Preface: More biology class, read on. Written with Gemini. 

As previously mentioned, there’s this dude called Marvin Minsky, who’s connected to Epstein somehow, who’s a cognitive scientist, and called Father of AI, who’s also really into developing technologies for this thing called cryonics, which is not science fiction, they figured out how to “freeze” people in sub liquid nitrogen temperature, they just still haven’t figured out how to revive their patients after they’ve been frozen. There are all these companies from the UK, Australia and Michigan working on it, somehow I had never heard of this, but now I have, and I think instead of putting your money in bitcoin, perhaps this is a more profitable and stable industry that will have great returns in five to ten years. The future of plastic surgery might leap into face transplant, idk, that doesn’t sound too science fiction to me now either, after researching on all these “far-fetched” ideas that are actually very viable. 

When you look at the price tag for cryonics—often cited between $28,000 and $220,000+—it sounds like a club for billionaires. However, the "secret" of the industry is that it's largely a middle-class movement funded by Life Insurance. As of 2026, here is how the "Wealth Gap" is being bridged and how people actually pay for it. Most members don't write a check for $200k. Instead, they take out a Term Life Insurance policy and name the cryonics provider (like Alcor or Tomorrow Bio) as the beneficiary. 

For the price of a couple of streaming subscriptions, a healthy 30-year-old can be "fully covered." The catch is, you must maintain the policy. If you stop paying your premiums, your "ticket" to the future is cancelled. This is where the ethics get interesting. To make cryonics accessible, providers offer a cheaper tier: Neuropreservation. Whole Body ($200k+) plan, has the entire body vitrified and stored. This is based on the idea that keeping your original hardware is safer. Neuro ($80k), is only preserving the head/brain. The theory (heavily pushed by Minsky) is that the brain contains the "data" of you, and a future body can be 3D-printed, cloned, or replaced with a robotic one. Many people choose "Neuro" not because they want to be a "floating head," but because it's the only tier they can afford on a standard salary. 

One of the biggest fears in cryonics is: What if the company goes bankrupt in 100 years? In 2026, top-tier providers will use Irrevocable Patient Care Trusts. When a patient is preserved, a large chunk of their insurance payout (usually around $115,000 of that $200,000) is placed into a trust. The trust is legally separate from the company's operating budget. The interest from that investment pays for the liquid nitrogen and maintenance forever. Essentially, the patient "pays for their own rent" using the stock market. 

A major shift this year involves insurance companies trying to dodge these payouts. Some insurers argue that since cryonics is "experimental," the payout shouldn't apply. Courts have generally ruled that since cryonics only happens after a doctor declares legal death, the insurer must pay. The "cause of death" (cancer, heart attack, etc.) is what triggers the policy, not what happens to the body afterward. Critics call it a "tax on hope" for people who can't accept death. Proponents call it a "Low-Probability, High-Reward" bet. If you choose burial/cremation, your chance of "survival" is exactly 0%. If you choose cryonics, the chance is non-zero (even if it's only 1%). To a "rationalist," a 1% chance of living for 500 more years is worth a $50/month insurance premium. 

The SST (Standby, Stabilization, and Transport) phase is the most critical part of cryonics. It’s the difference between preserving a "person" and preserving a "cadaver." If the $200k insurance payout is the fuel, SST is the engine. In 2026, this process has become highly sophisticated, moving away from simple ice baths toward what is essentially emergency room medicine on wheels. Ideally, a cryonics team (from companies like Alcor, Tomorrow Bio, or Suspended Animation Inc.) arrives days before a member is expected to die. A team of 2-4 specialists (often EMTs or doctors) stays at a nearby hotel or in a specialized ambulance. They monitor the patient’s vitals (blood pressure, oxygen, etc.) via a 24/7 "Deployment Committee." The second a doctor pronounces legal death, the SST team takes over. In cryonics, this is the "starting gun." The team uses a device called a "Thumper" or "LUCAS" (a mechanical chest compressor). This restarts blood circulation even though the heart is stopped. They immediately inject a cocktail of 10+ medications, Heparin, to prevent blood from clotting (the #1 enemy of a good freeze); antioxidants & pH buffers, to protect brain cells from the chemical stress of dying; BBB Modifiers (New in 2026), are specific chemicals used to open the blood-brain barrier so that cryoprotectants can reach the brain more effectively. The patient is placed in a portable ice-water bath. They often use "Squid" devices—tubes that spray high-velocity ice water directly onto the head and neck to drop the brain temperature as fast as possible.

