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Dec. 2, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:31:02
Edition 278 - Guest Catchups

Two top guests - Dr Leonard David on colonizing Mars - and Dr Max Moore on CryonicPreservation...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for bearing with me.
I know this show is a little bit later than it ought to have been, as I explained on the last edition.
I'm dealing with one or two things at the moment that are putting a bit of a roadblock in life, but I'm hoping to surmount those very soon, and I will keep you posted.
And in a future edition, I will explain exactly what's been going on.
Thank you for being my friend and for bearing with me during all of this.
On this edition, we're going to hear two guests from my radio show, two great conversations, one with a man called Leonard David, who's just published a brand new book about that topic that so many of us are really, really interested in, colonizing Mars.
Because this thing that seemed to be science fiction when maybe you and I were kids now is looking like science fact.
And it's going to be happening sooner than many of us believe.
So we'll talk to Leonard David.
His new National Geographic book about colonizing Mars, I think, was out in America last month and is out in the UK this month.
We'll also talk with a man called Dr. Max Moore in the United States, but he's a Brit there.
He is in charge of the Alcor Foundation.
Now, they've been in the news recently.
They were not directly involved in this case.
But we had a news story here, a very human story that certainly tugged at my being for a good long while.
It was a story that I thought about a lot as I was doing it on news.
A girl of 14 whose dying wish was to be cryogenically, or as you say in America, cryonically preserved.
In other words, frozen is not technically correct, but it's what journalists say about this.
It's not really a freezing process, per se, as you will hear.
Dr. Max Moore is the second guest on this edition.
No shout-outs this time.
If you were looking forward to a shout-out, I promise I will get round to a big mass of them probably in the next edition.
I just haven't had time to collate them.
So I hope you understand, but I have been reading the emails as they've come in.
And thank you very much.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for bearing with me and for helping.
And, you know, as I say, thank you to you very much for your donations and your support through this year of 2016.
The website address, by the way, is theunexplained.tv.
That's the address to go to.
If you want to email me, don't forget.
If you do email me, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show, because I love to hear from you wherever you are, whether you're in Australia, got many listeners there, the United States and Canada, or anywhere else in this wonderful world of ours, with its two hemispheres, the warm one at the moment and the cold one that I'm in right now.
All right, let's get to the first of the guests on this show, Leonard David, and we're going to talk about colonizing Mars.
Leonard David is the author of Mars, Our Future on the Red Planet, published by National Geographic.
The book is the companion volume to Mars, a six-part TV series.
The book came out, certainly in America, last month.
I think it's out here too.
We'll ask Leonard when he comes on.
Leonard is also co-author with Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin of Mission to Mars, My Vision for Space Exploration.
That was released a couple of years back.
Leonard, David, thank you very much for coming on the Unexplained.
Well, thank you for having me.
I appreciate it.
Whereabouts are you?
I am at 9,000 feet, but in the Colorado Mountains.
Wow, great place for stargazing.
And it's closer to Mars.
Why the interest in Mars, then?
Well, I think it's been decades and decades and centuries, really, of why Mars has always been a magnet for curiosity.
And, you know, it goes back a long, long way.
And the best thing that's happened, you know, for understanding that planet has been robotic exploration since the dawn of the space age.
Soviet Union and the U.S. have, you know, sent probes, same with Europe, and India has an orbiter around Mars now, so it's really been a magnet for investigations.
And probably that main thing that you started out with, you know, is there life on Mars, has always been a draw.
And we're still scratching our head on that one.
You know, one of the questions that would be asked and has been asked by many people is why would the likes of India, who they have enough problems on Earth, why would they want to get involved in Mars?
Well, I think it's a good question.
You know, you probably have to ask the Indians, and you might want to ask the United Arab Emirates.
They're working on a Mars orbiter that's going to be launched in a few years from now.
I think it's a little bit of, you know, it used to be a big deal to launch a satellite around the Earth.
Now we're, you know, swimming in satellites that circle the planet, our planet.
And I think that bold step of getting to Mars is sort of a new, you feel like you're a new player in an unfolding drama about Mars.
Same with China.
They're, you know, as much as they're doing right now with piloted spaceflight and a lot of different kind of satellites they launch and also lunar exploration, they've got a rover they're working on for Mars that will be launched in 2020.
So it's, again, here in America, we get a little bit NASA, NASA, NASA, and what they're doing.
But clearly in my book, I try to get to the point that this is a global undertaking right now.
Would you call it a race?
Is it like the race to the moon?
You know, I tried a story a few months ago.
I write for Space.com, and I tried to, I kind of put it in the context of a race, but a race to find life on Mars.
And I couldn't get anybody to really say that.
So I kept the title, but I didn't get a sense that scientists think it's a race for detecting life on Mars.
But I still kind of maintain that Europe has a brand new Orbiter around Mars looking for methane.
It's going to be fully operational here shortly.
Methane may be a signature of Mars biology.
I do still sense that there is some, you know, one upsmanship about finding life on Mars and proving it to the rest of the scientific community.
Well, of course, you know, space exploration for as long as we've had it has been about trying to prove that you're the best and fastest and the most able.
Yeah, I think finding life on Mars, it's difficult.
You know, apparently it's difficult because I think back in the 70s, obviously the U.S. landed two Viking landers.
And that was a pretty expensive mission, two landers, two orbiters.
And when they got down on the surface, they were successful.
But the package they put together was meant to answer the question, is there life on Mars?
And I think they both kind of relayed, can you repeat the question?
There are still some, one scientist in particular was on that mission and it claims his experiment did find life on Mars.
Who was that?
Oh, yeah.
Gilbert Levine is one of the Viking scientists, and to this day, he is adamant that his particular experiment detected life on Mars.
Did Gilbert Levine give us any clue as to what form that life took?
Well, you know, microbial life, but, you know, he detected some kind of exhaling material, you know, on Mars.
And some of the other scientists that were engaged in the project have said, no, no, I don't think so.
But Gil, here we are decades later, he just gave a talk recently at one of the anniversaries of the Viking landing, still pounding the podium saying, I believe my experiment found life.
Now, you're connected in this field, much more than I will ever be.
Have you had any contact from anybody who's involved in this research, who's given you any clue as to how the news, when that news, and I don't think it's a question of if that news will break.
I think that one of these days we will discover that there is indeed some form of life on Mars or has been.
Has anybody given you any indication, Leonard, of how that news will be broken to the people?
Because it's a bit of a game changer.
I think it's a game changer, and I'm not sure.
Let's put Viking aside for a second.
And there's actually some new work that's been done by Steve Ruff and Jack Farmer at the Arizona State University.
It's just out a few weeks ago or a week ago now that they went back and looked at some of the spirit rover that NASA put down on Mars.
And they think that they detect what they claim are biosignatures on Mars because they're very comparable to in Chile some similar type of geology and some biosignatures they found that they know were fossilized life.
So whatever it is, it's hard to prove to the entire scientific community that you've got some definitive information.
So here we are many, many decades after Viking in this new paper that's just out in a scientific journal claiming that they may have detected or spirit may have detected something numbers of years ago.
And they're just putting it out to the community to either agree, disagree, or be middle.
So it's hard.
Whatever it is, it's hard.
And in the book, I kind of get into why it's so hard.
I mean, if it's underground, we're going to have to dig deep, maybe not so deep.
Some people claim it's not so deep.
So we'll find out.
More rovers are needed to go, and then eventually humans.
And I think that will be the turning page in the history of Mars and the story of life on that planet.
You have a really good, mind-expanding website.
I loved your website.
I spent some time on it yesterday.
One of the headlines currently on your website is that Curiosity is about to start what you call some serious drilling on Mars.
And that's exactly what you've just been talking about, isn't it, that we may have to go down some way?
Curiosity has drilled into the surface numbers of times now.
It's a brand new location.
I think most people think we've got to dig deeper.
ExoMars 2020, the European rover that will be launched in 2020 and get there 21, that has a pretty significant drill that goes in deeper.
And so, again, most of the space science guys that are, particularly Chris McKay at NASA Ames, you know, drill, baby, drill.
We got to get deep.
And then there's potential for finding caves on Mars that may, you know, be some kind of habitation, housing for microbes.
So we'll see, but I do think we're going to have to be much more capable and whether the robots can do it versus human contact with the red planet on the spot.
That's still to be determined.
But the blend of the two, robots and humans on Mars, will certainly make a big difference in exploration.
Did you see this story that I picked up?
It was probably in other places, but on livescience.com this week that we did in our news section at the beginning of this show.
Giant deposit of buried ice on Mars contains apparently about as much water as America's Lake Superior here on Earth, according to a new study.
What did you make of that if you saw it?
Oh, yeah, no, that's a great find.
