Cryogenic Catastrophes - Tales From the Internet

Looking at the urban legend of Walt Disney's cryogenic freezing and some of the real life mishaps that occurred with the technology.

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[Wnick]

Imagine coming back to life after being frozen, only to find yourself rotting away as soon as you're revived

[CleaveTheDragon]

Having a holiday where a town of people come to celebrate because of you feels like a better kind of preservation than being frozen forever.

[joj.]

I'm an engineer working with a cryogenic cooling research company, and because of these geezers, I now have to always say "No, not the corpses one" when people ask...

[L_Train]

Ever freeze lettuce and try to thaw it out? Yeah, that's what happens to the body when frozen. Ice crystals are jagged and destroy cells.

[TonyEmond]

A friend of mine had a goldfish when his area was left without power for 3 weeks in the deep of winter -- the ice storm that hit Eastern Canada in 1998. When he returned he assumed that the goldfish was dead, but once the water was warmed up sufficiently the goldfish came back to life, doing goldfish things. 6 months later he gave the goldfish to another friend who overfed it, and it died.

[EluneAnzu]

Heard about one guy who got cryogenically frozen for a thousand years and is best friends with a robot and is dating a one eyed sewer mutant so they don't all end badly.

[compatriot]

The amount of preservation ice is capable of is incredible. Even more so for animals that are capable of surviving being frozen like wood frogs unlike that unfortunate goldfish

[BigDRandy]

18 naked frozen bodies in the freezers at ram ranch. Rock hard bodies waiting to get thawed

[cheetosjumboenjoyer]

I remember my dad telling me a story about my Grandfather, and how when he was a kid, his family would sometimes spend the winter at a farm in Alberta, Canada owned by my Grandpas Uncle, Jack. Anyways, the winters up their were brutal. They would have a rope running from the house to the barn so that you didn't get lost in the 3-foot visibility caused by the snow. One fateful winter, uncle jack would pass away. Now you can't exactly dig a six-foot deep hole in the rock solid, snow covered ground in the middle of January. So they wrapped him up in a old carpet, and stuck him in the hay loft in the barn, where he lay frozen until spring, when they buried him at the family cemetery, where he lies to this day. I have heard that this was pretty common back in the day for anyone who died in the winter in Alberta or any other place of a similarly northern latitude. RIP Great-Great Uncle Jack.

[bertchintus]

Just cryogenically freeze me until cryogenic freezing is scientifically possible and then freeze me in that one

[bluesquadron]

I actually like the idea that Frozen was made just to hide the myth

[eldrichnemo]

There's a Golden Girls episode where Rose has to go under for surgery and dreams she, Dorothy, and Blanche have had their heads cryogenically frozen. As they're arguing, "heads" in trays of ice on their kitchen table, Sophia casually walks in with the body of a 20-year old. When they all ask her how in the hell she has a body she responds "you didn't tip the guy?"🤣

That poor goldfish!

[virionspiral]

"I haven't done anything criminal, anything wrong other than a lot of bad decisions." Great quote.

[frankensloth]

I heard rumors of a guy working on a mining crew who was meant to be cryogenically frozen for 18 months as punishment for violating the no pets policy. He woke up WAAAAY later than intended to learn that the entire crew had died, leaving him alone with the ship’s senile AI, a hologram of his supervisor, a descendant of his cat, and an android they had rescued.

[ryrin]

The technology required to adequately preserve a body or even just a brain would probably be so advanced that they'd probably just be able to cure whatever medical issue the person had to begin with.

[WhatWouldVillainsDo]

I'm a butcher-food scientist by trade, sometimes we handle product that has been frozen to some pretty extreme temps below 0 way below 0 and have worked in blast freezers that will could kill you in 15 minutes or less if your not wearing proper clothes and one of the worst burns I've ever had came not from a fire but from a box that had been inside a ice cream freezer directly under the fans. I touched the box for maybe 7-9 seconds and felt pain all the way to the bone and a few days later all the skin died there turned all scaley and eventually fell off.

[thomasahearn]

"America needs nudism to end crime." As if I ever need an excuse to get naked.

[GonzoAppreciator]

I love Whang's channel because sometimes you learn about weird shit people jerked off into and other times you get horrifying yet very fascinating history videos.

[Izumi-spfp]

I read a Scientific American article back in the early 2000s that said that the natural "antifreeze" in the blood and body fluids of tiny things like insects, but up to fairly large amphibians would be the way to proceed. The idea being that simply freezing, even with liquid nitrogen, is still so uneven that significant portions of the body freeze at the temperature of scarcely below 32F. That results in ice crystal formation in each individual cell, that causes the cell to rupture as it freezes. Everybody has known of this consequence since day one. And part of the technology that would be needed to revive such frozen bodies would be figuring out how to repair all of that cellular damage.

But the antifreeze in certain animal bodies which allows like frogs to freeze solid at the bottom of a lake, literally in suspended animation, keeps them ice crystals from forming and instead of freezing, the frog body undergoes "vitrification". It essentially turns into a piece of glass. The same "antifreeze" (I forget what it was called) then allows normal thawing to take place and the cells are completely undamaged and the frog can then go about its business.

The idea being to derive such a substance that could be infused, embalming style into a human body and thus preclude freezing damage. There might be a bit more delay, but apart from the potential of autolysis, (cells eating their ownselves after death--you got about a few minutes, maybe, from the cessation of vascular circulation, so I'm not sure how you rocket that liquid into the body. Under normal circumstances of life, blood completely circulates the body in about 40 seconds) the cells would then be in a state of perfect pristine anatomical preservation. And yes, they knew about the autolysis issue from day one as well. Then you can put them bodies in the liquid nitrogen tank. I mostly forgot about that article until I saw this video just now. I have no idea if anything came of this research. Or if anything has ever been derived/developed. But as demonstrated by nature, the concept certainly seems sound.

[FreejackVesa]

I recommend the "Bobiverse" series of novels. It's about a guy killed in a random car accident, is cryogenically frozen, then thawed out and forced into servitude as a digital replicant who controls a self replicating VonNuemann space probe. It's a great series