Unholy Relics
Eternal life is on sale in Russia right now – it costs from 12 to 36 thousand dollars, and this profitable offer attracts customers from all over the world – from Italy to Japan. People are posthumously placed in liquid nitrogen and promised defrosting and revival in this century. Radio Liberty figured out who and what is going to take with them to a bright future and why only Russian seventh graders can bring it closer.
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On the very outskirts of Sergiev Posad, just five kilometers from the Trinity Cathedral, where the relics of the spiritual collector of the Russian people, Sergius of Radonezh, are kept, there is a small metal hangar that looks like either a warehouse or a car wash room. But against the background of the surrounding village and country wooden houses, it stands out noticeably. No sign, no security, no fuss, only once every three weeks a big car arrives, the hangar gates open and a thick hose is pulled inside from the tank.
However, the locals are aware of the contents of the mysterious building and, according to its owners, mostly do not object to such a neighborhood. Perhaps a certain isolation of the city – one of the main centers of Russian Orthodoxy – from time and worldly vanity helps them in this. In a hangar in the depths of the most ordinary suburban area, human corpses are stored. And if millions of Orthodox pilgrims who visit Sergiev Posad every year believe in the resurrection of the dead in Christ before the Second Coming, then the owners of the hangar are confident that they will be able to revive the bodies stored in them in the 21st century, and without any divine intervention – human technologies of the near future will suffice.
Sleeping bags and pots
Most of the hangar space is occupied by three huge barrels – two of them stand vertically against the far wall, another one lies flat, propped up with sandbags. These are Dewar vessels or simply dewars – they are designed to store bodies in liquid nitrogen. The dewar lying on its side is not yet in operation, its lid is open and it is clear that the vessel is arranged according to the principle of a thermos: it has double walls of a glass-like composite material, the space between them is filled with a special powder and air is pumped out from there.
"Almost no heat gets inside from the outside, and there you can indefinitely maintain the temperature of liquid nitrogen -196 degrees," says a young man with a reddish beard with pride. This is Danila Medvedev, the founder and now chairman of the board of directors of the company "KrioRus", which offers cryopreservation services (that is, frozen storage) of the deceased. Medvedev is one of the most prominent representatives of Russian transhumanists, a movement hoping for the imminent triumph of technological progress, which may, within a hundred years, change beyond recognition not only the surrounding world, but also the person himself.
New technologies, transhumanists believe, will make people forget about diseases and even death, improve intelligence and physical capabilities – in a word, a new kind of People will arise: posthuman. Anyone can get into the posthuman future, it is only necessary to place the body immediately after death in liquid nitrogen, and then someday it will be possible to defrost and revive it with the help of new technologies, moreover, preserving both memory and personality contained, according to transhumanists, in the physiological structure of the brain.
When Medvedev speaks, steam comes out of his mouth: the room is not heated, the dead do not need it, and the living have nothing to do in the hangar. The company produces only a few cryopreservations per year (five in 2014, nine in 2015, only two in 2016) - and still remains one of the world leaders in the number of "cryopatients". Medvedev himself visits the cryostage – that's actually the name of the hangar – once every few months, only the caretaker Sergey comes here regularly, checking the nitrogen level in the dewars with a cable with a load on the end, and workers who top up the liquefied gas into the vessels.
Active dewars
Eight "patients" can be accommodated in one dewar. Medvedev explains that such ambiguous terminology came to Russian cryonics from the American one, where it is easier to sell the idea of "undying" than resurrection from the dead. However, this is just a tribute to tradition, according to Medvedev, death in Russia is treated philosophically: "The concept that a dead person can be revived is understandable to a Russian person. It is rooted in tradition – remember fairy tales, living water, dead water."
The bodies of the deceased undergo special treatment, the so-called perfusion, during which most of the water in the body is replaced with a special liquid, a cryoprotector that does not freeze, which means it will not damage the tissues and blood vessels of the body. Perfusion should be done as soon as possible – preferably in the first hours after a medical death is recorded. Then the body is cooled, delivered to a cryopreservation facility in Sergiev Posad, it is placed in a sleeping bag ("yes, the most ordinary sleeping bag," Medvedev clarifies), on which the contract number and the name of the cryopatient are indicated, and lowered into a common dewar filled with liquid nitrogen. "They swim there like a baby in the womb," Medvedev says poetically.