This is the biggest tech jump of the last few years. Instead of waiting to get to the main facility, teams now perform a surgical washout on-site or in the ambulance. A surgeon (or trained SST tech) accesses the femoral or carotid arteries. They use a bypass machine to drain the blood and replace it with a base perfusion solution. This solution is designed to protect organs from "cold injury" and prepare the body for the toxic cryoprotectants that come later. Once stabilized and chilled to just above freezing, the patient is packed into a Ziegler Case (a specialized, airtight metal container filled with ice). In 2026, companies will use private medical jets or high-speed ambulances equipped with IoT sensors. These sensors monitor the patient's temperature, pressure, and GPS location in real-time, feeding data back to the main facility. To the airline or police, the patient is technically a "human remains shipment for research," which allows for fast transit across borders.

Without SST, you get a "Straight Freeze" (cooling without blood washout), which causes massive ice damage. With a top-tier SST team, you get vitrification, which preserves the brain's "wiring diagram" (the connectome) with almost zero structural damage. The "Holy Grail" currently being tested is Intermediate Temperature Storage (ITS). Instead of going all the way to -196°C, they are trying to keep patients at -140°C to prevent the "cracking" (fractures) that happens when things get too cold. 

Marvin Minsky did for cryonics what he did for Artificial Intelligence: he gave it a functional, mathematical soul. Before Minsky, cryonics was often viewed as a "medical" pursuit. Minsky shifted the paradigm, framing the human mind as a computational problem. His influence on the industry can be broken down into three major pillars. Minsky famously argued that the brain is essentially a "meat machine"—a complex computer made of biological parts. He was the first to loudly argue that if we can preserve the "wiring diagram" (the synapses and connections) of a brain, we have preserved the person. He helped define the industry's standard for death. In his view, you aren't dead when your heart stops; you are only dead when your brain's "data" is so corrupted that it's unrecoverable. This gave cryonicists a scientific "finish line" to aim for. 

In an industry often dismissed as "fringe," Minsky’s name provided massive intellectual weight. In 2004, he was one of the lead signatories of the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics. This document was a turning point, as it forced the mainstream scientific community to admit that cryonics was based on "sound scientific principles," even if the revival tech didn't exist yet. He served on the Scientific Advisory Board of Alcor for nearly two decades (1999–2016). Having a Turing Award winner and MIT professor on the board made it much harder for critics to call the organization a "scam." Minsky’s landmark theory, the Society of Mind, directly impacted how people think about revival. He argued that intelligence is the result of thousands of tiny, non-intelligent "agents" working together. This theory suggests that to bring someone back, you don't necessarily need to revive every single cell simultaneously. You only need to reconstruct the "agents" and their relationships. This paved the way for modern "Mind Uploading" theories—the idea that a cryopreserved brain could be scanned and "rebooted" in a digital environment. 

When Minsky died in 2016, his impact on the industry went from theoretical to practical. While Alcor maintains a "neither confirm nor deny" policy, it is widely accepted in the community that Minsky is Patient 144. In a famous 1997 moment, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler presented Minsky with his Alcor medical alert bracelet in a public ceremony—a symbolic "passing of the torch" from the world of AI to the world of life extension. Minsky’s preservation serves as a "north star" for the industry. Many believe that if we can ever bring back Minsky, we bring back the very mind that mapped out how to do it in the first place. ☀️

Terminology

• Cryonics: The practice of preserving humans at sub-liquid nitrogen temperatures after legal death, with the goal of future revival.

• Vitrification: A state of "solidification without freezing" where biological tissue is turned into a glass-like state, avoiding the structural damage caused by ice crystals.

• Neuropreservation (Neuro): A preservation tier focusing only on the head/brain, predicated on the theory that the "self" is stored as data in the brain's physical structure.

• Whole Body: A preservation tier where the entire biological body is vitrified and stored.

• Intermediate Temperature Storage (ITS): A "Holy Grail" storage method (around -140°C) designed to be cold enough for preservation but warm enough to prevent the "cracking" (fractures) that occurs at lower temperatures.

• SST (Standby, Stabilization, and Transport): The critical medical phase immediately following death that prepares the body for long-term storage.

• Thumper / LUCAS: Mechanical chest compressors used to restart blood circulation post-mortem to keep tissues oxygenated.

