Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, it’s real, and it’s as chilling as it sounds. According to the New York Post (August 23, 2024), a high-tech startup called Tomorrow Bio, based in Berlin, Germany, claims they can freeze a human body and revive it sometime in the future. Yeah, you read that right—they’re not just preserving leftovers in the freezer; they’re preserving entire human beings.
But before you start planning your post-apocalyptic comeback tour, you should know this service doesn’t come cheap. The company charges a whopping $222,603 for the full body freeze. If you’re on a budget and just want to keep your brain on ice, that’ll set you back $83,473. Oh, and don’t forget the monthly membership fee of $55—because even in death, there are subscription fees.
One of the co-founders, Fernando Azevedo Pinheiro, told the Daily Mail, “Personally, I believe that within my current lifetime—I’m 40 years old—we could see the safe cryopreservation and revival of complex organisms.” Well, if he’s right, you might just see a future where people come back from the dead, not as zombies, but as the same folks they were before they took that final nap.
For some, this technology offers a way to escape the one thing none of us can avoid—death.
So far, six humans and five pets have taken the plunge into icy oblivion, with 650 more people lining up for a spot on the ice, all with an average age of 36. None of them, apparently, plan on kicking the bucket anytime soon, though.
So, how does this futuristic popsicle-making process actually work? Tomorrow Bio offers something they call “field cryopreservation,” which is a fancy way of saying they start freezing you right after you’ve been declared legally dead. They even have a specialized ambulance, decked out like a mini surgical room, ready to go.
They claim to be the only company in the world doing this, which might be comforting—or terrifying—depending on how you look at it. The process involves replacing the body’s fluids with medical-grade antifreeze to prevent irreversible cold damage, then gradually lowering the body’s temperature to a bone-chilling minus 160 degrees Celsius over the course of a week. Finally, the body is stored in a long steel tank filled with liquid nitrogen for the long haul.
And here’s the kicker: if they do manage to bring you back to life and there’s still some money left in your cryo-fund, you’ll get a refund. Talk about an icy investment! Pinheiro cites a successful example of a similar process used to preserve rabbit kidneys. So, there’s that.
Tomorrow Bio has storage facilities across Europe, including in Berlin and Amsterdam, and they’re planning to expand to New York City soon. So, if you’re thinking of cheating death, you might want to start saving up—or at least get on the waiting list.