Actually, the head of “KrioRus” has a business-like manner of speech: he received an economic education before fully devoting himself to transhumanism and cryonics, managed to work as a financial analyst in a Finnish investment fund, an entrepreneur is guessed in him. The founder of the first and only Russian cryocompany says that he is ready to talk about philosophy, but prefers to leave it to those who understand it better:
– What we do is social entrepreneurship. We want to build a huge social system. If there were pyramids in ancient Egypt, but only for the pharaohs, then our task is to make pyramids for everyone, in which all the space would be used, so that a million people would be cryonized in Russia every year. I follow the plan of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov: until we have conquered death for the living, we at least have to prevent the destruction of the dead.
So far, up to a million a year, KrioRus is very far away: in total, the company stores a little more than 50 people and two dozen pets. Cryopreservation is not just a very exotic service, but also quite expensive: the company offers freezing of a full body for 36 thousand dollars, only the head or brain (transhumanists have no doubt that it will not be difficult to create a new body in the future) – 12 thousand dollars. Freezing a "small cat" (this is the wording used by the official website of the company) will cost 10 thousand.
A pot for a neuropacient
Neuropacients – this is the euphemism for frozen brains – are stored at the bottom of the same dewars in special leaky pots, about half of them are frozen. Actually, it's not very clear why you should take an imperfect body with you to the world of posthumans, and even overpay three times for it, but many people go for it, it seems, for nostalgic reasons. Medvedev is sure that all personality traits and memory are contained in the structure of the brain and, if properly frozen, they will be completely preserved, as if on a computer hard disk:
– We have at least two patients whose brains keep very important secrets. One of them was a leading Soviet cryptographer, his brain contains a lot of closed, secret and top secret information. Fortunately, hackers can't get to it in any way.
Apartment for Immortality
KrioRus has clients not only from Russia, but also from Ukraine, Estonia, the Netherlands, Israel, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Belarus, the USA and Italy. The flags of these countries are the only ritual decoration of a cold hangar with dewars. Some of the cryopatients are anonymous, but many names and biographies of both already frozen people and those who have signed a contract for future cryopreservation are public. For example, among the frozen there are relatives of prominent figures of Russian transhumanism, including the grandmother of Danila Medvedev himself.
Some are ready to go for cryopreservation for several generations.
Irina Mneva, a pensioner who worked for several decades at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, paid for her mother's cryopreservation in 2012, and then signed a contract for her posthumous freezing. "Let's say Mom will be restored in the future – who will take care of her there?" she explains. Mneva says that all her life she was inspired by scientific and technological progress, but in the end she was pushed to cryonics by distrust of Russian healthcare. Mneva is convinced that if not for the low qualifications of doctors, her mother, who survived a stroke, could have been saved. "There is no medicine in our country. What is advertised on TV is not available to ordinary people. I hope everything will be different in the future life: if a person gets sick, he will be able to go to a profile office, and he will be cured there or sent to the right place," she says. "Everyone has such a thought, everyone has such a reason."
The pensioner has no doubt that she and her mother will be revived – the only question is when: back in the 21st century, as KrioRus suggests, or later. If you look at the official price list, Irina Mneva had to pay KrioRus for two contracts for a total of 72 thousand dollars. According to her, it was not easy to raise this money. "I went into business, I did it, and I paid," she says, without going into details. Danila Medvedev confirmed that Mneva paid his company 72 thousand dollars. When asked about their origin, he said: "Well, they had several apartments in their family. In my opinion, even three."
And is it possible to bequeath your real estate or other property to KrioRus, receiving in return the hope of a future resurrection? Medvedev says that they are regularly approached with such a request, but this is too legally complicated a scheme for KrioRus. In principle, the company would like to follow this path, especially since, according to Medvedev, this is standard practice in American cryocompanies.
However, not all relatives of current or future cryopatients share transhumanistic enthusiasm. "The main enemies of the cryopatient are his relatives," Medvedev grins. – We had a patient who signed a contract, but his wife was able to illegally obtain his body and cremate it, hoping that we would refund her money. Actually, they were already divorced. Unfortunately, this area is poorly regulated in Russia, in principle, almost anyone can come to the morgue and take the body, only if it is not at all obvious that he has nothing to do with the deceased."
