Many people have always thought about what they could do if they had a time machine. All of the events they could change and what the future would be like. Something like that has always been so far off from what we can produce that no one has even given it a thought. Many people think to themselves, I wish I had more time to spend with someone before they lost their life or that it was too soon for them to die in the first place. There are many dreams people have that can not be achieved and the fact that we can’t go back in time to see them one last time is something people want. There is a reason for everything that happens, but that doesn’t always have to be the case. There is a way to help peoples dieing family and even the chance to go into the future in a one way type of time travel. There is a science that is still under development that can help dying people and has the ability to live longer than anyone else. This science is called Cryostasis and it is the ultimate answer to these problems.
The term Cryostasis is something that sounds like it could be out of a SciFi movie and in fact, the original idea was made based on some of those concepts. Cryostasis is the act of freezing someone’s body without killing them in order to slow the aging process of the frozen person to the point where they don’t age for hundreds of years while frozen. It is a science that has been in the process for almost a hundred years and it has barely progressed during that time. “It is important to understand that we consider legal death distinct from absolute final death, which can be best defined by the principle of information theoretic death.”(Pichugin) To be able to freeze one’s body, you would be able to slow the rate in which a disease spreads in the body allowing someone to be frozen long enough to live until they are able to come up with a cure. It is also a way to fast forward or time travel in one direction to the future to experience life in the future without aging to get there.
This concept might be hard to grasp at first thinking about a way to freeze someone without killing them since the human body is made up of over seventy percent water making freezing the body with conventional methods impossible because the water in each cell would crystalize when it froze and kill us from the inside. This means that there needs to be some kind of antifreeze that we can implement into the body in order to keep the water from freezing while also slowing the body down enough to stop it from aging. This question is the reason why we as humanity is unable to make the concept of Cryostasis a real idea.
Even though humans can’t go through cryostasis, there are in fact some other animals that are able to do it themselves. If you look at the wood frog that lives in Alaska, you will see that it is able to freeze its body to survive in the cold weather. “thawing and freezing patterns helps the frogs convert more of the glycogen stored in their liver into glucose. This is essential because it is the high levels of glucose in the frogs’ cells that keep them alive throughout the long, cold winter.”(Netburn) The reason that this frog is able to survive in freezing weather is because when the temperature drops, the frog starts to produce a chemical called glycol that covers each individual cell of the frog’s body which keeps them from freezing while also allowing the frog to not age. The reason it doesn’t age is because when you slow your heart rate and the rate in which you body processes the food you consume, you reach a point where you produce so little energy that it shouldn’t be able to keep your body alive, but when you slow your body down, you only need a minimal amount of energy to live which means that you won’t make new energy very fast and your body won’t grow as fast because your cells are in a state of stasis. The wood frog isn’t the only animal that is able to go into a frozen state. The painted turtle is another animal that can go into a stasis or halted state. The integument of the animals becomes highly resistant to the penetration of ice into body compartments”(Packard). Painted turtles can become frozen thanks to the fact that their bodies are made to withstand a freezing temperature along with that they produce a chemical that also helps the water in their bodies from freezing. The ability that both of these animals have is the key to making cryostasis.