It also gives you a clue that we've got more work to do.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Corporate has a radar system on it, and after numbers and numbers of passes over a certain area on Mars, they believe they picked up signals and you look at the data and you wonder how they get all that out of there.
But apparently, there's water ice there and a huge amount.
So that's just one location on Mars.
The thing that's probably going to have to happen, and NASA is quietly trying to make this happen, is in a few years from now, there's a need for a new kind of orbiter, and it may be an international orbiter.
There are people starting to talk a lot more about having a global orbiter that would have multiple countries involved to really look for resources on Mars.
Where are those kind of ice pockets?
Where are all of them?
And where can we get to them?
If humans go there, you've got to have a strategy now to live off land, which is something that people in the book I get to quite a bit is what they call in-situ resource utilization, kind of a NASA word or scientific word, but it's just on the spot, can you find resources that can sustain human life on Mars?
And that ice deposits is a step forward.
Yeah, and it's a double-edged thing, isn't it?
Because on one side, you're looking for water because it might contain life or have contained life, but you're also looking at water as a resource, and we're more and more thinking about that now, that human explorers of Mars could tap into and use to maybe grow things, but certainly to drink and wash.
And make fuel, make propellant.
You separate it, you create propellant out of it.
Yeah, it is a conundrum.
And I find that it's going to be a little bit of a head-on collision.
I'm not sure how it's going to be resolved, but it's almost ironic that where the water is, the life will probably be.
And we want to sustain human life on it.
But what happens if we find microbial life, maybe even a second genesis of life?
What do we do?
Do we select certain areas that we're going to really contaminate and use the water?
Again, I'm coming off this book.
So it's in the book about this kind of, a little bit of a catch-22 on Mars and how humans are going to search for water, search for life, and what happens then.
It is a bit of a, maybe an ethical question about...
We've tried to ask this before, but I haven't had somebody as well connected as yourself on this subject to ask the question about the morality of it, really, because if there is something there and something has evolved in a different way from us, do we have the right in our quest for knowledge and our quest for resources and all the other things that drive and motivate humankind?
Have we got the right to go there and change it?
I think that's a good question.
And I think we're going to have to start embracing the answers fairly soon because we're certainly sending spacecraft.
Numbers of nations are sending spacecraft.
Some have been sterilized.
Viking went through a really rigorous procedure to sterilize it because it was on the search for life and you didn't want to haul microbial life from Earth and then detect it on that planet.
Connecting to Leonard David, he is a space journalist.
He has been for 50 years.
He's also the author of a brand new book called Mars, Our Future on the Red Planet, published by National Geographic last month in America, and I think available here too, because National Geographic make their stuff worldwide as we know.
I think, you know, a lot of people are waking up to this idea, certainly this year of 2016, Leonard, that this is going to happen.
People are going to go there, and some of us may well be alive when it happens.
Well, there's certainly the opportunity, you know, and again, I do think there are several scenarios that you can see kind of coming.
Recently, Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and chief rocketeer there at that company, you know, was in Mexico and gave a fairly powerful presentation about colonization of Mars and how his company is very interested in first putting on the red planet red dragon capsules and then upgrade them to human landers.
And then, you know, he's got an interplanetary ship that he wants to design and build, not only for Mars, but beyond Mars travel for humans.
So that's one.
The private sector, not only, you know, not only must, but there's, you know, Richard Branson's very interested in public space travel, as well as Jeff Beast, the Amazon.com fame.
So you got that private sector kind of space hunger.
Then you have the governments that, you know, NASA certainly believes that it's on a journey to Mars.
We've got an administration change coming, and my guess is that's going to change the tables a bit of where Mars fits in into the NASA program.
Then you have the global reach, you know, like we've talked to China, UAE, India, you know, other nations, certainly the European Space Agency as well.
How is that going to evolve in the near few years?
Right.
I've got actually, I know we're having some Skype difficulties, Leonard, so we're monitoring it.
We may come back to you by phone if it gets much worse.
However, this is fascinating.
There was an organization, and we played a little clip on our news section maybe four or five weeks ago here, a company called Mars One, and they're massively, massively confident.
They've got a superb website.
I'm looking at it now.
And they are talking about starting the process of colonizing Mars Any year now, I mean, I think they're going to send their first automatic craft there, I think around about 2017 or thereabouts.
The automatic craft will build the first habitations, and then the people will start to arrive.
And we're talking 2020s by then.
Very ambitious.
Do you think that's going to happen?
Well, I've met those folks that run the group, and they do have a proactive view of their project and how they are going to go about it.
What I was impressed with were the numbers of people that signed up on a one-way Mars flight.
And I've met a couple of those folks that have sort of been, you know, they've narrowed the list down of candidates that they want to send.
And they're pioneers.
You know, they're mental pioneers right now, and actually doing it is going to be a different thing.
But certainly their will and ambition to be striking out from Earth and step foot on Mars is to be commended.
Now, whether or not the wherewithal, the financial aspect of that particular group is going to gel, I think it's a little bit of a roll of a dice.
But I think I do salute their effort and the fact that they've had so many people clearly demonstrating an interest in thinking about stepping off this planet and going to another.
I want to talk with you in a little while about the human aspects of this because they are fascinating.
And I heard you talk, I think, on a radio program in Canada about this, which is why I've got you on here.
It's a fascinating thing.
But just looking at the Mars One project here, on the front page of their website, they say that sending humans to Mars is, you know, surprise, surprise, a phenomenal undertaking by all standards and presents very real risks and challenges.
Establishing a permanent settlement is very complex, they say, but is far less complex and requires much less infrastructure sent to Mars than return missions.
Mars One has already started contracting established aerospace companies that will be able to develop the required systems.
All systems require design, construction, testing, but no scientific breakthroughs are required to send humans to Mars and sustain life there.
In other words, we have the technology.
All we need is the will.
I think it's there, the technology.
I think the willpower is there for groups to do these kind of things.
But there are still some unknown unknowns that are going to be involved.
I don't want to characterize one-way trips as sort of the suicide missions.
You've got to give people a fighting chance on the planet to survive and thrive.
But as you said, and as I played a little clip of them a few weeks back, they're very bullish about this.
They say they've had way more takers, way more people getting in touch than they could ever send out there.
So lots of people want to do this, even though it is a one-way mission.
Yeah, well, I think that's great.
And again, I think it underscores the human interest in off-planet exploration.
One big thing that may happen, and I don't see why this would not happen, right now, you know, it's 140 million miles away.
It's a long six to nine month journey.
You hang around on the planet.
If you want to come back, you've got to wait a while for the planets to come back online and come back another six to nine months.
You know, it's a drudgery, you know, for people to try to take that track.
But what will happen, transportation will change.
You know, space transportation, I believe, you know, it's like every form of transportation we've seen here on the planet.
We're going around the planet.
Everybody's moving around the planet.
There are millions right now in, I always think of them in suborbital space.
They take off from one point, they go to another point on Earth, and there's millions of people in the air right now flying through airspace.
And what's going to happen in the future, I think the solar system is going to shrink.
We're going to be able to move about much more rapidly than we've ever thought.
And so that connective tissue, literally human tissue between the Earth and Mars, may not be a big deal in the future.
Well, as I said, the Mars One people very, very bullish when they held a news conference recently.
I've actually found the clip of them that we ran on our news here five or six weeks back.
Let's just hear them.
My company, Mars One, is trying to establish the first human settlement on Mars in 2027.
And it's going to be a mission of permanent settlement.
So the people that we sent there are going on a mission forever, for the rest of their lives.
And that is really what makes Mars One possible.
The most important skill is really teamwork.
So you need to be the ultimate team player because you're going to depend on each other with your lives.
And that is what the whole mission depends on.
We started five years ago.
We talked to aerospace companies around the world.
Our first mission is scheduled for 2020.
It's an unmanned mission that will look a lot like the NASA Phoenix mission.
We'll install our own instruments on that to test some of the equipment that we need for the human mission.
Two years after that, we're going to send a rover to Mars.
It's going to drive around on the surface.
It's going to look for the best location of the settlement.
Once that's pinpointed, we're going to send all the hardware for the manned mission.
So two life support units, two living units, another rover, supplies.
The rovers will put everything together and there will be a habitable settlement waiting for the crew.
I have to say, Leonard David, when I heard that, and I'll find online here, I'm just looking for the name of the CEO.
I don't have it here off the top of my head.
But, you know, it took that audio clip that I got and played here to make me realize, to get it through my head, that there are people who really believe that this is going to happen within a very close time scale.
Well, I think that's, you know, they're great in talking about it.
We've got to see countdowns and things go and money raised and that kind of thing.
So I salute them for their enthusiasm.
I think in my view, the trek early is tough.
And, you know, pioneers will die on Mars.
People will die.
And if it's a possible government organization, maybe they would cancel out because people died.
