Description du poste
(Cross-posted at the Sparks Newsletter)
Let’s imagine that you think that preservation after legal death with the goal of future revival may actually be able to preserve important information that you care about, such as long-term memories.
Let’s also imagine that, unfortunately, you live far away from an organization that offers these services. In that case, especially if you die suddenly, the chances of having a preservation team get out to you in a timely manner (within <4-12 or even <24 hours) seem quite small.
But what about embalmers? Don’t they already pump aldehyde-containing solutions through the blood vessels of recently deceased people? And aren’t there already a bunch of them in lots of places in the world? Couldn’t they possibly do the initial preservation themselves, thus stabilizing the structure of the brain/body and thereby addressing one of the key problems related to access to preservation services?
This topic has been a hotly debated one over the years in the field of preservation/biostasis/cryonics. Of course, I will not end the debate in this one essay. But what I will try to do is:
(a) make the case that using the services of embalmers actually does make sense in some circumstances, and then
(b) discuss some practicalities of how people can use the services of remote embalmers to access preservation services with Sparks (where, as a form of disclosure if you were not already aware, I work as a Research Scientist).
Is the use of commercial embalming fluids a good idea for structural brain preservation? The extant evidence is pretty unclear, but it suggests that cellular structure is preserved, as would be expected by the fact that embalming fluids use formaldehyde as their key component
The problem with evaluating the usefulness of embalming fluids for brain or whole body preservation is a common one in this field, which is that nobody has really bothered to study it directly, probably because they just don’t care very much (and why would they?