Australian cryogenic company Southern Cryonics charges $150,000 to freeze dead bodies to be revived
Do you want to come back from the dead? Australian firm promises customers a second chance at life for $150,000 – by FREEZING their corpses to 196C until science can revive them
- Aussies wanting another crack in life need an extra $150,000 for the chance
- An Australian company wants to bring gamblers back to life after being frozen
- Their NSW facility is the first in the country to offer the controversial life after death
- Bodies frozen in chambers until drugs progress to revive them
- Scientists warn that freezing process has not been proven to sustain life
An Australian company offers the wealthy a chance to come back from the dead with the country’s first cryogenic freezer to preserve corpses until science can revive them.
Southern Cryonics has set up a hi-tec facility in rural Holbrook, NSW, 500km south west of the company’s Sydney headquarters.
Participants will have to pay as much as $150,000 to be encased in liquid nitrogen at temperatures close to -200C in the steel chambers.
Interior of rooms where bodies are enclosed (pictured in a US facility) head forward, feet up, to an icy -196C
There are no guarantees or refunds for those who want to extend their lives through the project
Their bodies will be submerged head first, feet up, giving the brain the best chance of survival if the chamber leaks.
The nonprofit already has 40 spaces — most of which are reserved for the founders — to be filled in the first phase of their project, but plans to add another 600 spaces once additional warehouses are built.
Cryonics is the practice of preserving human bodies at extremely low temperatures in rooms – with the expectation that medical technology will be able to bring them back to life in the future.
It promotes the idea that death is a gradual process and can be reversed if a corpse is frozen fast enough.
The Holbrook facility (pictured) in NSW has 40 spots, most of which are reserved for founders of Australian firm Southern Cryonics
The facility (pictured) hopes to give participants a revival hundreds of years after their deaths
Once certain medical advances are made in the future, participants may be able to be resuscitated, the Southern Cryonics website emphasizes.
It hopes that future medical technology will be able to repair the accumulated damage of aging and disease at the molecular level and return the patient to health.
Still, there are no guarantees or refunds for those who want to seize the opportunity to extend their lives with this project.
Past participants got lucky in the late 1970s when the president of the Cryonics Society of California, Robert Nelson, ran away from a facility after it ran out of money.
Nine bodies, which should have been preserved, were left to decompose, after which families later filed a successful lawsuit against Mr. Nelson.
The idea of a life that can be revived after being frozen for a long time has largely been relegated to science fiction in scientific circles.
Dennis Kowalski, the president of the Cryonics Institute in the US said: Discover Magazine there are three challenges for future technological developments that must be overcome.
Repairing the damage done by frostbite, curing the ailment that killed the subject, and reversing the aging process will all be necessary so that the person has a healthy body to enjoy their second chance at life.
Shannon Tessier, a cryobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in the US, said the freezing process alone is a permanent death sentence.
“There is absolutely no current way, no proven scientific way, to freeze a whole human being to that temperature without completely destroying the tissue — and I mean obliterating it,” Ms. Tessier said.
The Southern Cryonics facility (pictured is an architect’s rendering) in NSW, 500km southwest of Sydney, could grow to accommodate an additional 600 customers in the coming years