I understand that the ahem fatal flaw of commercial brain-freezing cryonics is the formation of destructive ice crystals which mess up the delicate neural structure of your brain as surely as trying to preserve your laptop in molten magma.
Would keeping a body at a constant temperature of a few degress but in a near-perfect vaccuum (eg. space or encased in amber) ameliorate this? Or would the bacteria which do a similar wrecking job continue unabated, anaerobically, requiring some ‘magical’ anti-bacterial or nanotechnological treatment to get rid of them first?
Space isn’t actually cold, because a vacuum has no ambient temperature; by enclosing the corpsicle in a vacuum, you’re insulating it, that’s a great way of keeping it from absorbing heat by conduction, but has the disadvantage that you cannot keep it cool in like manner. Any radiant heat it absorbs can only be lost by radiation, so it will achieve thermal equilibrium with whatever physical objects are nearby.
So it might work if you could keep it in a vacuum chamber which itself is inside a very cold outer container, but this solves nothing at the same time as adding technical complexity and adding the problem of having to protect the corpsicle from the potentially damaging effects of a low-pressure environment. You could end up with a freeze-dried corpse.
That’s arguably a worse idea. You already have moisture in your brain – that’s where the destructive ice crystals form – it’s not frozen condensation that’s causing the problem.
On top of which, drawing down a vacuum while freezing is what creates called freeze-drying, a process used to remove practically all moisture from things. They’ve used freeze-drying as a sort of taxidermy. When they do so, they have to put glass marbles in the eye sockets, because the mostly-water eyeballs practically disappear. A brain that was freeze-dried would be prwetty useless. You couldn’t “resuscitate” it after the treatment.
Actually, it might be better to pressurise the container; at extremely high pressures, you could keep everything liquid (so no damaging ice crystals) at the same time as getting it really cold (dramatically reducing chemical activity, including the action of enzymes and pathogens)
Note that it is the action of the freezing that causes the ice crystal damage, not the long term storage. Trying to revive a body even 10 minutes later that has been damaged with ice crystals is a mind boggling prospect.
Perusing the “faith-based encyclopedia” I see that the ice-crystal formation has apparently been solved by using new cryoprotectants which turn the moisture “glassy” (vitrified) instead, and that the seemingly more tractable problem with these is that they become toxic upon rewarming. That apparently makes the biggest problem getting the cryoprotectant everywhere, after death, in time.
If so, could a person not improve his chances by euthanising himself this way, ensuring that his own circulation refreshes the parts other chilled fluids cannot reach?