Fearful Fantasies and Supernatural Comfort

Fear of revival is (mostly) silly

Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

Fearful Fantasies

In my experience, the most powerful source of resistance to the biostasis idea is not doubts about its technical feasibility, it’s fears about what happens if it works. The perils of survival!

The fear is that you will wake up in a remote future where you are a misfit, your knowledge and skills obsolete, and where you will be alone. These are reasonable concerns. Still, too often – especially in popular fiction – these concerns are blown up into absurd fantasies of horrible futures. These encourage people to let themselves die rather than take advantage of the possibility provided by biostasis.

Let’s expose these scary scenarios and see why they are extremely implausible. Once confronted directly they should dissipate – like other groundless fears.

Some popular fictional fates for cryonauts see them being used for spare parts, as slaves or indentured servants, wanderers in a post-apocalyptic world, as people without a soul, or transplanted into someone else’s aged body. One of the silliest and laziest scenarios was a made-for-TV movie that came out in 1985 – in the early days of my involvement with biostasis.

In Wes Craven’s Chiller, corporate executive Miles Creighton is revived ten years after his clinical death. However, he returns without his soul and is now an evil killer. This one makes no sense to me because (a) I do not believe there is a “soul” if that means some non-physical thing; (b) if there are souls and all humans have them, then presumably you could not revive a person without one; (c) if the soul is non-physical, why would it wander off while someone is in biostasis? And (d) If a soul is really the essence of a person, how would a person-without-a-soul think or feel anything?

You could, with great generosity, interpret “has no soul” to mean “has brain damage.” It is certainly plausible that not all memories will be preserved in some cases but no reason why that would turn a normal person into a heartless killer! (Why does such damage never turn one into a Ghandi or Borlaugh?) Given the advanced technology needed to repair trillions of cells and sensing ability that implies, repair technicians would presumably spot major functional issues and fix them.

Dozens of stories in written fiction and big and small screen fiction revolve around five common themes.

Rapid Aging and Bodily Breakdown

One of the more dramatic revival tropes is that the preserved body cannot withstand the revival process, leading to accelerated aging or catastrophic failure:

• In Forever Young (1992), a pilot frozen in 1939 awakens in 1992, only to discover that his body is rapidly aging and breaking down, giving him only a short time to live.

• Oxygen (2021) follows a woman waking up in a malfunctioning cryo-pod with limited air, trapped with no memory of who she is or why she was frozen.

This trope assumes that revival is flawed, when in reality, any technology advanced enough to bring people back would likely have fail-safes against such failures. It would have been tested on increasingly complex animals as well as in advanced in silico modeling of biological systems. If freezing could damage the body beyond repair, revival would not even be attempted.

The World Has Moved On—And It’s Not Good

Another common theme is waking up in a world that has changed beyond recognition, often for the worse:

• Demolition Man (1993) revives a cop and a criminal five decades later in a sterile, authoritarian future, where crime has nearly disappeared, making both men out of place and unable to adapt.

• In Futurama (1999), Fry wakes up 1,000 years in the future, feeling completely alienated. Though meant as comedy, the theme of disconnection from society is real in many serious sci-fi works.

• Planet of the Apes (1968) presents an extreme version: an astronaut wakes up to find that civilization has collapsed, and apes now rule the planet.

I do not think we should spend much time worrying about the ape scenario. We will need to work at adapting. While there would be an adjustment period, society would likely have rehabilitation programs or AI-assisted learning to help bridge the gap as I discuss below.

Forced Into a New Body or New Life

What if revival isn’t on your own terms? Several dystopian works explore the horror of waking up in someone else’s body or being forced into a new identity:

• Altered Carbon (2018) envisions a world where minds are stored digitally and can be re-sleeved into different bodies. The protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is revived after 250 years in a body that is not his, forced to solve a murder for a powerful man.

• In a particularly horrifying scene, a little girl is revived in the body of an elderly woman due to lack of available bodies, leaving her terrified and traumatized.

• The ultra-rich, called Meths, revive people from the past for their own entertainment, experiments, or servitude, stripping them of autonomy.

This scenario assumes that revived individuals would have no rights, which is unlikely in any civilized society. It would require a massive reverse shift in cultural development. If brain-transfer technology existed, the culture would have beliefs, practices, values, and laws protecting against this kind of abuse. Some of these situations make gripping plot ideas but seem implausible in the real world.