• Surgical Washout: The procedure where biological blood is drained and replaced with a base perfusion solution.

• Cryoprotectants: Specialized "antifreeze" chemicals that replace water in the cells to prevent freezing.

• BBB Modifiers: Chemicals used to open the Blood-Brain Barrier, ensuring cryoprotectants can fully saturate the brain.

• Squid Devices: Tubes used to spray high-velocity ice water on the head and neck to rapidly drop brain temperature.

• Ziegler Case: An airtight metal container used for the secure transit of patients.

• The Connectome: The "wiring diagram" of the brain (synapses and connections) that cryonicists aim to preserve.

• Meat Machine: Marvin Minsky’s term for the brain, viewing it as a biological computer that can be mapped and potentially "rebooted."

• Society of Mind: A theory suggesting intelligence is a collection of smaller "agents," implying revival could involve reconstructing these agents individually.

• Mind Uploading: The theory that a preserved brain could be scanned and its consciousness transferred to a digital or robotic body.

• Irrevocable Patient Care Trust: A legally separate fund where insurance payouts are invested to pay for a patient's storage "rent" indefinitely.

• Term Life Insurance: The standard method for middle-class individuals to fund their preservation via monthly premiums.

• Deployment Committee: A 24/7 monitoring team that tracks a member’s health to ensure the SST team is dispatched before death.

• Marvin Minsky: The "Father of AI" and a key intellectual architect of modern cryonics theory.

• Alcor / Tomorrow Bio: Leading service providers and long-term storage facilities.

• Suspended Animation Inc.: A specialized company that focuses exclusively on the SST phase.

Primary References (Scientific & Historical)

• "The Society of Mind" by Marvin Minsky (1986): The core text explaining how intelligence emerges from "agents." This is the primary source for the theory that revival doesn't require reviving every cell at once.

• "Ultrastructural and Histological Cryopreservation of Mammalian Brains by Vitrification" (Fahy et al., 2026): A landmark recent paper (bioRxiv) demonstrating that whole brain structures can be preserved without ice damage using solutions like M22.

• "Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics" (2004): A public document signed by Minsky and 66 other scientists (including Eric Drexler) arguing for the scientific legitimacy of the field.

• "The Emotion Machine" by Marvin Minsky (2007): Minsky's follow-up to Society of Mind, focusing on how "feelings" are actually different types of "thinking" used to solve problems—crucial for those interested in mind uploading.

• "Biostasis: A Roadmap for Research in Preservation and Potential Revival of Humans" (McKenzie et al., 2024): A comprehensive roadmap often cited in 2026 as the standard for how the industry intends to bridge the gap between "frozen" and "revived."

Recommended Reading: Cryonics & Life Extension

• "Preserving Minds, Saving Lives" edited by Alcor (Updated Edition): A collection of the best writings from Cryonics Magazine over 40 years, covering everything from SST to the ethics of "Neuro" vs. "Whole Body."

• "Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old" by Andrew Steele (2021/2026 reprint): A guide to the biological science of longevity that provides the context for why people choose cryonics.

• "Engines of Creation" by Eric Drexler (1986): The book that introduced Nanotechnology. Drexler explains how "cell repair machines" (nanobots) could theoretically repair a vitrified brain atom-by-atom.

• "The Prospect of Immortality" by Robert Ettinger (1962): The original book that started the cryonics movement. While the tech is dated, the "rationalist" philosophy is still the bedrock of the industry.

The "2026 Reading List" (Brain & Future Tech)

• "The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains" by Pria Anand (2025/26): Explores the storytelling nature of the brain and how identity is shaped, providing a medical perspective on whether "data" equals "personhood."

• "Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer's Guide Through the Sleeping Mind" by Michelle Carr (2025): Recommended by 2026 researchers for understanding the neuroscience of consciousness—essential for those interested in "waking up" from biostasis.

• "Singularity Rising" by James D. Miller: Discusses the economics and risks of a future where AI and life extension collide—relevant to your point about cryonics being a "stable industry" compared to Bitcoin.

Industry Resources

• Alcor Life Extension Foundation (alcor.org): Access their Case Reports to see the actual medical data from preservations (including Patient 144).

• Tomorrow Bio (tomorrow.bio): Their "2026 Roadmap" blog provides updates on the use of BBB Modifiers and CT scans for quality control.

• The Nanofactory Collaboration (molecularassembler.com): For technical white papers on the molecular tools required for potential future revival.