Another man, according to Medvedev, sent his father for cryopreservation, and then suddenly died himself. The family buried him, celebrated the wake, 7 days, 40 days. "Then they wanted to continue the banquet," Medvedev laughs, "they started calling us and asking if we could return their father to them. They wanted to unfreeze him and bury him so that they could celebrate the wake again, 7 days and 40 days."
If we leave out the hope for a future resurrection, cryopreservation itself is very similar to an alternative funeral. "Purely technologically, for many people, not only the possibility of revival is important, but also the possibility of preservation. They don't want their relatives to rot in the grave, because despite the traditions and rituals that surround the burial, nothing good and beautiful happens in the coffin," Medvedev says. According to him, people from the funeral business are already showing interest in KrioRus – in particular, the company is starting to work with a ritual project created by the Military Memorial Company to promote funeral services in a modern spirit.
"They want to open a club-format salon, in a good location within the Garden Ring, where some elements of cryonics will be shown, among other things. But we must understand that even VIP funeral services cost less than cryonic ones," Medvedev says. According to him, even the most expensive coffin costs 300-400 thousand rubles, and no one invites Madonna to the wake – in short, it is difficult to promote a service worth several million rubles in this market. "As in Ancient Egypt, they don't bury people now," Medvedev says, seemingly somewhat upset by this circumstance. The entire turnover of the company "KrioRus" is about 250 thousand dollars a year.
Russian communal transhumanism
The Moscow office of the company "KrioRus" is a pair of cramped, poorly furnished rooms on the ground floor of a residential building in the center of Moscow. The bookshelves are mostly scientific journals and books on transhumanism, although among them you can see a popular brochure on the treatment of rheumatism. "Do you know who Don Delillo is?" asks Medvedev. It turns out that the famous American postmodernist writer recently released a new novel "Zero K" about cryonics, the book is open in the middle on the desk of the head of the company. Next to it is Medvedev's smartphone with a voice recorder turned on. "He always records everything," explains Valeria Pride, CEO of KrioRus, "usually on video too, but in order not to embarrass you, we decided not to turn on the camera." Transhumanists believe that in the future, stored data about a person of a very different nature can help to restore personality – both a digital footprint on the Internet, and voice recordings, and videos.
Sitting in a battered office chair, Medvedev talks about the main ideas of transhumanism, the forerunner of which he considers Nikolai Fedorov, a Christian thinker and philosopher, the founder of Russian cosmism and the author of the doctrine "Philosophy of Common Cause." One of the key ideas of this teaching is to unite people in the name of subjugating nature to defeat death.
Medvedev believes that Russian philosophers have prepared the ground for the ideas of modern transhumanism, and that is why, since the 1990s, the transhumanist movement in Russia has been one of the strongest and most ambitious in the world, on a par with American transhumanism. "Only the United States and Russia are capable of taking responsibility for the future," Medvedev suddenly declares. Russian Russian soul, a special Russian mentality, but, following Fedorov, we are building a common, communal transhumanism in Russia, and not an individual one, as in the USA."
In the USA, cryonics originated in the second half of the 1960s (the first cryopatient James Bedford was frozen in 1967, his body is preserved to this day), but it has not grown into a large industry, now two cryonics firms, Alcor and the Cryonics Institute, have been operating in the United States since 1970- x, they froze about 300 people. Apart from them and KrioRus, no one in the world offers commercial cryopreservation services.
"Russian communal transhumanism" in addition to Medvedev is represented by several other equally striking figures. For example, Mikhail Batin and Dmitry Itskov. Entrepreneur Batin, a former deputy of the Kostroma Regional Duma and head of the local Federation of Trade Union Organizations, created and headed the Science for Life Extension Foundation about 10 years ago. His main interest is the search for medical technologies to combat aging, and Batin is trying to find truly promising scientific research in this field overflowing with quackery and too bold promises, which, however, are not many at all. However, it is not without mistakes here either: it was Batin who invited the odious Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini to Russia.