Revived for Exploitation – Slaves, Soldiers, and Organ Farms

A common trope is that revived people are nothing more than resources for the powerful:

• In “The Defenseless Dead” (1973), a dystopian future legalizes the harvesting of organs from frozen people, first targeting the poor and then expanding to the mentally ill.

• In Bioshock (2007) and The Outer Worlds (2019), frozen individuals are revived into corporate dystopias, where they have no say in their future and are essentially slaves.

• Judge Dredd comics depict criminals being frozen as punishment, only to be revived later for forced labor.

• Altered Carbon shows criminals stored in digital prisons, only to be revived and used as soldiers or mercenaries.

The World is an Apocalyptic Wasteland

Finally, some stories suggest that revival will occur in a ruined world, where survivors have little interest in ethics:

• The Stars My Destination (1956) features a man waking up in a universe filled with war and chaos.

• The Forever War (1974) plays with time dilation, where soldiers return to a vastly different and unrecognizable future.

• Eternity Road (1997) is set in a post-apocalyptic world where cryonics was forgotten for centuries, leaving the revived as relics of a lost age.

Implausible!

However, such apocalyptic scenarios make revival extremely unlikely. A society capable of revival would need advanced technology, wealth, and stability—none of which would exist in a wasteland. Nor would a society in the midst of war be likely to choose that time to revive people.

While these fictional stories explore compelling fears about biostasis, they often fall apart under scrutiny. Some common flaws in these scenarios include:

• Reviving people just to use them for spare parts – In a future capable of revival, growing or 3D-printing or regenerating organs would be vastly easier than reviving old bodies for dissection.

• Slavery using revived people – If forced labor existed, it would be easier to exploit current populations rather than go through the trouble of reviving people. Unless subjugation was the main point, it would be easier and safer to use robots.

• Revival in a ruined world – A post-apocalyptic civilization would not have the technology, energy, or interest in reviving frozen people.

• Reviving someone in the wrong body – If mind-transfer technology ever exists, strict ethical and legal protections would likely prevent mismatched bodies.

While these scenarios make for engaging fiction, a real future where people wake from biostasis is more likely to involve rehabilitation, recognition of legal rights, and rehabilitation programs rather than chaotic exploitation. Science fiction often explores worst-case scenarios, but reality tends to be more practical.

Afterlife: Supernatural vs. physical

Most people imagine dire futures like these for revived biostasis patients. If you ask those who believe in an afterlife whether they fear it, you will find that they rarely do. They have no clear picture of the afterlife but assume everything will be fine. Why not have at least the same level of doubt and concern as they have for a biostasis revivee?

If there is an afterlife, our scientific understanding of the world is badly flawed. That means we should have far less confidence in our post-death existence, not more. If there is an afterlife that implies the existence of a meta-reality. This could be a traditional supernatural existence (usually but not always with a “god”) or it could be more along the lines of a game developer or universe-simulation enthusiast. This could be good or bad from our current perspective but is definitely far more uncertain than a plausible future for revivees.

So, why do people automatically assume a lovely supernatural afterlife but the opposite for biostasis revivees? I can only speculate. Supernatural beliefs are unconstrained by empirical reality. Anything goes. Humans like certainty. It makes thinking and living more comfortable. Throughout our evolutionary history, predictability meant survival. Early humans who quickly categorized threats and made firm decisions (even with limited information) were more likely to survive predators, starvation, and conflict. Certainty reduced the cognitive load of endlessly analyzing risks and increased group cohesion. When it comes to our very existence, we want certainty. Either we want to be certain that when we die that is the end, or we want to be certain of a beautiful afterlife.

Because no rules exist in an imagined or posited supernatural realm, we can impose our own desired (or feared) view of it. For a few that means fearing Hell – an endless punishment for sins real or imagined. For most it means imagining a perfect world under the absolute wise and benevolent rule of a being they label as “God.” If there are no rules or even guidelines, why not quickly assume that the afterlife – which you cannot avoid – is a perfect place of peace and joy?

But when it comes to pondering the future world into which biostasis patients may return, the constraints of the physical world intervene. It is easier to imagine bad outcomes than good ones. Bad outcomes are simple. They involve damage, coercion, destruction, and pain. Good outcomes – at least outcomes better than what we have today – require creative thinking. And even the most creative thinker will fail to foresee all the unprecedented possibilities, just as someone in 1800 would be radically surprised by the world of today.