I pulled up the article and noted, "He wouldn’t reveal how many people had survived as a result." How do we know anyone survived this if he won't say?
Because it's a clinical trial under extensive oversight at a major hospital. Also, a less severe version of
deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA) has enabled many thousands of people to survive up to an hour at near freezing since the late 1950s.
Do you understand the difference between resuscitation and resurrection?
Yes, of course. In fact, I understand it far better than you do.
Restoring a clinically dead but animate (metabolically active) organism with a chemical such as naloxone, chest compression, ventilation, defibrillation, or open-chest cardiac massage (OCCM) is
resuscitation.
Restoring a deanimate (metabolically highly suppressed or inactive; clinically or biologically dead) organism from suspended animation (from cryostasis to high subzero stasis to suprazero torpor) is
reanimation.
Restoring an infotheoretically dead (decomposed or cremated) organism is
resurrection.
Outside of fictional depictions such as Lazarus and
Riverworld, only the first two are currently possible.
However, the line between life and death will continue to be pushed back as medicine advances over the coming decades and centuries.
Doctors developing EPR-CAT believe it could eventually be extended to days or weeks, NASA is studying the possible development of monthslong
torpor for spaceflights to Mars and beyond,
rat kidneys have been reanimated and transplanted undamaged after one hundred days in cryostasis, people have been born from embryos suspended in cryostasis for
up to three decades, James Hiram Bedford (1893-1967) has been in cryostasis for over half a century with the goal of reanimating him centuries from now, and nematodes frozen in the last ice age were
reanimated after 46,000 years in
cryptobiosis.
Although Bedford's brain was significantly damaged by the formation of ice crystals, he may not be
infotheoretically dead, meaning that the information contained in his brain may still be retrievable and his brain may still be repairable with technologies which may be developed centuries from now, such as
molecular nanotechnology. Subsequent advances in cryopreservation have significantly improved quality: vitrification can eliminate ice crystals and intermediate temperature suspension can eliminate fractures. Both were used in
the cryopreservation of
Stephen Coles, giving him a much better chance of eventual reanimation than Bedford. Future advances such as less cytotoxic cryoprotectants will continue to improve the process until it's perfected, allowing anyone to enter cryostasis without sustaining damage and emerge unharmed centuries, millennia, or even eons later.
At the ultimate hypothetical end of this most vital spectrum lies Nick Bostrom's
simulation argument, which proposes a method by which everyone who ever lived might be resurrected by a
Kardashev-scale civilization with literally astronomical computation sufficient to simulate every possible minute variation of human history, resulting in the perfect recreation of everyone who ever lived within an astronomically larger set of alternate versions of them and of people who were never born but could have been.
Why's everyone acting like it's The Sopranos level serious?
