gets brought up that I actually I fact checked a different script about cryonics and cryopreservation. And it talked briefly about the process of vitrification. It says, are you familiar with this? Yeah,

Tessa 18:06
so basically, you know, I mentioned that normally, when you freeze biological organisms, you get ice crystals forming, which are bad because they will literally just poke holes in everything. You know, at a microscopic scale. vitrification is the idea that basically, you lower the temperature in such a way and you usually use antifreeze for this as well, that things do reach effectively a frozen state, but they never form crystals. Instead, you have this weird amorphous class like substance, hence the name vitrification. You know, vetra means class. That’s what you need to do. If you’re hoping to preserve biological samples using extremely cold temperatures.

Charles 18:48
The idea being that if you’re replacing the water, then the water cannot form ice crystals and then removing that, you know, freezing element, then will result in minimal like deformation of the tissue afterwards, I saw at least one of these like cryonics Institute’s bring up vitrification as a possibility of like, Ah ha, you’re always talking about freezing damage. But what about this? And it’s like, okay, human body is a is a massively complex collection of tissues. There’s a lot going on in here.

Tessa 19:31
And not to mention a lot of that is still predicated on the idea that you’re using these, you know, anti freeze prior protections that I mentioned earlier, which are very toxic.

Charles 19:40
Right? Yes. Where it’s like, okay, we gotta Okay, let’s think about this. So but that’s really the the physical element of like, Is this possible? Probably not. Is it possible right now? Definitely not. Yeah. Are any of the people who are currently being kept Which frozen, ever gonna be revived? It’s I’m not a betting man. And also, I think that question is going to be answered on a on a timespan longer than my lifetime. So it would be no use to bet on that anyway. But if if I were a gambling man, I would say absolutely not. Yeah, there’s

Tessa 20:17
a low probability event. And I mean, the argument they make instead is that oh, well, even if it’s a low probability event, it’s still a higher probability than the zero probability if you just die and decompose under normal circumstances. Yeah, but I’m very skeptical that I

Charles 20:36
just, and I was thinking about this last night, because I, the prospect of immortality introduces five different distinct concepts for death. And so I was reading, I was trying to look into sort of the history and the philosophy of biological death. And I started thinking about like, crayon Asus don’t consider a lot of the bodies that they’re preserving, or that they want to preserve as being debt, like meaningfully dead, because they think that they’re in a state of like, D animation, but as is kind of a weird, like medical coma. Yeah, right. And there’s this there’s a liminality to that, that I am not particularly comfortable with. And I was thinking about a Bob’s Burgers episode. Where are you familiar with? How familiar are you with? I’ve seen a few episodes. It’s a good show. I recently watched all of it. And then I watched the movie. And then I was like, I don’t know what I want to watch now. So I just watched. I just watched all of it again. And then I watched the movie again. It’s a very good, like, TV show movie. Anyway, there’s one episode where Bob and Linda who are the parents of the Belter family are talking about what they want to happen to their bodies after they die. And there’s like this whole episode long disagreement between them, where Linda wants to be cremated, and Bob wants them to be buried together in a cemetery under a tree so that their kids can come visit them. And part of Linda’s argument is like, what if they bury me alive? And Baba is like, I don’t think they do that anymore. She’s like, it could happen. I want to be cremated so that there is no question when I’m dead. I’m gone. And I kind of, I kind of feel that way about cryopreservation. Where it’s like when I’m dead. I’m baby. I’m dead. Yeah, yeah. There’s no coming back from it. And as I believe I’ve said before, on the podcast, I want my body. Well, I want them to shell that thing out like an avocado and spread out my organs to as many people as possible, and then I want to be composted. I think that’s overall, like best case scenario. And as we’ve established your plan, is that to put your brain and your wife’s brain in a galaxy, exploring robot, and yeah, go around all over. But that does leave your physical body to be hauled out like an avocado.

Tessa 23:07
Yeah, exactly. You know, I’d rather those organs go to people who can use them more than I can at that point. Absolutely.

Charles 23:12
But yeah, so then talking about death, he defines five different kinds of death, quote, in fact, we recognize at least five kinds of death, which must be kept firmly in mind. The first is clinical death, quote, its criteria being cessation of heartbeat and breathing, then biological death, which is, quote, the state from which resuscitation of the body as a whole is impossible by currently known means, then cellular death, which is, quote, the irreversible degeneration of the individual tiny cells of our bodies, as well as legal death and cultural death, which I think he establishes as more cultural ideas rather than biologically meaningful ones. And this is interesting, because one thing in particular that I hadn’t considered, but that the definition of death, like the point at which a body was considered dead, radically changed in the past 100 years. And I

Tessa 24:09
mean, there actually is like good bioethics and philosophy type discussions to have about this very subject, because it has changed as medicine has changed,

Charles 24:18
right. And particularly as sort of a major turning point, that multiple sources that I found identified was around the invention of mechanical respirators in the 1950s. At that point, your body could be kept breathing, even if your brain was not able to keep it breathing. And this sort of heralded a change from you know, is are you breathing too? Is your brain able to control like autonomic functions like that? And thus, the introduction of the concept of brain death? Right. And I think at that it’s interesting and potentially potentially not coincidental, that that change happened. Not super long before the introduction of cryonics as kind of an identifiable movement. It is

Tessa 25:09
not hard at all to imagine that, you know, Robert editor and his buddies were just like, well, we can do this. But imagine what we’ll be able to do in another 50 years, you know, just assume that this trend in being able to, you know, further push back death will just continue indefinitely.

