Working in the field of cryonics and life extension, we happen to talk about death... practically every day. Death is defined as “a permanent cessation of all vital functions; the end of life”. While this definition is generally accepted throughout the world, the concept of death and the way we perceive it depends on various factors.
The concept of “end of life” is different when viewed with a religious rather than an atheistic eye. Does your life terminate with the irreversible cessation of your heartbeat or does it continue with your soul on its journey to hell or heaven, or reincarnate into another form of life?
Similarly, the point of no return that was defined 100 years ago is not the same as it is today (or will be in the future), considering medical technological progress. A few decades ago, few people had the chance to survive a disease like cancer. Today, about 80% of people diagnosed with types of cancer that are easy to diagnose and treat live 10 or more years afterwards. In the future, medical research will likely be able to raise the survival rate even for more deadly types of cancer.
Assuming, therefore, that death is a fluid concept, let’s look at 10 interesting facts about death.
5 General Facts About Death
What exactly is death? How many definitions of death exist? If you think the answers to these questions are rather straightforward, take a look at the following five facts. You might be surprised.
Death is a Process
Think back to the first time you encountered death. A living organism (person or animal) was in your life and then they were gone. Based on this logic, death seems to be a precise moment in time.
Yet, from a medical and scientific point of view, death is more of a process. The process begins with the cessation of the heartbeat. When the heart stops pumping, oxygenated blood is no longer transported to the various cells in the body. These cells can only go a few minutes without oxygen before they start to self-recycle and die. If the heartbeat isn’t restored (e.g. by cardiopulmonary resuscitation), the body enters the process of death. The speed at which cells die depends on a number of factors, the most important of which is temperature. There are cases where, thanks to very low temperatures, some people have managed to survive without oxygen for quite some time! High temperatures, on the other hand, speed up cell death and degradation in the body.
A question arises: if the process of death was paused right at its very beginning, would it be possible to eventually reverse it?
There Are 4 Official Types of Death
Humans have this tendency to classify and label things. We need to do it if we want to make sense of the incredible diversity of life. Of course, even a concept as crucial as death has its categorizations and definitions. To be more precise, there are four official types of death:
- Clinical death
- Biological death
- Legal death
- Info-theoretic death
Imagine a real-life situation. Oliver is about 80 years old and has been hospitalized due to the aggravation of pre-existing conditions. At some point, Olver has a cardiac arrest. He enters a state of clinical death. His heart stops pumping blood. The medical staff rushes in: although Oliver is clinically dead, there’s still a chance to revive him and save his life! Thanks to current medical knowledge and technology, clinical death can in fact be reversed.
Now, Oliver is quite an old man (according to today’s standards) and, despite the efforts, the medical personnel don't manage to revive him. After several minutes of unsuccessful CPR, the doctors give up. Oliver is now biologically dead. At this point, the person in charge reports the time of death on an official paper. Oliver has been declared legally dead.
In most cases, the story would end here. Yet, Oliver is a member of a cryonics association. The standby team is already there ready, as Oliver’s family called them after he was hospitalized. As soon as the patient is declared legally dead, the team starts the cryoprotectant procedure to pause the process of death. This has to happen as fast as possible (ideally at the time when the patient enters the state of clinical death). In fact, the more time passes, the more the cells that make up Oliver's body, left without oxygen, die.
So what’s info-theoretic death? Information-theoretic death is a type of death that can’t be reversed, no matter how advanced and unimaginable future medical technologies are. When the body reaches this state of the death process, all memories and information that make Oliver, Oliver are lost forever. Since it’s hard to predict what future medicine will be able to do, it’s often difficult to define when this type of death is reached. Certainly, if the person were to die in an accident that would completely destroy their brain, we would categorize them as info-theoretic dead.
.jpeg)
Immortality Already Exists
With current medical technology, life expectancy at birth is 80.4 years in Europe. Definitely not a bad result, if you consider that it has doubled in the last 100 years (in 1900 people in the presently known EU would live about 40.54 years on average).