Dmitry Itskov is the co–founder of the pro-Kremlin media holding New Media Stars ("Days.Ru", "View.Ru" and other similar projects), which is believed to have been created under the patronage and in the interests of the then deputy head of the presidential administration Vladislav Surkov. Having earned money from media management, Itskov in 2011 created his own movement within the framework of Russian transhumanism – "Russia-2045". The ideologists of the movement promised that immortality would come as early as 2045, and, unlike Medvedev's cryonics and Batin's medical technologies, the emphasis here was on cyborgization, that is, the transfer of human consciousness into a computer.
In 2013, the movement "Russia-2045" briefly made the front pages of American newspapers – thanks to the pretentious congress "Global Future – 2045", which Itskov organized at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan. Medvedev says that, despite the fact that tickets to the event cost from $ 750, the congress undermined the financial situation of the former media mogul, and along with the money, interest in his movement began to disappear. Medvedev is sure that through Surkov, Itskov tried to interest Vladimir Putin in transhumanism, but without much success.
However, Medvedev believes that the Russian authorities at various levels are actually interested in transhumanism, but they are not always ready to advertise it. For example, he claims that the Minister of Health Veronika Skvortsova is "interested in various kinds of transhumanist technologies," and "a person who is responsible for prolonging life" has appeared in the Ministry of Health. Mikhail Kovalchuk, President of the Kurchatov Institute, a man from President Putin's inner circle, who was familiar with him from the Ozero cooperative, presented a "Strategy for the development of convergent Technologies" a year ago – a possible concept for the development of Russian science. The document is really based on the ideas of American transhumanists 30 years ago. Among other things, the "Strategy", which has not yet been officially launched, contains a link to an article by Danila Medvedev and Valeria Pride.
Technological Bolshevism
The term "transhumanism" somehow includes everything that has to do with the technological image of the future. Because of this breadth of the concept, it is not always clear what transhumanists do – science, philosophy or some kind of sermons. "In the modern world, religion is formally separated from science and technology, but transhumanism can be characterized both in secular terms – as an ideology, and in religious terms – but not as faith, but as superstition. There are almost no working scientists among transhumanists, because the latter know that scientific discoveries are unpredictable and the development of technology often goes the wrong way. It is a mistake to believe that we can predict what technologies will be in 50 or 100 years. Transhumanists overcome this uncertainty with the help of ritual practice: by performing certain technical actions, they believe that the enchanted future, in which their fantasies about technology will become reality, will not forget to reward them," explains the philosopher of science, an employee of the French Commissariat for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energy Sources Alexey Grinbaum.
Greenbaum describes transhumanism as a layman's idea of technology, despite the fact that this layman is obsessed with them and does not realize it himself. At the same time, transhumanists make a leap into a bright technological future, leaving out all the intermediate stages – just as the Bolsheviks immediately made a leap into communism in their minds, like Christianity, which defeated paganism, promising immortality to every soul. This is a natural reaction of society to the progress that is really taking place in science and technology – genome decoding, genetic editing tools, advances in the development of artificial intelligence and much more, and although everyone criticizes hyperrational transhumanism, nevertheless it is gradually gaining popularity.
Schoolchildren and sticky fingers
Danila Medvedev is more inclined to practical actions than many other transhumanists. "I'm interested in doing specific things," he says, "where you can achieve a lot with small means, where you can quickly achieve results, but almost no one does it, because the topic looks too radical."
Indeed, there is nothing complicated or new in freezing itself. The storage of biological tissues in liquid nitrogen, the use of a cryoprotector – all this is successfully used in conventional medicine. Perfusion is a simple operation that can be performed by any qualified surgeon using standard resuscitation equipment. The main know-how of KrioRus is built logistics, which, according to Medvedev, allows you to prepare any client for conservation as soon as possible after his death (for this, in particular, customers are supposed to wear a special badge with the phone numbers of the company's representatives on duty), while the tissues of his body, and especially the brain, they have not undergone irreversible changes.
But customers, of course, are willing to pay so much money not for a badge and logistics, but for a reasonable belief in immortality. The main theoretical basis of the future revival, as Medvedev and other transhumanists see it, is the development of nanotechnology, tools that hypothetically should give people the opportunity to work with matter at the most subtle, atomic level. In the mid-1980s, American scientist Eric Drexler proposed the concept of so-called nano–robots (or simply nanobots) - microscopic devices capable of manipulating individual atoms, in fact, assembling and rearranging matter into tiny bricks. Nanobots would have no trouble changing our relationship with the material world, for example, Medvedev fantasizes, a pinch of nanomechanisms could disassemble the contents of a garbage bag by atoms and assemble anything from it – food, an electronic chip, body tissue close to the real one, or other nanobots. And all this practically without the use of additional energy sources.
