In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Again, Han Solo achieves each billionaire’s wildest dream by being frozen alive in cryogenic stasis – proof, as if it was wanted, that he actually is the good man within the galaxy.
Solo is frozen as an experiment by Darth Vader and Boba Fett (the latter returning to our screens in The E book Of Boba Fett, streaming on Disney+ from 29 December) to see if he would survive the ‘carbon freezing’ course of. Fortuitously, he does. However in keeping with Gary Bryant, a physics professor at RMIT College in Melbourne, Australia, Solo wouldn’t have been so fortunate in actuality.
“There’s no proof of any cryoprotectant being injected into his physique and there’s no human cell you may freeze with out including cryoprotectant first,” he says. It is because when the human physique (which is usually water) is frozen, ice crystals type inside cells, which destroys them.
Cryoprotectant prevents that, however there’s a catch. For even when Solo did have his bodily fluids changed with cryoprotectant, it might have killed him anyway – as a result of the cocktail of chemical compounds in cryoprotectant is lethally poisonous. “You’d simply be left with the skeleton and the useless cells, just like the pores and skin,” says Bryant. “The mind actually wouldn’t survive.”
That is why, in keeping with Bryant, the thought of cryogenically freezing a stay human being is “a great distance from attainable.” In the true world, cryopreservation is especially utilized in fields similar to fertility, to protect eggs and sperm, and in scientific analysis, the place cells similar to most cancers cells are frozen in storage. However so far as the human physique is worried, the variety of cells that may be frozen is restricted.
“There are nicely over 200 forms of cells within the human physique, and we will freeze fewer than 10,” says Bryant. “Even then, we should freeze them below completely different circumstances. So to freeze crimson blood cells we've got to make use of very excessive concentrations of cryoprotectant. We should additionally freeze them shortly, as a result of the cells reply quick to modifications of their atmosphere. White blood cells, we've got to freeze slowly and use smaller quantities of cryoprotectant.”
All of which means freezing the cells in a human physique, the place they’re all jumbled in, is massively impractical.
There are corporations that supply to cryogenically freeze individuals, however solely after they’re useless. In 2016, for example, a 14-year-old British most cancers affected person gained a court docket case to have her physique cryogenically frozen by an American agency referred to as the Cryonics Institute. The logic – or hope – in instances like these is that sooner or later science will attain some extent the place the frozen our bodies will be revived and cured.
There’s a faculty of thought that this shall be achieved by developments in nanobot expertise, with tiny robots reconstructing the physique and mind. But it surely’s truthful to say that Bryant shouldn't be satisfied.
“We’d have to really perceive the mind sufficient to have the ability to reconstruct it,” he says. “We don’t have any thought what the mind does. We don’t know the way reminiscences or information are saved. We don’t know the way individuals’s reactions are saved. The mind is what makes you you, and that’s what you need to protect.”
Bryant thinks that corporations just like the Cryonics Institute are exploiting susceptible individuals’s concern of demise. “Individuals are being given false hope,” he says. “There’s completely no means of these our bodies being recovered. It’s not nearly preservation anymore. They’re additionally saying, ‘Okay, now we’ve received to convey individuals again from the useless.’” And even when Han Solo did like the percentages, “preservation and reanimation are two wholly completely different impossibilities.”
Verdict: It doesn’t matter how strongly the Pressure would possibly run by your veins, no one goes to outlive being frozen alive.
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