So who knows which scenario is really going to play out here.
But I salute those folks, the Mars One crowd, being very optimistic and tapping into some public interest in human travel to Mars.
And there are other people taking them seriously because I'm just reading one of their news releases here, and the CEO is called Baz Lansdorp.
One of the news releases that he put out on the 7th of this month, 7th of November, so just days ago, is that they've gone public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
So this is a serious endeavor.
The one thing that, before we get into the human aspect of this, which is fascinating, the one thing about Mars One and probably all of these projects, if and when they come to fruition, is the idea that you can send craft up there first, and those craft, with the technology that we've got now, are reliable enough and can do the job comprehensively enough to be able to build something for people to live in in advance.
I mean, I find that whole idea mind-boggling, but they're very confident.
Yeah, well, it doesn't take much to realize that, you know, we have landers on Mars, a robotic craft.
I mean, the last successful, we just had a European lander that didn't make it to the surface.
It was a robotic lander, and unfortunately, it had a glitch in its computer system and some other kind of maneuvering system that, you know, would crash the thing.
This was the ship 100 miles an hour.
But we know we can land a ton on Mars, and that was the Curiosity rover.
But what's going to have to happen here is that if you're going to launch 10, 20, 30, I've heard numbers up to 100 tons of hardware to build some habitats, that's going to take a little bit more effort and technology and know-how.
Not that we can't do it.
It's just that we're going to have to really hunker down and start doing that.
And, you know, the Mars One crowd and the governments and Elon Musk and his efforts, I mean, it's showtime, basically.
You can get up and you can do a lot of hand waving and have PowerPoints going.
But at some point, you know, there's a countdown involved and something goes up in the air and makes it or doesn't.
You know, the one thing that struck me very forcibly about all of this is that I love that Mark Wahlberg movie, The Martian.
And I watched it and I thought, well, that's a bit of Hollywood Hocum.
You know, it could never really happen like that.
And yet we seem to be knocking on the door of an era when it might.
Yeah, I think the biggest problem I have with the movie The Martian was that people thought it was filmed on location.
On location on Mars.
It looked so real, and the hardware looked like exactly what you'd think would be happening.
But I do want to emphasize that the early pioneers will be hunkered down in these habitats.
They're kind of Spartan.
It's like space station modules.
You look in the images of the space station.
There's clutter all over the place and people are living in these things.
And early Mars habitats will most likely be something like those modules.
And the key will be using the resources and 3D printing and construction to actually use the materials available on the planet to create habitats far different than what we see now projected by NASA or other countries.
And there are some provocative designs that are being looked at that are, you know, it's not nearly the Motel 6 kind of habitats.
It looks pretty exotic.
So who knows?
But I do think the future is going to be much more living comfortably on a planet like that and in confines that are much more elaborate than what we see today.
Right.
You know, if the technology is able to do it, that's one thing.
But what I want to talk about next is the human factor here, because we've already hinted at that, Leonard David.
Fact is that people are going to be going on a one-way mission, so they're going to have to have their heads pretty straight about that from the beginning.
Plus, they've got to be able to realize that they are so far away from home when they're there, and they're going to face a whole range of conditions that maybe they're not all that prepared for.
You know, for a start, the ferocity of the storms that are experienced, the temperature swings that are experienced on Mars.
These are all things that humankind will never have dealt with before, and they are fascinating conundrums to deal with, because you would have thought 30 years ago, impossible.
No human being could face such things, mentally or physically face such things.
But now we're talking about this becoming a reality.
We're talking about the science and the humanity of colonizing Mars.
Now, look, I have a friend called Jenny Priestley.
She is a great entertainment correspondent who you will see on Sky talking movies periodically.
Jenny and I have known each other for years, and she would be screaming at the radio if she'd heard me say that Mark Wahlberg was in The Martian, of course it wasn't.
It was Matt Damon.
Sorry about that.
And I've seen the movie twice, so there's no excuse.
David, thank you very much for your tweet, just giving me a steer for somebody involved in the Mars One project that we might be able to get on here.
We're On that.
David, very good of you.
Thanks for listening and thank you for sending that suggestion.
Leonard David, we've got about a quarter of an hour thereabouts to talk about this.
The humanity of this is to me the most interesting thing.
I heard a whole Canadian documentary on Canadian radio about a month or so about this.
I think you might have been featured in this, but it was remarkable stuff because it made me think about aspects of doing this that I'd never considered before.
A lot of it is about the psychology.
You know, what is it going to be like for those volunteers, assuming they actually make it and assuming that they can survive, what is it going to be like for them to know that they are stuck on a place so far away from what we call home and they can't come back and they've got to make the best of it with the people who are there?
Right.
It's going to be an interesting dynamic of people that will be selected for that type of mission.
You probably have to have backup people in case something goes medically wrong with somebody in training.
So it's going to be, that first flight out, it's going to be pretty tough.
You get some views, though.
You get some inkling of what's going to happen on the International Space Station.
I'm probably one of a number of reporters that wondered what billions and billions of dollars have been spent on the International Space Station, and we weren't quite sure what the function was going to be.
And, you know, it has turned out to be a testbed, not only for hardware, for ideas, but also cultural bonding and, you know, different countries using that facility and how an international crew learns to work, you know, on issues or difficulties and work together as a team.
In my book, there's a couple of gotchas, however.
One of them is by Nick Canis, a psychologist that's done a lot of work with cosmonauts and astronauts.
And he has a kind of a, I'm not saying a prediction, but he's just saying there's a concept, he calls Earth out of view.
And for the first time, you're going to have people on Mars where the Earth's on the other side of the Sun, and they're completely cut off for a good bit of time with communications from Earth, which is already delayed normally, Earth to Mars and back.
But everybody they've ever known on that planet, you know, all six or seven or eight billion of us, they won't have any contact with those people.
And, you know, the psychology of this is fascinating because what down here can really prepare you for the experience of that for real?
I don't care how mentally stable you are, when you're faced with that reality, how will you react?
You know, I think everybody's pointing to we're probably not going to know.
You know, we'll do the best to shake out the crew and psychologically have the best crew we could possibly ever send to that planet.
But I think there's on-the-job training that's going to be required and on-the-job thinking.
And, you know, with the communication delay, typically, you know, on the space station, you're always linked in to the mission controls, whether they're in Moscow or NASA in the U.S. And that's not going to be the case.
These people are going to have delayed communication.
They're going to have to depend on their own decision making.
And who are those people going to be?
You start thinking about what kind of people are we going to go?
I mean, are we talking all technicians, all engineers?
They're going to be some biologists that's got to be involved.
Is there some shrink that's going to be part of the crew?
I mean, what kind of disciplines are going to have to be sent there?
And I would have thought, you know, some people with law enforcement experience will be needed because you've only got to watch movies like the Alien series to realize that, of course, there are going to be animosities and disagreements and problems, and they can be serious.
And when you're so far away from home, you can't call the cops.
Well, you know, you don't want to be in there and then have somebody go wrong or something and suck everybody out on the surface.
So there's not a lot of room for I'm sorry, you know.
So that team development is going to be crucial.
But again, these are one thing that does kind of get in the way of people's attitude about this.
When you think about exploration on this planet, I mean, we have people that put themselves in harm's way all over this globe, whether it's the top of the mountains or the below the ocean, in the deserts, Arctic regions.
And each of those people have conquered that environment and under great duress, stress, whatever.
But always knowing that if you climbed Everest, you know that eventually you're going to go down to the base camp at the bottom and you're going to get on a helicopter.
You can't go out on Mars.
If you're brought down on a sled that you're dead, it can be that too.
So there will be boot hills on Mars at some point.
I mean, there will be places where expeditions went awry, I'd assume.
I just don't see it as a slam dunk early on.
Later on, as you build up confidence and realize that Mars is out to kill you all the time, are there ways to circumnavigate, circumvent some of those issues?
And we'll get better at living on Mars.
And then you do open the possibility and the promise of settlement and outposts and that kind of vision.
And the other thing, of course, you have to provide yourself with your own food.
We talked about trying to find a good supply of Usable water.
But you can't go out to Mars with a lot of shopping bags from Safeway full of stuff to last you through.
It's not going to work that way.
You've got to start growing things.
How practical do you think that will be?
Well, I do think the Mars One group has done some very futuristic and very productive looks at greenhouses on the red planet and the types of crops that can be used, what kind of fertilizers would have to be found or brought.
And I think they have made some headway in that area.
And similarly, NASA has done a lot of greenhouse work and different kind of lighting you'd have to use.
You're always fighting radiation because of the thin atmosphere of Mars, so you've got to be aware of that.
But it does bring up another ethical issue in the future, in the last few minutes we got here, and that is terraforming Mars.
