Cryonics – Preserving Ourselves for the Future

Dr. Ralph Merkle

April 30, 2017

History makes it abundantly clear that science and technology are constantly advancing. Flight to the moon was little more than a dream in 1900, by 1969 it had become a reality. Today, medical technology can’t always keep us alive, let alone healthy. Looking ahead, we can already see technologies that will keep us both alive and healthy for as long as we want. How can those of us alive today, who are in need of this future medical technology, reach it? By preserving ourselves using ultracold temperatures. This will stabilize our condition and preserve us, unchanged, until future technologies can be developed that can restore us to vibrant good health. This is the promise of cryonics. This talk will offer a glimpse of these future technologies and how they might work, as well as the practice of cryonics today.

A Stanford University Ph.D. who co-invented public key cryptography, Dr. Merkle (merkle.com) was a research scientist at Xerox PARC, a Nanotechnology Theorist at Zyvex, and a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A winner of the Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology, he is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, a Director of Alcor, and Department Chair for Nanotechnology at Singularity University.