Charles 25:24
Yeah, I also reading the prospect of death. I was kind of like, I gotta understand how Scientology got started now.

Tessa 25:31
Yeah, yeah, very much from the same era, there was just something

Charles 25:34
in the air, something in the water and the American mid century have just like this absolute credulousness about biological possibility, which I can’t happen to personally, but it kind of also reminds me of I recently started listening to the podcast behind the bastards. And I listened to some of their more recent episodes on Hellenic blocky,

Tessa 26:02
oh, yeah, there was a lot of crazy stuff that came out of her to

Charles 26:05
write and it made reference to sort of the spiritualist movement of and how the division between sort of spiritual and paranormal phenomena, and what we would probably in the mainstream now recognize as sort of empirically scientific phenomena, it was much more porous, because so much stuff was totally new, where it’s like, if you can figure out electricity, maybe there are ghosts, right, exactly. And I wonder if there’s sort of a similar phenomenon happening and like the mid 20th century of like, so much stuff is happening that like, if we can, you know, identify and sequence the, the DNA in our cells that control like inheritance of biological traits, maybe we could just freeze people and live forever. Yep. And I wonder, I feel like we’ve we don’t have that right now. But maybe I, maybe I’m the fool. And maybe I’m just grossly underestimating the boundaries of human possibility.

Tessa 27:15
Maybe I’m gonna still hedge on the side of skepticism.

Charles 27:22
I probably will as well. But there is something interesting there. I think in the various concepts of death, I mean, not to get serious again, but it does kind of get into a lot of anti choice. I always just comes back to this, like the flattening of the complexities of life where like, life is not an on offs date, it’s, you know, it’s not a light switch. There are gradations. And it’s a process and our bioethics are never going to be robust. If we cannot account for how massively complex the whole question of life is to begin with, yeah, what I mean, yeah, yeah,

Tessa 28:08
it’s a very, very gross simplification of a very, very complex process.

Charles 28:13
And so similarly, death is not an on off kind of a thing, except when it is, sometimes when you’re dead, you’re just dead. But, you know, and I

Tessa 28:23
mean, that also can get back into thermodynamics and information theory, but we’re not going to get there because that’s a whole other episode,

Charles 28:29
we would never act like physicists. So that’s that, and then getting maybe most directly to the actual content of the episode, where the the most interesting aspect of bits fine kind of an episode of tng is this question of like, dying, and then waking up in a totally alien environment, 300 years in the future? And whether that is even something that you would want to do, which, frankly, I don’t know. Thanks.

Tessa 29:06
Yeah. I mean, it really kind of raises the question of whether or not that would actually be desirable from like, a psychological point of view. Because potentially, you’d be all by yourself, you know, you’ve lost everyone you’ve ever known. And you’re in a completely different environment. That’s a lot to adjust to.

Charles 29:24
Yeah, I mean, I’m calling you from the perspective of, I’ve never adjusted to change Well, whenever I move somewhere, it takes me a full calendar year to like adjust to being in a new place. So if I suddenly woke up 300 years in the future, everyone I’ve ever known, everyone I’ve ever loved, has been dead for hundreds of years. And suddenly I have to adjust to a whole new situation and now we’re in space and there’s this alien. A lot is happening. I don’t think that I would bounce back from that particularly well. But even in general, if you I mean, that’s the really the thing that gets me about cryonics of like, if it were a very short term thing, I have a terminal illness right now. But it’s possible that in like 10 years, we’ll have come up with a cure for it, that I can understand because you’re still meaningfully in the lifetime of your own life. But even then, it’s like, that’s 10 years that your loved ones, your friends, the world as a whole has been going on without you being aware of it. And anyway, like, that’s bad enough, but then waking up with no anchor meaningfully, except that presumably, you’re waking up among members of your own species, one would hope but even the language changes in 300 years, but I guess it kind of I’m coming at it with the perspective of I, if I were suddenly put inside of Elon Musk’s head, I think I would immediately die from shock. And, but I guess if you have the kind of mindset that makes cryonics make sense to you in the first place, you might also still believe I’ll be able to adjust pretty quickly. Oh, yeah, yeah,

Tessa 31:22
I mean, you know, these are people who are just full of people with very high opinions of themselves and their capabilities. So I think that that follows

Charles 31:33
it. And to be charitable, I think it’s even a level of just like confidence and optimism, that I have never been able to access for a single moment of my entire human life. Maybe he’s born with it. Maybe it’s Generalized Anxiety Disorder. But yeah, I, it’s I, I wouldn’t do it,

Tessa 31:55
I’d like to think I would probably adapt a little bit better. You know, just because you’ve mentioned before this kind of difference between, you know, the ADHD brain and the autism brain that I actually do well, relatively well with novelty, but even then, it would still be a lot. I don’t necessarily consider it to be an optimal outcome. You know, I would love to see how the future turns out. I don’t know if I want to know that badly, though.