Whether or not we're going to turn the thermostat up on cold Mars and make it more Earth-like.
And there are very serious proposals on how to transform Mars into kind of an Earth 2.0.
Right, by growing crops there, crops which will...
And can you actually make the atmosphere that more tolerable for humans?
And that does get back to this ethical issue of, you know, what right do we have to go transform that planet, particularly if we find life there.
Also bearing in mind the fact that if you believe that climate change is real and we caused it, look what we've done here.
That's right.
Well, and I think terraforming on Earth is running rampant.
We terraform all the time.
Agriculture is terraforming.
We see, I was just in Las Vegas.
There's a great terraforming activity in Las Vegas.
They turned a whole desert community, desert surroundings into a gambling facility.
So I don't know.
It's just one that we bring up in the book.
I tried to bring in both sides of the issue of what is the future of the red planet in terms of changing it to suit Earth life.
And I left it in the middle.
And that'll be another thing to discuss because the friends of Mars are out there looming.
They are indeed.
International cooperation, I would have thought, very important.
If you have a plan for colonizing Mars, it's got to be an international plan.
You can't have different nations taking one view and then another nation takes a different view.
And that would be a terrible mess.
But how, I mean, look at the United Nations.
How would we get agreement on how to do this?
Well, you'll have many more shows on this to come.
It's going to be tough.
Yeah, I think, you know, everybody has stepping stone abilities to explore Mars.
And, you know, in my view, combining nations and private sector operations, I think we can come up with a fairly aggressive, sensible exploration plan for Mars.
There are a lot of details, and somewhere in there, you know, the lawyers are lurking.
Yes, and that's a whole other aspect of it that needs to be talked about.
One of my listeners, W.J. Smith, says, have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, which explores the subject that we're talking about?
I've had the pleasure of meeting him, and to be honest, I have not read, I'm not a good sci-fi reader.
Sci-fi movies, I'm there, I'm standing in line for the arrival coming up, you know.
But I've listened to Robinson give a presentation on his books, and I understand that he's actually, there's some move to make a TV series out of his books.
And so that will be another step in the direction of getting people very interested in what's the future of the red planet.
Leonard, do you think part of the subplot of doing this, of all these nations wanting to get involved in this and private organizations actively planning doing this, do you think the subplot of it all is that eventually we may screw this planet up so much that we've got to get out and we've got to go and live somewhere else and the somewhere else might be Mars?
I think that's one scenario that, I mean, I talk to people, that's what they feel, like we're going to foul the nest here, and we better have a back planet.
Even Elon Musk himself, you know, you get into these multi-planet species.
We've got asteroids and comets perhaps acing us out.
It's important to get to Mars to assure survival of the species.
However, I do think that if we can't make it on Mars, if we fold up shop, if we foul up Mars, if life is crushed somehow, I don't think that's a good thing because I do think it is a testing ground for ethics, for technology.
You know, Mars is a huge metaphor for exploration, scientific discovery, and, you know, and destiny.
So you're saying that we could actually come out of this better people?
I think anytime we as a species work together on projects that are so mind-boggling in history making, yeah, I think we come out the other end a better species.
Because I think in the long haul, and this is another topic that you, I'm sure, are interested in, we're talking interstellar travel here at some point.
Humans are going to jump out of the solar system and, you know, little by little, the exoplanets are starting to show up all over the place.
And there are destinations now that look promising way beyond Mars.
So, you know, these are all grounds for testing every bit of what humankind does best and moving on.
Final question, and you've been very good to do this, and thank you for coping with the Skype connection that we've got here.
I think we've just about got every word that you said.
Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo astronaut, you worked with him on a book.
Have you talked, I presume you have talked extensively with Buzz about Mars?
What does he make of all of this?
Well, no, Mars is, you know, for him, he doesn't want to see taxpayer dollars in the U.S. go back to putting astronauts on the moon.
He'd rather see the commercial sector have a place on the moon.
But his big window of opportunity now is Mars, and he's very busy.
He's 88, I think, now, and very fascinated with creating a transportation system called the Cycling Spaceships that would allow for almost, you know, kind of you jump on one end of the cycling spaceship and you wind up at Mars, and it's constantly going between the planets.
So Buzz has been busy.
He continues to be an amazing character in my life.
It was a great pleasure to work with him, but he's not done thinking big things.
And he's got some new ones coming.
Well, I would love to talk with him on this program.
Did you ever meet Gene Roddenberry, the man who created Star Trek?
I sure did.
And I can't tell you which bar we were in, but we had a great conversation.
Did you talk about colonizing Mars?
We talked about everything.
It was just one of these.
I was in Scottsdale, Arizona, and we just hit it off.
I was at a meeting with the National Space Society Institute at the time, and Roddenberry is one of those guys as a director, one of the key players in it.
And it was just great.
I mean, just his whole, it was more about his life and the struggles he went through to have a success in television and then what he made that success become.
And, you know, Star Trek didn't start off, you know, as a big of a hit as it was.
It nearly got canceled at the beginning, but what a remarkable man who was so prophetic.
We're out of time, Leonard David.
Thank you very much for persevering with the connection and for taking time out of your Sunday to talk with us here at The Unexplained.
Thank you, and thank you for the listeners.
Leonard David, with some marvelous and thought-provoking reflections on colonizing Mars, which is going to happen, maybe in our lifetimes.
Exciting stuff.
Not sure that I would want to go there, but there are many, many people who do.
And I've got a bit of a plan to try and talk to one of the candidates for one of the missions that's being planned at the moment.
We'll see if we can make that happen.
Next guest is a man called Dr. Max Moore.
He's the CEO of the Alcor Foundation in the United States.
They have been part of the news recently, not directly involved, as I said, because a lot of people have been discussing the idea of cryonic or cryogenic preservation.
You know, when you die, the idea that whatever killed you might be curable in the future, and if you are preserved cryonically, then maybe you can be brought back and cured and then live again.
Very much brought into focus by this heart-tugging story of the girl of 14 who got her dying wish to be preserved in this way.
Not by Alcor.
They were not the company involved here.
But let's hear, as broadcast on the program, from Dr. Max Moore about cryonic preservation.
And first of all...
If you're reporting the death or near death of an Alcor member, please press 2 now.
That is very illustrative, isn't it?
You know, literally, there are people who will call that number.
I don't know whether they'll call it tonight, but they will press option two and they will say, I'm a member of Alcor and my relative is about to die or has just died.
Can you make the process kick in?
This is where we bring on Dr. Max Moore, the CEO of Alcor.
Max, thank you for waiting.
How would you describe what you do?
Well, yes, it's a good question.
Ms. A little bit unfamiliar to most people.
I like to really frame what we do as essentially an extension of emergency medicine.
If you think of it like this, think about 50 years ago, if somebody, you're walking around the street or in a shopping mall or somewhere, somebody keeled over, they stopped breathing, their heart stopped beating, we would have checked their pulse, and just like on the old Star Trek, we would have said, this person's dead, Jim, and that was it.
We kind of gave up on them.
But today, we don't do that.
We don't consider them dead anymore.
We can do things to help them, such as CPR, defibrillation, a number of other things, and we can revive them.
So our point of view is that today, when a doctor declares you to be clinically dead, or legally dead, really that doesn't mean a whole lot.
It really means that they're saying, I've reached the limits of today's medical technology and capability.
There's nothing much more I can do for this person.
It doesn't even mean they couldn't revive the person.
Quite often they could at least temporarily revive the person, which is why you have do not resuscitate orders, because it's often quite pointless, because they're just going to fail again fairly soon.
So death is not this drastic bright line that people seem to think it is, where the soul leaves the body.
It's not like that at all.
There are people who've been clinically dead for an hour and a half in cold water and have been revived and been neurologically intact.
So what we're saying really is when you reach the limits of today's medicine, there's nothing more you can do.
Turn them over to us and in good circumstances, we'll be right there by the bedside.
We can start within a minute or so.
We're going to cool the patient, protect the cells in various complicated ways that I can elaborate on if you like, and then eventually store them at an extremely cold temperature, minus 196 degrees Celsius, minus 320 Fahrenheit, at which temperature there is no metabolic activity.
That means that it doesn't make a difference whether we wait a day, a year, or 100 years at that point.
We can wait for as long as it takes to find a cure for whatever kill them into day sense, reverse the cause of the fatal dysfunction, and hopefully repair the additional damage done by the cryopreservation process.
For a lot of people, this will sound like something from that old TV show, The Avengers.
It sounds like that kind of thing.
But I can hear in your voice, Max, this is very serious science.
It is, yeah.
Actually, I'm not sure which Avengers you're talking about, but if you think about The Avengers and Captain America, of course, Captain America fictionally was the first cryonaut.
