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When I die, as I'm sure I someday will, I don't want anyone to freeze my head. The thinking is that whatever killed me
will be easily curable in the future, and so I'll be revived with a robot body or something. I don't suppose anyone's ever
really thought this through, because it seems to me there's a big difference between curing someone's cancer and bringing
someone back who's already died from it.
But even if I believed that they'll eventually be able to do it (which I totally don't, but assuming I even did), I still
don't want anyone freezing my head. I don't object to it on moral grounds, or think like I won't be able to get into heaven
or something like that (althought that would make a pretty good ghost story, where this headless ghost with icicles hanging
off him appears to lab techs at a cryogenics institute, wailing "Unfreeeeeeeze my heeeeeeeeaaaadd........."). In fact, I will
go so far as to say that if I was 100% certain that no one would ever revive me, I wouldn't give a crap what they did with
my head or any of the rest of me. I mean, I wouldn't want to be used as dog food or anything, but I don't think it would really
matter. I would want to be 100% certain, on the other hand, that what killed me was not someone cutting off my head and sticking
it in a freezer.
In other words, I wouldn't so much be afraid that the procedure wouldn't work; I would be afraid that it would. I just
don't have enough faith in humanity to believe that anything in 100 or 200 years will be any better than it is now. The best
I could possibly imagine would be that it wouldn't be any worse, and even that I would have to qualify as freakishly optimistic.
I know a lot of people out there say I'm cynical and bitter and misanthropic, but I'm not really. Just because you think
someone is a moron doesn't mean you hate them. I don't wish harm on anyone and I won't gloat during the nuclear winter; it's
just that I think no matter how smart we get intellectually, or how advanced technologically, we're still just exactly stupid
enough to wipe out all life on earth.
Like, if someone said that we shouldn't use matallic brake pads because they wear the pistons (or whatever the hell brakes
are made of), no one would use them anymore. The metallic brake pad people would totally go out of business. But when they
say we shouldn't eat french fries or drink too much or smoke, no one stops doing any of those things. In fact, people do them
more. So we do care if we have to spend $200 to have our brakes aligned (or whatever the hell you do to brakes) but
we totally don't care if we ourselves get cancer or have heart attacks or just get really sloppy and ugly.
Lots of folks will tell you different than this. Folks are always saying that if you use the right mouthwash or vote
for the right person or join the right religion, everything will be ok. Poets and philosophers say that we can get better,
we can grow and improve.
Anyway, that's not the future I see when they freeze my head. I think the future will be more like Mad Max
or Planet of The Apes than The Jetsons or Star Trek. And I don't want to be woken up in the future
with a robot body or be hunted like a dog by talking gorillas.
Chances are I wouldn't make it anyway, even if my head was frozen. Because some freaky scientist will start telling folks
that he could cure cancer if only he could just experiment on some frozen heads. And then conservatives would say no!
they're still alive! and liberals would say it's what the freaky dead people would have wanted! And then Congress
would get involved and the ACLU and the right-to-lifers and the Supreme Court and the frozen head advocates. It'll just be
a big hassle and hopefully I'll be dead by then.
So if I die, please don't let them freeze my head.
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