Charles 32:22
I mean, I think there’s a difference between knowing how things turn out and having to also be there. Yeah, that’s true. That’s very true. On the other hand, the the situation for the three people in Star Trek, I mean, putting aside the loss of everything, and everyone you’ve ever loved, it’s a pretty plum situation, because they get free medical care. And then they get to go to Earth where they will never have to worry about material security, again, in their whole life. And we

Tessa 32:51
should probably actually talk a little bit more about the episode is that you know, it they again, this is not a great episode, but they did manage to, I guess, get a pretty good spread of people, you know, and the three people that are revived one was a very rich finance dude, I think, who was very, very put out to realize that money didn’t mean anything more than 21st century. One was like a some sort of rock star, I think. And the third and most sympathetic one was like basically a housewife who hadn’t even signed up to be frozen her husband and did it after she died. And she was actually pretty shocked by this, understandably so.

Charles 33:32
Yeah. The finance guy. I mean, I guess for him, it’s not great because he thinks he’s going to die, and then wake up and be magnificently wealthy. Then it turns out that we have moved beyond the concept of currencies as humans, but yeah, I liked the musician guy, except for the fact that he kept sexually harassing Dr. Crusher.

Tessa 33:55
Yeah, that was not great. I mean, come on, man. It might be on brand but it was not great.

Charles 34:01
No, I did get the sense from him that you know, he gets one talking to a buddy. It’s the 24th century and then he would be he seemed like a an overall genial fellow. But yeah, and then part of the episode was about Romulans. Who cares in terms of like the pantheon of canonical Star Trek, aliens, Romulans. I, I can’t. Yeah, yeah,

Tessa 34:27
they just aren’t that interesting.

Charles 34:29
There’s not really a lot there. I’m sure that there are Romulan stands in the audience potentially. And I’m, I’m sorry to insult you, but I don’t get it because like Kardashians, all Kardashians are bastards. But they have a lot of not in tng really. But in Deep Space Nine, they have so much compelling stuff. Some of the best episodes of GS nine are about Kardashians and about how terrible Kardashian society is like the episode where miles gets put on trial. Ill anyone was dies. That’s great right episode were with Amon Maritza great episode. God I love to play offline that’s basically what I’ve got on on cryonics.

Tessa 35:16
Yeah, I will say one other minor tidbit that I found amusing is that yeah, again, we haven’t established that cryonics. Reviving those who have been chronically Frozen is impossible. extremely unlikely. But you know, for Robert Edie injure himself, I can’t help but hope that it doesn’t work out because I was looking this up and it turned out he had both his first wife and a second wife, cryogenically frozen, so if in some event, the three of them are ever resurrected, that’s going to be awkward. Oh, wait,

Charles 35:45
this actually does get into another thing of he in the prospect for immortality he had a paragraph quote, can families be kept together will widowers and widows be allowed to marry again in the first life? What will happen to the resuscitated person confronted with two or more ex husbands or wives? Is there a conflict between the freezer program and religion? Or should the freezers be considered merely the latest and a long series of medical efforts to save and prolong like, it’s like these are hilariously these are a lot of the same questions that ascertain these are not questions that are unfamiliar to me as somebody who grew up deeply embedded in the Christian church. Oh, yeah. But instead of it being what will happen after people get revived from being cryogenically frozen it’s how are we going to deal with this and haven’t

Tessa 36:36
ya know what that I hadn’t thought about that? That’s a very good point

Charles 36:39
six of one half dozen of the you know what I mean? And both, depending on who you ask are about equally likely to happen? Well, it’s tested if people want to find you online, where should they look?

Tessa 36:54
They can find me on Twitter at spacer mais SP AC er NSC, or my website Tessa fisher.com. And if

Charles 37:01
they want to find the show, we are on Twitter at ASAP pod or at our website where we post show notes and transcripts for every episode ASAP. podcast.com. Thank you to Nicole pekovic, friend of the pod and previous guests for our intro music. And if you were always looking for guests on the podcast, if you were if you are a trans person in science, both trans and science being fairly broadly defined there, we have an interest form that you can fill out linked on our website or you can contact us through the contact form on our website or at a sap pod@gmail.com

Tessa 37:40
And until next time, keep on science-ing.

tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s