A clear case for cryonics: A review of The Future Loves You

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Why vitrifixation offers a credible path to halting death

When people ask why I’ve signed up for cryonics, I offer them a few carefully curated arguments.

One of my favorites is a simple thought experiment: Imagine you know you’ll die tomorrow. But your doctor offers you an alternative - instead of death, you can be put into a drug-induced coma for one week, after which there’s a 99 percent chance you’ll wake up healthy, cured of whatever was about to kill you.

My inquisitors usually laugh: “Well, of course I’d take that option. Who wouldn’t?”

Yes, I know, it’s a sinister trap.

And sure, the ifs and buts come quickly after, but in principle, they’ve already answered their own question.

And that’s exactly the kind of mental reset Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston is pushing for in the brilliant book The Future Loves You - How and Why We Should Abolish Death.

It takes the core intuition behind that thought experiment - that most people, when faced with the choice, would choose the chance to go on living - and extends it into a full-blown scientific, philosophical, and economic case for brain preservation.

Where I offer casual traps, Zeleznikow-Johnston offers a detailed blueprint: how aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation works, why it matters, what it costs, and why failing to scale it up isn’t pragmatism - it’s meek death acceptance.

To be fair, some of the objections people raise are hard to casually dismiss. For example, in the case of cryopreservation, the odds of revival right now are probably closer to 1 percent than 99 percent. After all, it’s never been done and, as things stands, it will be a while yet.

My usual response is simple: the alternatives offer zero chance.

And reading The Future Loves You has only deepened my conviction that I’ve made the right choice. Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston isn’t some armchair philosopher; he’s a skilled neuroscientist. And he joins a growing chorus of respected researchers who are done treating preservation and revival as fringe speculation.

What Zeleznikow-Johnston brings is a detailed, accessible case: what personal identity really is, why our current definitions of death are philosophically and medically outdated, and why brain preservation through vitrifixation* is, in relative terms, a straightforward and surprisingly affordable procedure.

* Vitrifixation (notice the x) combines two steps: chemical fixation (using aldehydes to lock brain tissue in place at the molecular level) followed by vitrification (cooling it into a glass-like solid without ice crystal formation). The key difference is that vitrifixation chemically stabilizes the tissue before freezing, preserving the fine structural details (like synapses) far better than vitrification alone, which mainly focuses on avoiding ice damage.

In a nutshell, he explains that personal identity isn’t about the specific molecules making up your brain at any given moment - they’re constantly being replaced anyway - but about the patterns and connections encoded in your neural circuitry: your memories, dispositions, and ways of thinking.

Zeleznikow-Johnston works from a clear so-called physicalist position: if the mind arises entirely from the physical structures and processes of the brain, then what matters is the connectome - the full map of neural connections that shapes who you are.

Preserve that map with enough precision, and you preserve the informational essence of the person.

He argues that vitrifixation already offers a scientifically credible way to lock in the connectome’s architecture, holding it intact for as long as necessary until future technologies - whether biological, robotic, or digital - can reanimate or emulate it.

Speaking of putting things on hold, let’s stop for a moment and really consider one of the implications of what Zeleznikow-Johnston is saying.

At the heart of Zeleznikow-Johnston’s argument is the idea that death, as we currently define it, is fundamentally outdated. In an information-theoretic sense, we aren’t truly dead when the heart stops or even when the brain stops firing; we’re only irreversibly dead when the neural information that makes us who we are has been lost beyond recovery.

If that theory holds, it means we are routinely being declared dead long before the real deadline - long before the point when, in principle, the person’s identity and memories could still be preserved, if only we had the tools and protocols ready in time.

It reframes the hospital deathbed not as a final moment, but as a tragic failure of imagination and preparedness.

Cryonics is sometimes called “the ambulance to the future” - a last-resort attempt to stabilize someone until better treatments arrive. But in everyday medical practice, that ambulance never comes. So far, only around 600 people worldwide have been preserved this way*. For everyone else, the journey simply ends at the curb, whether or not future science might have been able to meet them halfway.

* Well, as Zeleznikow-Johnston argues in the book, the vitrifixation procedure is fundamentally different from older methods, which often captured only a low-resolution, degraded or damaged version of the connectome - making the prospect of revival an even more distant hope than it already is.

Where the book struggles - and to be fair, this isn’t really the author’s fault (he readily admits how speculative it all is) - is in describing how, exactly, we might one day wake up from our long slumber.

There’s whole-brain emulation, which I, for one, remain somewhat skeptical about. It’s not that I find it completely implausible*, but digitizing future Peter makes future Peter vulnerable to a very different kind of virus than the ones present-day Peter has to worry about. But in a world where preserved people can be revived, I guess we can assume that digital embodiments are housed inside quantum-secure architectures - protected against hacking, corruption, or collapse at speeds no biological system could match.

* One interesting argument in the whole “is it really me or just a copy” debate - one I hadn’t really considered before - is that the turnover of our cells and molecular components essentially means we’re already copies of ourselves, if you follow that line of thinking.

One of the other revival pathways, which I find far more appealing, is nanotechnology. Honestly, it would already be enough of a culture shock to wake up 200 years in the future - and then also have to grapple with being a digitized consciousness embodied in a robot or some synthetic form. But with nanotech, I could potentially keep my biological body, restored to a pristine state, rather than the slightly malfunctioning 48-year-old one I’m currently walking around in.

As I alluded to above, Zeleznikow-Johnston makes the case that vitrifixation is relatively inexpensive - especially when set against the backdrop of national healthcare spending. Many wealthy nations spend 10 percent or more of GDP on healthcare (in the U.S., it’s closer to 20 percent), and a considerable share of that staggering sum goes toward patients we already know we cannot save - not because we lack compassion or resources, but because we refuse to invest in the only intervention that could, in principle, change the game.

There’s a striking double standard here. As a society, we’re willing to pour enormous effort and money into last-ditch treatments for the dying - and rightly so; those efforts are humane and often heroic. But we scoff at vitrifixation, dismissing it as fringe or fantastical, even though it offers the only real prospect of preserving a person’s identity when all other medical options have been exhausted. The problem isn’t that we care too much about people at the end of life; it’s that we care in ways that are misdirected, clinging to familiar interventions while rejecting the unfamiliar ones that might actually work.

Beyond the scientific and philosophical blueprint, The Future Loves You is dotted with small gems - arguments or phrases that deserve to be pulled out and kept.

One is the label “palliative philosophy” - the idea that death-acceptance culture isn’t some stoic confrontation with reality, but more like intellectual pain management: a soothing story we tell ourselves when we have no other tools. My podcast co-host, philosopher Patrick Linden, has of course made a similar point in his book The Case Against Death, but I bet he wishes he’d come up with “palliative philosophy” (I haven’t had time to ask him yet.)

Another nugget is Zeleznikow-Johnston’s observation that memory and imagination run on the same neural machinery - something I hadn’t thought of before.

And I especially appreciated his suggestion that cryonic storage facilities could be reimagined not as cold warehouses or futuristic labs, but as places of remembrance - akin to cemeteries. Families might visit preserved relatives, tend to their memorial spaces, and long for the day they might return. Instead of the usual sci-fi image of anonymous tanks in a sterile facility, he invites us to imagine a social landscape where the vitrified dead are still part of the living world’s emotional and cultural fabric.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I refuse to pretend death is noble just because it’s familiar. If staying alive means taking a very long hiatus, I’m prepared to do it.

Reading Zeleznikow-Johnston’s wonderful book has only made me more hopeful that the end is not in sight. I’ve always loved the future. It’s reassuring to know that the future just might love me back.