He actually fell into the icy waters of the Arctic, and his super soldier serum is kind of a little bit like our cryoprotectant, if we stretch things a bit, and he was able to be revived with no damage to his cells.
It does sound Like science fiction, but listen, think about in vitro fertilization back in the 70s, 1978.
Louise Brown in England, the very first test tube baby, as they call them back then.
And everybody was saying, Oh, this is science fiction, and if we do this, they won't have souls.
Today, there are over a million people walking around who are cryopreserved, but they were embryos at the time.
So, yesterday's science fiction can become today's science fact.
And when I say fact, this is still speculative.
We can't actually prove that these future technologies will be developed.
Our point is that it doesn't violate any laws of physics.
It's really a matter of developing fine micro-scale tools that can repair solar damage.
And that seems to be entirely possible.
It's a matter of time.
On your website, Max, you say very clearly that this is an experimental procedure.
Do you say that for legal reasons?
Well, we say that because that's the truth.
It's kind of funny.
A lot of people say, oh, this must be a scam.
They're out to make money from preying on people's desperation, which if you actually look into what we do is exactly the opposite.
First of all, we almost never take people at the last minute.
Most people sign up years or decades in advance.
We make it quite difficult for people to sign up at the last minute.
And if you look at our paperwork, we emphasize pages and pages of the things that could go wrong, things that might not work.
We may not even know that someone's being declared clinically dead for hours or days if someone doesn't tell us.
There could be all kinds of things that go wrong.
Maybe the technology won't be developed.
Maybe you have an aneurysm or brain cancer or something else that may make it irreversible.
So this is no kind of promise.
This is just a possibility that, under good circumstances, I think has a reasonable shot at giving you another chance of living longer.
So you don't just accept everybody.
And in fact, you can't just accept everybody because, as you said, in the case of brain cancer or other things that are so destructive, as far as we can foresee, and we're already looking into the realms of the impossible, as it will be considered now, but there are some things that you can't deal with.
Yes, but let me make a distinction here.
We don't take last-minute cases if the conditions look bad, but if it's a member who's been signed up with us for years or decades, we will follow their instructions no matter what they are.
And we have to say that we don't know in brain cancer, for instance, we cryopreserved a young woman of 23 just a few years ago.
Ironically, she was a neuroscience student, and this is basically a charity case for us.
She was cryopreserved after having a very severe brain cancer.
But just a few days before, she was conscious and seemed to retain her personality.
So we can't say she couldn't come back.
The same with Alzheimer's disease.
It's not really understood yet.
Have the memories gone forever?
Or is it just that we have a hard time accessing those memories?
People often say, Uncle Fred was quite lucid yesterday, but today he doesn't remember anything.
So we don't, if you already have arrangements, we certainly don't turn them down then.
But someone comes at the last minute and says, please send up Auntie Emma.
We don't want to do that because we don't want to cause financial stress for the family.
We want to know there's informed consent.
There's a whole set of conditions that have to be passed to accept those kind of cases.
Just one small sidetrack for a moment here.
We weren't able to speak before we did this.
I'm hearing in your accent, I think, that you're British.
How did you get there and involved in this?
Yes, well, I guess I'm still sort of British.
My Americans friends think I'm British, but I've been living in the States since 1987.
I actually co-founded the first CryNAX organization in England back in 1986, along with Garrett Smith, who's probably listening, and a couple of other people.
And then moved over the next year.
We were actually on the Terry Wogan Show and BBC World Service.
And so if you search the archives, you'll find quite a lot of media back then.
So yeah, we started back in England.
I got involved because even as a teenager, and this is probably fairly unusual, I was thinking about death and life and thinking, you know, death is really kind of a boring state.
It's kind of boring to be dead.
It's not that I'm afraid of death because there's nothing, literally, nothing to be afraid of in my view.
But it's pretty boring.
You can't do anything.
You can't create anything.
You can't have relationships or learn anything.
So I was interested in life extension.
But I realized even back then, and I first made my arrangements with alcohol when I was 22 years old, I thought, well, it's possible I could die in a car accident or something else could go wrong before we figured out the aging problem, which I still think we will figure out at some point.
And so cryonics is really the ultimate life insurance, if you like.
It's a true life insurance.
If we don't figure out life extension in time, this is your last resort.
Nobody wants to be cryopreserved.
I don't relish the idea of sitting in a vat of liquid nitrogen, unable to control my destiny, but it's certainly better than being eaten by worms and bacteria or incinerated.
Of course, how do you ensure that the people who sign up for this are aware of all of the ramifications?
Let's just suspend disbelief for a moment and say this will be doable and at some point you will be able to bring these people back.
Do you make them aware of the fact that if it's hundreds of years from now, all of their relatives will have died?
Perhaps the place where they lived will have changed beyond all recognition.
They will be coming back to a world that will be completely alien to them?
Yes, I mean, absolutely.
That's very clearly stated in all our paperwork and our literature.
And this is actually a very interesting point because I frankly, from all my conversations, which I've had very many with people, I don't think it's the technical objections that put people off.
I think most people, when you discuss the actual science, and I'd be happy to discuss that more, they can see how, okay, this is not crazy.
This actually could work.
But what if it does?
Oh my goodness, I'll be on my own in an alien future not knowing anybody.
That's actually the most powerful objection to cryonics.
So I like to make the point that, well, first of all, first of all, you can know people because if you bring your friends and family along with you, then you won't be alone.
If you get to know some of the couple of thousand people who've already made arrangements, then you won't have to be alone.
But the fact is we were all born alone in the first place.
Some of us, such as myself, move thousands of miles from our home where we don't really know anybody.
Or as Larry King said when he was asked about his interest in cryogen, he says, I'll make new friends.
So yes, it's very scary for some people, but with somewhat a bit of a sense of adventure, that's not really a critical objection.
I don't want to let this point pass.
You said that there are people who've made family arrangements.
It's almost like the family crypt or tomb.
You're saying that families have arranged to do this so that they're all frozen together.
That's right.
Yes, we have actually a growing number of families where the husband and wife sign up, and often one or two children also signed up.
And obviously, when they reach the age of maturity, they can decide whether they want to continue with those arrangements, and often they do.
So yes, I mean, my wife has also signed up.
So I won't be alone.
I know several people who've choir-preserved already, some old friends.
So, you know, I won't be alone, nobody really has to be.
But I'd still rather face the future alone, especially because I think the future will actually, contrary to most people's beliefs, will probably be a pretty good place.
I always ask people, think about the past.
Is there any time in the past you'd rather live?
Would you like to go back to a time when women were owned by men, basically, when we had slaves, when we didn't have painkillers, we didn't have antibiotics, when we died at 30?
Really, the past was a pretty rotten place, and the world generally keeps getting better.
So unless we really do something stupid, the future should be a pretty decent place to live.
While I was talking about you, and I want to get to the science of this and all of the other issues in a moment, I didn't ask you, were you a medical doctor here in the UK before you got involved in all of this and appeared on the Terry Wogan show and all the rest of it?
No, I'm actually fairly unusual in terms of the alcohol leadership.
A lot of our senior people are medical or scientific in background.
My background actually is I studied philosophy, politics, and economics at St Anne's College, Oxford in the 80s.
So my lives were really economics and philosophy.
I've had a strong interest in science all that time.
I also spent 10 years studying business and organization and ran nonprofits before this.
So that's kind of my background that suited me for this.
But even my philosophy was actually very relevant to this.
My dissertation is actually available online.
And a quarter of it actually addresses the whole concept of death, what actually really is death, because we keep changing the criteria for death over time.
And I argued that you're not really truly dead until the information that is essentially your personality encoded in the structure of your brain has been deteriorated beyond the point that it could be reconstructed by any physically possible technology.
Otherwise, you're not truly dead.
And that's why we keep changing our criteria.
You talked about the agreement that you have with your wife that you're both going to be frozen.
Presumably, do you have a clause in the contract somewhere that says that you're both going to be brought back at the same time?
It is unlikely, but it is possible that you won't die of the same thing at the same time.
It'll be different things you die from.
So the cure for those things will be found presumably in a different way in a different time.
What I'm saying is that you could both be brought back at different times, one before the other.
Do you have an agreement between you that you'll come back at the same time or will one of you come back first?
Well, that's a good question.
Different couples have different arrangements.
And you make a good point that we don't really know under what circumstances will be cryopreserved.
My wife is actually 14 years older than me.
On the other hand, women live longer than men, so maybe that kind of balances out.
But we could, you know, if I have a car accident, maybe I'll go 30 years sooner.
I don't know.
So I'll be a little bit careful because I'd rather not be in there longer than I need to because there's always the possibility that the organization would fail.
Alcohol's been around for 45 years, but it's kind of hard to design an organization to last more than a century.
I think we've got it down, but we can't be sure.
So I'd rather come back a little sooner.