However, if we think of a concept like immortality, we are still quite far from achieving it. Even the oldest people in the world (Lucile Randon of France, aged 118 years, 194 days, and Juan Vicente Pérez Mora of Venezuela, aged 113 years, 89 days) haven't yet managed to find the elixir of eternal life.
It would almost look as if there is no cure for death. Of the 117 billion people who have ever walked the Earth, only 8 billion are currently alive. Yet, there are living beings that have managed to defeat death. One of them is a tiny jellyfish that, due to its special characteristic, it’s called Immortal Jellyfish. To defeat the Grim Reaper, these jellyfish are able to reverse their life cycle. They change from mature jellyfish to simple polyps when external conditions are unfavorable. By looking at these little 4.5 millimeter animals we could one day learn how to reverse our specialized cells to stem (unspecialized) cells.
Nobody Dies of Old Age
Aging doesn’t kill anybody. What kills is the accumulation of a series of mistakes at a cellular and molecular level that make the body eventually unable to fight external attacks and repair itself. The expression “dying of old age” is mostly used for its social significance.
The most common causes of death for people over 65 are heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, respiratory diseases, diabete, and even something as simple as influenza. What kind of work do we therefore need to tackle these problems and extend our lives?
- Slow or reverse the aging process. Researchers have recently managed to define the 9 hallmarks of aging, interconnected mechanisms that denominate the impairment of vital functions.
- Find better ways to early diagnose and treat diseases that our body is not able to fight.
Doomed or “Not Treatable With Current Technologies”
This leads us to a very important fact about death. Aside from fatal accidents, the majority of people in the world die from diseases. Diseases that, in all probability, will one day be curable thanks to developments in medical technology.
Think for example of the AIDS epidemic, which started in the US in the early 1980s. For years, millions of people died. When one of the first cures was found (a very slow process due to stigmatization and discrimination) things started to change. Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) was introduced in 1996 and decreased the death rate by 47% in only one year. This means that almost half of the people that died in 1995 of AIDS would have survived if they had been infected one year later.
Now, many would say that this is life. Some are lucky, others less so. Some people got Covid-19 after being vaccinated and had some mild symptoms. Others got it a few months before the vaccine was released and didn't make it. Yet, there may be a solution to this dilemma. If the sick person's body could be paused at the beginning of the dying process, perhaps it could also be cured later, once a treatment is developed...
3 Facts About Burial Techniques
Another interesting aspect related to death is: what to do with the body after the declaration of legal death? Each state has its own laws in this regard and each culture its own traditions. Let’s have a look below at 3 interesting facts regarding the more and less common body disposition techniques.
Not All Burials Are Underground
Nowadays, most people who are buried after their legal death follow a rather traditional process. The deceased is transported from the morgue to the funeral parlor. Here the undertaker cleans and processes the body making it look as alive and at peace as it gets, and possibly avoiding post-mortem movements or sounds. Finally, the body is placed in a coffin for the last farewell. Which in religious cases takes place in a church, in atheistic ones in a living room or a chamber rented for the occasion. The coffin is lowered into a pit, covered with soil and marked by a gravestone, which will serve the relatives as a place of mourning.
Yet, somewhere in the Tibetan plateau, the dead are “buried in the sky” instead of in the ground. Although, to be fair, 'buried' wouldn’t exactly be the most correct term. In fact, it is a tradition among some Tibetan communities to carry the bodies of dead loved ones to mountain tops. Chopped into pieces by a Burial Master, the bodies are left in elevated areas so that vultures can feed on them. This tradition is based on the belief that vultures will carry the soul of the deceased to a sort of paradise, where they’ll await reincarnation. The remains are left on the mountaintop to decompose under the influence of the elements.
A rather poetical way to reach heaven but, from a strictly medical point of view, certainly not the best for future revival.
Those Aren’t Ashes You Keep on the Mantelpiece
Competing with underground burial as the most widely used method of disposing of the deceased is cremation. After the funeral (if there was one), the body is placed inside a specially designed chamber, called a retort, which is exclusively used for human cremation. It takes temperatures between 760 and 980 degrees Celsius and about one and a half to three hours to burn away all bodily tissues thoroughly.
