I saw this news article a while back and it just came back to me questioning its moral in catholicism.
The article read that since the late 1900s, apparently scientists have already been experimenting with freezing people with diseases (ie. Cancer) and then bringing them back to life when there’s a cure. And apparently people are still signing up for this stuff to this day.
How does this stand in the Catholic faith, what does it mean for us Catholics. I’m sure there’s a good explanation, I just can’t wrap my head around whether I should be afraid of this stuff or not.
Cryonics isn’t freezing people in time. It’s freezing their bodies in order to preserve them
after they’re dead. The idea is that if at some point in the future a way is discovered to resurrect the dead or jumpstart the heart or whatever else, you’d then be able to perform it on those bodies because the freezing process has preserved them, whereas otherwise a corpse would have decayed so much it would be much harder, if not impossible, to revive them.
Basically, in the way that it’s a whole lot more possible to shock someone’s heart back to life after one minute without a heartbeat than it is to do so if they’ve been without a heartbeat for a day, cryonics tries to freeze the body as close as possible to that time of “no heartbeat” so that if a way to restore life at that point is discovered, the body could then be un-frozen and resuscitated.
The idea isn’t impossible. Note what I mentioned about shocking someone’s heart back… that’s something we can do now that we couldn’t do in the past. So if someone went into cardiac arrest centuries ago, and you were able to freeze their body fast enough and perfectly preserve it, you could then un-freeze it in modern day, immediately apply a defibrillator, and save their life. The idea that in the future we would develop further technology that could do something like that and thus allow us to “resurrect” the frozen people is certainly possible.
But possible isn’t probable. For it to work, it requires a number of things. First, a way to “restart” your body must be discovered. Second, it must be able to work on someone who was cryogenically frozen (and you must have been cryogenically frozen fast enough that your body was in a situation where it could be restarted). Third, your body has to have stayed frozen that whole time, meaning that the company you hired didn’t go out of business in the interim, as some have.
So the whole thing is basically a speculation on top of a speculation on top of another speculation. But, hey, I can’t say that it’s necessarily a bigger waste of money than a bunch of other things people will pay exorbitant costs for.