But yes, it looks probable that we could come back within the same 10 years or so, that would certainly be preferable.
It would make it much easier.
Yes, I can understand that.
You mentioned a car accident.
I don't want to get to Macabre, but it is after midnight, so we can probe some of these things.
But if somebody dies in a way that they are horribly mutilated, if somebody falls from a tall building, having expressed an interest to eventually be frozen and brought back one day, presumably you're working to your own rules.
So you will have rules that say how mangled a person you can accept.
Well, actually, being mangled is not a problem at all.
Given the kind of technology that would be required to, first of all, reverse the immediate cause of death in today's sense of the definition of death, and to reverse the aging process, and to reverse the cellular damage from the process, that's pretty advanced technology.
Undoing a mangling, whether it's completely regenerating limbs, replacing skin, those things are going to be relatively trivial by comparison.
We're already starting to grow organs in the lab.
We actually just, like last year, scientists took stem cells, just basic stem cells, and grow proto-organs out of them.
And it's not at all controversial now to say within 10 years we'll be growing whole human organs.
So if we can do that, it really doesn't matter how mangled you are.
We can just replace your whole body.
So that really isn't the problem.
And one of the things that you make very clear and is on your website is that you're a not-for-profit.
So when people, as they do, and I've seen online and when that recent story of the 14-year-old girl, all of these arguments came out, when people are saying you're doing this for money, well, as a non-profit, presumably you're not.
Yes, that's a very frustrating thing.
I mean, even back in my very first TV appearance, back in England, back in 1986, with a professor of surgery from, I'm not sure which university it was in London, that was his parting shot as we left the studio.
He says, he looked at me and kind of smirked and said, I'm sure you'll make lots of money.
Which is funny because for the next 24 years, I have been an Alcor member supporting Alcor, never paid a thing until I became CEO.
Board of Directors is not paid.
There are no shareholders.
We don't do this because we want to make money.
Obviously, we have to make enough for the operation to keep going.
We do this because we want it for ourselves.
We don't want to die.
We're enjoying life.
Now, there are some for-profit organizations.
Alcor is kind of unique in being a tax-exempt non-profit.
Chronics Institute that actually did the case with a 14-year-old girl is a little bit different, but they're essentially like a mutual society.
So for most of us, this is not about making profit.
If it was, we wouldn't be in this business.
This is the most difficult thing to sell in the world.
It pushes so many emotional buttons.
It's so complicated that it'd be much easier to sell the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever the bridges are in London these days.
This is not a good way to make money, frankly.
Before we get on to the science of it, I just want to deal with a couple of other things and get to a caller, if that's okay with you.
We've got somebody who wants to speak with you and ask you a question about this, Max.
Of course.
The story of the 14-year-old girl tugged at all of our heartstrings.
You would have to have been a very hard person not to have been affected by this.
You know, I'm a news guy.
I've done news for years and I was affected by it.
And my thought about it was if this 14-year-old girl, who was very sadly dying and her life truncated in that way, if she wanted to be among the first remains to be taken to Mars to be there, then as far as I'm concerned, whatever she wanted was fine.
But there were lots of arguments about this and a lot of people were absolutely implacably opposed to this thing.
Presumably you followed the story from the United States and being British, you will have done.
What were your thoughts on it?
Well, as always, with these things, when people comment without really knowing what they're talking about, it's very frustrating.
I saw Sir Martin Rees, for instance, who really should know better, and there was quite a prominent philosopher also who commented on this, clearly hadn't done any of the research, and this unfortunately is quite a common pattern.
I think, you know, unfortunately, they were not only ignorant of the subject, I think they were irresponsible in talking about something they hadn't looked at, and actually unethical in saying that this is a terrible thing and shouldn't be allowed.
I'm glad, Howard, that you understand that, you know, we each own ourselves, we have a choice about our lives, we decide what happens to us.
And the judge apparently, I don't know that the young lady involved, but the judge recognized that she was obviously very intelligent, well-informed, and she had the right to choose what happened to her.
And as you said, if she wanted to ashes strott into space, if she'd pay for that, that would be her option too.
I suppose the crux of it was, at age 14, are you able to make a decision of that import?
My personal view for what it's worth is absolutely yes, but other views are available and they were.
Right.
I think it depends on the individual, obviously.
I think at 14, I could have made that choice.
Some people can, maybe some may not be able to.
But obviously, most, the vast majority of people who sign up for this are older and are the age of majority and certainly have the right to make this choice.
And they have the right to decide how likely or unlikely this is and whether it's worth the expense to them.
So I'm very pleased that the judge recognized that.
He didn't state that, you know, he thought it worked or didn't work.
That was a different issue.
It was the person's right to choose that mattered.
Right.
Do you have any 14-year-olds, any people younger than the age of majority in your facility?
Yeah, so actually, I think our youngest patient until not a couple of years ago was, I think, 21, but a couple of years ago, we had by far the youngest patient, also the longest distance case, was a poor little girl from Thailand who had a pediatric brain cancer, and she wasn't quite three years old yet.
And her parents, who were both physicians and researchers, tried everything.
She had multiple brain operations.
Nothing worked.
And they eventually decided to have her cryopreserved.
And we were able to get a team over to Thailand along with a neurosurgeon.
And they were extremely resourceful.
The whole family was very supportive, seven or eight of them who later came to visit us here in Arizona.
And we were able to cryopreserve her quite successfully.
We actually did a CT scan of her brain later on, which showed us that we had actually successfully cryopreserved and cryoprotected the brain.
And by the way, I just want to make a point, because you mentioned frozen before.
Frozen actually implies the formation of ice crystals, and that's what we try to avoid doing.
And in the case of this little girl, we did succeed in that.
We actually use a solution that's used in organ preservation research that actually prevents the formation of ice crystals, which massively reduces the damage done to the cells.
And even when the person is preserved in that way, as you said, you were able to do a CT scan?
Yes, yeah.
For a long time, we just kind of assumed that because the patients are in the good nitrogen and aluminum containers, that we couldn't do that.
But it turns out that CT scans go straight through the aluminum.
And once we learn how to calibrate the electron densities, we can actually now tell what's brain tissue, what's ice crystals, what's cryoprotectant solution, what's tumors.
And so we've done, I don't know, probably 15 or 20 CT scans, and we're doing a lot more now.
And it's teaching us quite a lot about the different conditions under which we do this process.
Right.
I've got a call for you.
Kyle is online to the unexplained.
Max, meet Kyle.
Kyle, you have a question.
Thanks very much for coming on.
What do you want to ask, Max?
Good evening, Howard.
Question for Max.
Well, I've got two parts, really.
One, if you were to be sort of, it's the wrong phrase, but like frozen, effectively, surely if you were to be frozen and then brought back, say, 200 years later, that person would feel completely out of their depths.
If you look at how things have changed from the 50s and 60s to now, how would they sort of fit into societies?
Is there some sort of psychological counselling that would be done for these people?
Good point.
Shall I take a look at the question first?
Please do.
Yes, no, that's a very good question.
I think one that comes up a lot.
First of all, you have to remember that the people who are choosing to do this, it's not going to be a surprise when they come back.
At least not a huge surprise because they've planned for this and they've already thought about that.
And I think the kind of people who go ahead and do this regardless are those with a kind of an adventurous spirit who actually don't mind having to learn some new things.
But I do have to say that it's part of ALCOR's mission not just to cry-reserve people, not just to bring them back, but actually also to rehabilitate them.
We want to help to reintroduce them.
I'm sure there'll be professional people as this gets more popular.
Maybe a combination of social work and counseling and training with new job skills.
Although we don't know if anybody will have to work, maybe the robots will do everything.
We don't really know.
But we'll be there to help people to reintegrate.
But there are lots of small details, aren't there?
If you think about people who've been in a coma for 30 years and have revived, if you've seen the movie Awakenings or read the book, the cases like that of people for 30 years have been unconscious and they've been able to retrain and catch up.
There's been Aboriginal Australians who've moved to places like New York City and they've been able to adapt.
So if you're prepared for it, it is possible to adapt.
But what about things like cultural norms and mores?
For example, if you think about 100 years ago in this country, it was perfectly acceptable to walk along the street and spit on the pavement and nobody would think you'd done a bad thing.
Today, everybody would look at you as being dirty and disgusting.
That's just a trivial example.
But how do you recondition people for what will be a new age?
The things that are commonplace will not be commonplace then?
Well, Howard, obviously, I can't say exactly because it hasn't happened yet.
Any forecast about the future is usually wrong.
But I think fairly plausibly, it's quite likely is we'll bring back people to some level of consciousness before we set them loose in the world.
We'll probably bring them into a very advanced virtual reality.
And actually, virtual reality is pretty good even today.
But in the future, it'll be very intensely real.