When cremation ends, all that is left is bones. Crematorium workers use powerful grinding machines to break these bones down into what we call “ashes”, before giving them to the deceased’s loved ones. Basically, it’s as if you had the skeleton of your loved one in your living room. Grinded and placed in an urn, it’s certainly more practical to store (approximately 3.5% of the body's weight) and you don't run the risk of spooking your guests.
There May Be a Chance to Extend Your Life in the Future
Remember the info-theoretic death we talked about? Once your body is turned into a handful of bone ashes, there’s probably no way you’ll be revived in the future. Surely we can’t really predict what future technology will be capable of achieving. However, considering that the brain, as far as medical and scientific knowledge understands nowadays, is the seat of memory and personality… Not having a brain makes revival quite complicated.
At this current moment, the only medical technology that provides a chance, small or large, to be revived in the future is cryonics, aka biostasis. Through the use of very low temperature, the biological function and degradation of the body are paused shortly after the declaration of legal death. If the time interval between clinical and legal death is short, the brain can be preserved with a low amount of damage. This way, memories and personalities are stored indefinitely.
At this point, medical technology has plenty of time to achieve two goals:
- Find a treatment for the disease that caused the patient’s death in the first place. Should the cryopreserved person “die of old age”, there will be a need to find a way to reinvent the aging process.
- Develop revival technology.
2 Facts About Life “After Death”
The mystery of life after death has interested mankind since the beginning of time. Different religions have tried to answer this question, most of them affirming the existence of a soul, which leaves the body after it has stopped functioning and reaches an afterlife. Death isn’t the end. Rituals and traditions have sprung up around this concept. Think for instance of the complicated mummification procedure that wealthy Egyptians had to undergo in order to make their way to Aaru, the paradise where Osiris reigns.
Now, we haven’t yet been able to understand what happens after death. But we have figured out a few things. Below, we present 2 of them.
Near-Death Experiences Could Be Just a Strong Psychedelic Trip
Have you ever heard of those shamans in the Upper Amazon who drink a brew extracted from a plant called ayahuasca during their divination rituals? Some research is trying to prove that the near-death experiences described by many people are actually produced by the same substance, called DMT, naturally released by our brain at the moment of death.
The research starts from the assumption that the experiences of dying people and those who have decided to take DMT voluntarily have much in common. In both states people have experienced: the subjective feeling of transcending one’s body and entering an alternative realm, perceiving and communicating with sentient ‘entities’ and themes related to death and dying.
We still don’t know how and where exactly this substance is produced in the human brain. While it was thought that the answer lay in the pineal gland, some research on mice has shown the presence of DMT even in subjects which had it removed. Therefore, we can’t yet come to any firm conclusions. In any case, if this fact were true, your death could be one of the most powerful psychedelic trips you will ever experience.
The Meaning of Life After Death May Be About to Change
To this day, ideas of possible lives after death are mostly religious. Whether it’s the Christian paradise, the Islamic Jannah or the Nordic Valhalla, one must leave one's body and earthly life to reach them.
But if and when cryonics worked, legal death would no longer be the limit. As mentioned above, cryopreservation is a technique of preserving people’s bodies indefinitely through the use of low temperatures. The ultimate goal of cryonics is to be able to cure and revive cryopreserved people. These people will have the opportunity to experience the future and benefit from medical technology that we aren’t yet aware of.
Since revival technology hasn’t been developed yet, this goal remains far away and difficult for many to imagine. Yet, successful revival after cryopreservation may completely revolutionize the world. A technology so effective in saving lives would probably become mainstream. Perhaps cryopreservation will become common practice in hospitals. Can you imagine a world where diseases will be curable and death will no longer be the end?
Conclusion
How death affects our lives is up to us. We may be afraid of it from time to time, and that’s totally normal. We don’t know what is going to happen, we can’t say what exactly we will feel or where we will go. And all this unknown can startle us.
However, it’s important to remember some of the basic facts about death. Death is a fluid concept: what we perceive as “end of life” today is based on current technologies. In the future, it will probably mean something very different.
If the idea behind cryonics has got your attention and you would like to learn more, schedule a call with a member of our team. If you already know that this chance to experience the future is what you were looking for, sign up now.