And I think people will have a kind of a training time where they learn about how things work today and what the norms are and what the laws are.
And don't walk in front of the flying cars, that kind of thing.
And we'll probably do that in virtual reality before you actually have to tackle the real world.
Okay, so there is a plan for it.
Kyle, you're still there.
You said you had two points.
What's the second one?
Yeah, the other one was, so suppose this was to become wide scale as it is at the moment.
What happens if lots of people went for the option of the process and then they got revived?
Surely that would lead to like a population overload.
Good point again.
You know, we touched on this at the beginning.
Can the Earth, if more and more people do this and can afford it, can the Earth accommodate all of these people coming back?
Yes.
I actually have a, you know, I think we've got an FAQ on our website as an answer to this.
If you prefer a video on YouTube, the Alcor cryonics channel has an answer to this that I did.
Basically, this is not a problem.
First of all, cryonics would have to become massively more popular to have even a tiny dent on population.
I mean, 100,000 people are dying every day today.
We have 149 patients, cryotopserved.
So we'd have to grow a million times before this is a big issue.
But secondly, and very importantly, and it still kind of baffles me that people haven't caught up yet.
It's like we're still living in 1965.
Population growth is just not a problem anymore.
It peaked in the 1960s.
It's been falling ever since.
38% of the world's population now live in countries where population growth has stopped.
Population is shrinking or demographically, inevitably, it's on the verge of shrinking.
All of Eastern Europe is shrinking.
Japan is losing a million people a year.
Almost all of Europe, I think England's actually a little bit of an exception, is either shrinking, I mean Germany is shrinking quite rapidly, and most other countries are following suit.
Even African countries, which had a very high fertility rate, are slowing down.
This seems to be an inevitable thing as women get more choices, children become more expensive, they're no longer producer goods who work on the farm for you in the factories, but instead you have to buy them expensive college educations and so on.
So I think the problem is going to be, and the UN agrees, by the way, even though the UN's always overestimated population, even the UN thinks that half to two-thirds of the way through the century, globally, population will stop growing and actually start shrinking.
And that actually is quite worrying.
We don't have a lot of good experience with shrinking populations.
So if this does have any effect, I think it'll actually be quite a positive effect.
Kyle, thank you very much for your call.
If you want to talk with Max about this, then we can do this for another quarter of an hour or so.
There are so many issues here, and it is so truly fascinating.
You know, which of us would not like to extend our lives beyond the three score years and however many that we have here?
I think a lot of people want to do that.
Of course, a lot of people would say, Max, you know, once I'm done, I'm done.
A lot of people take the view that they want to live their natural life, age, and then go.
And then let's see what comes next, if anything.
Right, but what is a natural life?
You know, if you go back 100 years or so, a natural life was 30, 40, 50 years.
Then it became 60, then 70, now 80.
What actually is a natural lifespan?
I don't actually think there's any such thing, except in the sense that our bodies evolved to live basically long enough to reproduce, to pass on our genes to the next generation.
And beyond that, nature didn't really care about us, because I'm anthropomorphizing here.
But there's no reason for nature to design bodies that could survive longer.
So already, you could say our lifespans today are not natural.
We live to 100 quite often.
So I think really it's up to us to decide how long we want to live.
And we're certainly not offering immortality.
That's maybe something I should emphasize, because so frequently in the newspaper you see immortality or forever.
We're not offering forever or immortality.
We're offering a chance to live longer.
It doesn't mean you can't be killed.
You could be hit by an asteroid.
All kinds of things could go wrong.
We're just giving a chance at more life.
And I think that's a very natural thing for us humans to do.
We tend to change the environment and change ourselves.
And I don't think there's anything unnatural about that.
If you do believe there's an afterlife and it's eternal, what does it matter if you live a couple of hundred years or a thousand years against eternity?
If I sign up for this, you send me an invoice, how much money will be on that invoice?
Yes, this is a good question.
I wanted to mention this because there's a misconception that Cryanix is just for the rich.
Well, I know from personal experience that's not true.
I was a poor student in England as an undergraduate when I signed up.
It's a little more expensive now because we're a lot more professional than then.
There's basically two costs.
There is the cost of membership dues, which keep the organization functioning, and those will cost you something like 35, $40, 30-some pounds per month.
That goes down over time, and we charge less for family members.
Then for the actual procedure itself, including us sending a team to wherever you are in the hospital or hospice to stand by, to do the actual procedure, all the medications, all the surgery, the whole preservation procedure, and long-term storage, including a chunk of that money going into a fund just to keep you cry preserved for the long term.
If you just want your brain preserved, and people say, well, why would you do that?
I'll be happy to talk about that.
That's only $80,000, which is, I don't know, probably about £68,000 right now, or $200,000 for the whole body, probably about £150,000.
And most people probably pay for that with life insurance.
They don't have that kind of cash sitting around.
That's not a big life insurance policy.
I like to say if you're, say, a healthy male in your mid-30s, coming out membership dues and life insurance payments, it probably costs about the same as going to a coffee shop once a day and having a grande cappuccino.
I have to say that I couldn't afford to have my whole body preserved.
Not that I think the world is probably quite grateful for that.
There is another, and I'm so pleased that you're very happy to tackle the philosophical difficulties with this and issues with this.
Let's leave aside the word difficulties.
There's a demographic issue here, isn't there?
If you're talking about a lot of people who can afford £150,000 or whatever that sum may be in the future, that is a particular slice of demographic.
You are excluding some people from this.
So what you're doing when these people come back is that you're skewing the demographic balance, aren't you?
You're upsetting the balance of society.
Well, not really.
As I said, since you pay most people, probably 90% of members pay for this with life insurance.
So yes, it's true that people who live on the street and can't afford the very bare minimums won't be able to afford this.
But the vast majority of people could afford it.
And furthermore, I actually think that sometime in the future when it becomes socially acceptable and part of the establishment, it would actually make sense for governments to subsidize this.
Because if you look at how much money is spent in the last six months of people's lives, it's a vast amount.
In the US, People bankrupt their families, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Why not just let yourself go a little bit earlier, avoid the last few weeks or months of absolute misery and suffering, and instead be crowd reserved under better circumstances?
It would actually save society money.
So I think in the long run, it's not implausible that this actually be something subsidized by governments to actually save the money.
We can't name names of companies here, but are there many insurance companies offering policies to do this?
Yes, it's completely normal life insurance.
All that happens, you take a regular life insurance policy, whether it's universal life or whole life, and you make alcohol the beneficiary of the policy.
It's not a special policy at all.
So there are many companies that do this.
All right, if you're up for this, got another call.
This is Manny in Wolverhampton, friend of the show.
Manny, how are you tonight?
I'm fine.
I'm not here.
I'm good.
Nice to hear from you.
Max is listening.
What question have you got for him?
Hi, Max.
Just one question.
A lot of these countries have gone bust.
So what happens to the bodies?
Okay.
All right.
I don't know whether you heard that, Max.
Thank you for that, Manny in Wolverhampton.
Manny says, and I haven't read it, I don't know the specifics, but he says a lot of these organizations have gone bankrupt.
And if you say your organization, I know you're a not-for-profit, but say there was some financial cataclysm, the world economy went south in a real big and serious fashion.
There wasn't the money to continue this.
What happens to the 140, the people that you have in store?
No, it's a very good question.
Although I would dispute the characterization of many organizations having gone under, I think it was actually very few.
There was most infamously the Cryonic Society of California back in the very early days that was not well managed, was not really a proper organization and caused a lot of trouble in the early days.
But since then, it's actually been pretty stable.
I can't actually think of anybody else who's gone under.
When they do, if they cease operation like the American Cryonic Society, which actually started way back in 1969, it doesn't seem very active these days, but almost all its patients have been transferred to other organizations.
So you have a legal agreement or a gentleman's agreement with other organizations that they will take over your charges?
Well, we don't have that.
I think we're actually the most stable organization in the world.
So other ones have all had to go before we do.
I say we've been around for 45 years now.
What's unique to Alcor is we have something called the Patient Care Trust Fund, which is actually quite separate from the rest of the organization.
It's just top $10 million now.
That pays for the perpetual upkeep of our patients and hopefully their eventual repair and revival.
And even if ALCOR itself was to go under, that would actually be separated from the rest of the organization and continue to maintain the patients.
So that's something that's kind of unique to us.
And I think having a structure as a non-profit organization definitely helps in the long term.
Not many for-profits actually last very long.
I did some research on that for a talk in Germany.
And almost all the long-lived organizations are religious organizations, educational, academic, or non-profits, with a very few exceptions.
And so that's how we're structured.
I'm sure you've planned for a lot of eventualities.
There are some people who say that there could one day be, I don't know, a kill shot from the sun, an electromagnetic pulse that momentarily or even for much longer than that takes down power networks.
If your power went out, what would happen?
Absolutely nothing.
Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but basically nothing to the patients.
One thing that people misunderstand, it's funny, there's two things people think they know about cryonics, both of which are wrong.
Number one is that Walt Disney was frozen.
Actually, he wasn't.
And the second one is that if the power goes out, we're in big trouble, which kind of amuses me that they think we haven't thought of that after 45 years.
What happens is really nothing because our patients are stored in liquid nitrogen.
Liquid nitrogen simply boils off.
It sounds odd to talk about boiling at this temperature, but it boils off at minus 320 Fahrenheit.
We simply top it up on a regular basis.
No power is used at all.
We could actually go for several months without having a delivery of liquid nitrogen.
In the meantime, we could go out and get our own small liquid nitrogen plant.
We have our own backup generator.
So it's a pretty foolproof system.
It would take at least World War III for us to have any real problem on that basis.
Now, if we had no power, yes, we'd have problem with surgery and the perfusion process, but that's why we have the backup generator here.
Thank you for answering that.
We'll talk a little about the science.
We've been getting round to this next here on the Unexplained Talk radio.
The man we have on is Dr. Max Moore.
He's from Alcor, an organization that is involved in the business, I say the business, in the science, the experimental science of preserving people who die in the hope that one day, 100 years from now, maybe 200, maybe 300, maybe 50, who knows, they will be able to be regenerated with the spark of life, healed, and set back on their course of living again.
Got a question here from Hedy.
Now, Hedy is a scientist and a fan of this show.
And Hedy, nice to know that you're there.
Hedy says, Howard, I'm a Christian as well as being a scientist.
What kind of response does Alcor get from religious bodies?
Good question, Hedy.
Max, you know, what do the religious community, I presume you've heard from them, make of this?
Yes, we do have a little bit of information on this on our website.
Actually, it's interesting, we haven't really heard very much from religions in general, but what we have has generally been cautiously supportive.
And honestly, I see no reason why this should be any kind of problem for the vast majority of religions, other than perhaps some very narrow sects that don't allow people to have blood transfusions, for instance.
Because really, how is this different from, let's say, if you have cancer, taking an experimental cancer therapy to extend your life, or having a stent put in to extend your life, you have a heart disease, when otherwise you would have died.
This is just another means of extending life.
I think it's very important to realize that we're not freezing dead people.
We're not bringing back the dead.
We are just extending people's lives, giving them another chance to live longer.
And that actually should be not only compatible with pretty much every religion, it should actually be something that religions encourage.
After all, you know, in Catholicism, it's a mortal sin.
I can't imagine.
I can imagine that it's a problem for some fundamentalist Christians, I would have thought, because they would take the view that only one person in history ever came back from being clinically dead, and that person was Jesus Christ.
And here you are offering that possibility, whatever you want to call it, and however you might say it works, to people who are not Jesus Christ.
Well, again, people aren't coming back from the dead because death is, if you define it properly, our patients are not dead.
They're kind of an in-between state.
But actually, it wasn't just Jesus.
Lazarus also came back From the dead, however that was defined.
And Jesus even said, Go forth and do as I have done.
So I would even argue with the fundamentalists that it's perfectly compatible with their views, in fact.
I think they think that it's incompatible, as they have for many other things.
For instance, they also used to argue that women shouldn't have anesthesia during childbirth because women were supposed to suffer for the sins of Eve.
No, I don't think anybody makes that argument seriously anymore.
So I think they're using their religion in some cases as an excuse for prejudiced beliefs.
It's not actually part of the religion that would support that view at all.
So Max, what state do you have to be in to be preserved in this way?
You say that you're not quite dead.
In what sense, what is your status then?
It's kind of like the Monty Python.
If you remember the old Monty Python sketches, I'm not dead yet.
They're telling the business, shut up.
Well, you know, there used to be an old, almost a joke in Liverpool.
He's not dead, he's resting.
You're sort of resting.
Yeah, that's the old parrot sketch, right?
He's not dead, he's resting.
Yes, exactly.
Our patients are, they're not alive because clearly to be alive implies metabolism and activity and so on.
But if dead means beyond any possibility of recovery, they're no more dead than somebody in a long-term coma.
Well, we don't really know whether or if they'll ever better come back from that coma.
The only difference being there's no metabolic activity in our patients.
So people have a hard time grasping this.
They think, okay, if you're not living, you must be dead.
Well, no, there's kind of an in-between state.
It's kind of like a deep state of hibernation, which certain animals can approximate.
And human beings have also been in the state from just falling into cold water.
So unless your brain has been damaged beyond the point that you can repair it and preserve the memories that are stored in the physical structure of your brain, you're not truly dead.
So again, we're extending life.
We're not reversing death.
Now, is that a scientific fact or is that a point of debate?
In other words, that to me sounds like your view, but then there might be somebody else in the medical profession who would say that in that state you are indeed dead.
Well, the actual definition of death, that's not really a scientific concept.
It's a philosophical concept.
And I've argued that in my doctoral dissertation.
But what is science is several facts of science here which are relevant.
One is that as far as we know in today's neuroscience, all memories except the very short-term memories, which you lose during anesthesia, for instance, 10 or 15 minutes, every memory you have, every long-term memory is stored in a physical change in the brain, in the pattern of the synaptic connections and something going on inside the neural bodies that we don't fully understand.
And we know from doing electron microscope studies of cryopreserved brain tissue in animals using the same protocol we use on humans that those structures are preserved.
So we do know for a fact that under decent conditions we are preserving the structures where your memory resides.
Now we can't prove that we can reverse that because that depends on future technologies.
But we do know that we are preserving those structures.
And when you come back, assuming that you can, we don't know that you'll be you.
You know, the process of being preserved in this way, we can't know, can we, whether it changes the nature of those stored memories, the personality of the individual.
There isn't anything, unless you tell me there is, to guarantee that the person who is preserved in that way and the person who comes back eventually will be the same.
Well, actually, you'll be reassured to know that.
Yes, I can say there is evidence to that effect.
Again, because we do know, you know, if you talk to any neuroscientist, they'll agree that there's a thing called long-term potentiation and the synaptic connections in the brain.
That is where our memories are stored.
And we can directly show evidence that we are preserving those connections.
So a lot of people think, you know, you turn off the electricity in the brain, the electrochemical activity, and everything is white.
That's just not true.
And that's easily provable.
Anybody who's undergone general anesthesia for surgery has gone through that.
They have no electrochemical activity.
They retain all their memories, except again, the last 15, 20 minutes or so, which have not yet produced physical changes in the brain.
Plus, we actually, it was a year or two years ago, we published a paper, and there was discussion of this in the MIT Technology Review, where we took a tiny little worm, a very simple organism, but it still had a bit of a brain, and we were able to teach it based on chemical gradients where to find food.
And then we cry-preserved that, we rewarmed it, and we were able to show that it retained its memory through that process.
I suppose what I'm talking about, and I'm not a scientist, but I'm talking about the subtleties here.
We all know cases of people who bang their heads and they're slightly different.
They're never quite the same afterwards.
Here, you're talking about doing something of a much bigger magnitude, and yet we're saying you'll come back as the same person.
Well, those two things are a little bit different.
It's very well understood that if you damage parts of the brain, quite specific parts, we can actually predict what kinds of damage will be done, because we know that certain functions are located in certain parts of the brain.
So we can say, you know, if you have a car accident and part of the motor cortex is damaged, you won't be able to move your limbs, or you won't be able to retain long-term memories, or you won't recognize things that you're seeing.
We actually have a pretty good mapping of the brain, but those are actually where parts of the brain are actually destroyed.
Now, what we're doing, you know, if we do the job well, then nothing is destroyed.
There's some kind of level of damage done on the chemical level, but nothing is actually destroyed.
The structures are still there.
So that's why we think there's every reason to think that you are still potentially there and retrievable.
Now, of course, that doesn't always work out that way.
There may be a long delay before we even hear that you've gone under.
It may be you have a bad accident that's caused damage.
You might have an aneurysm.
All kinds of things can actually mean that we couldn't guarantee 100% fidelity when you return.
But under good circumstances, that should be the case.
Dr. Max Moore and his organization is called ALCOR, A-L-C-O-R.
And thank you to them for being kind enough to speak with me frankly and honestly about the whole process, how it works, and the kind of people who do it.
And thank you before that to Leonard David.
His new book is out.
Search his name.
He's got a great website and his National Geographic book is, as they say in the commercials, out now.
And by the sounds of it, it would make a great Christmas present and I am not on a commission for it before you say it.
Thank you very much for your involvement in this show, for keeping the faith with me, for being my friend and supporting me through 2016, a challenging year for so many of us.
And until next we meet here on The Unexplained, please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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