It is these nanobots, in theory, destined to revive the bodies stored in Sergiev Posad – it will not be difficult for them to repair and restart the spoiled organism. The problem is that no one is doing serious work on the creation of nano-robots now, moreover, the enthusiasm with which Drexler's idea was perceived in the 80s and 90s has been replaced by disappointment - for everyone except transhumanists. Medvedev also admits this: "At some point, the main idea of nanotechnology was forgotten, instead everyone took up simple and understandable things - nanofilms, nanomembranes, that is, much more primitive things than Drexler suggested, in fact, just advanced chemistry."
The Russian transhumanist explains the fading of enthusiasm in the scientific community by the inertia of modern science, the unwillingness of scientists to take risks, their dependence on publications and grants (everyone who is engaged in "alternative science" likes to use the same arguments – from the refuters of the theory of relativity to the creators of perpetual motion machines). At the same time, Medvedev is convinced that the creation of nanorobots is, in general, quite simple. And since scientists are postponing a leap into a bright nanotechnology future, we will have to attract other allies. Therefore, according to the plan of transhumanists, Russian schoolchildren will be engaged in the development of nanobots.
"We have found a weak spot in the educational system – this is chemistry training," Danila Medvedev shares his plans. – Now it is taught in such a way that no one remembers anything from the lessons, even the periodic table. We have developed a computer system with which you can virtually work with individual atoms – assemble molecules and nanostructures." Already from the seventh grade, the head of KrioRus hopes, schoolchildren will be able to engage in real nanotechnology as part of the school curriculum, and the construction of nanorobots will become a popular hobby like assembling radios several decades ago. "Nanotechnology fans will advance the entire field, which in a short time will be able to create the technologies predicted by Drexler. We will not have to convince the Ministry of Science or the leadership of Rusnano, whose stereotypical thinking we have already had to deal with," Danila Medvedev shares his expectations.
If Medvedev claims that it is so easy to create nanobots that "schoolchildren and children" could do it, then Alexey Grinbaum is convinced that there are fundamental difficulties in this direction that are insurmountable even for adult scientists: he refers to the discussion that unfolded in the early 2000s on the pages of scientific journals between Eric Drexler and Nobel laureate in chemistry Richard Smalley. The fundamental problem that Smalley drew attention to is connected, as he said, with "sticky fingers." On the scale of the nano-world, the mechanical paradigm of thinking, which assumes that you can take something at point A and put it at point B, does not work. It is possible to take something, for example, with the help of electrical or chemical procedures, but it is not easy to put it, because this "load" will stick to the finger – atomic forceps or nanomanipulators with which we took it. They are made of the same matter, and there is no difference between the fingers and the object that was taken.
The internal inconsistency of Drexler's concept of nanomachines was one of the reasons for the sharp cooling of interest in transhumanism, which was born in the 1990s, even among the official scientific bureaucracy in the United States. Those who are ready to pay tens of thousands of dollars for their cryopreservation today should understand that the future defrosting and reviving of their bodies does not just remain a fantasy – real scientific work in this direction is practically not conducted. "This has nothing to do with today's science, it is a beautiful dream of a future in which all problems will be solved. To a large extent, cryonics is just a ritual," warns Alexey Grinbaum.
Ideas against corpses
The rational image of a bright technological future, which transhumanists and adherents of cryonics draw, leaves out very important ethical and philosophical questions. Let's say someday, maybe in 50, maybe in 500 or 5000 years, a person frozen today will be able to be revived. Will he be the same person or someone new? Will he be able to adapt to the world of the future, will there be a place for him there? "If we imagine that a person who died in some 1917 year would be revived today, he would, of course, immediately get lost in today's world, in which everything is arranged differently, other technologies, everything else. His brain is simply not adapted to this world, he would have to learn everything all over again," says Greenbaum.
Transhumanism and its criticism as part of thinking about the future coexistence of technology and man is a discourse in which not only activists like Danila Medvedev participate, but also people who directly determine technological progress, such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin (one of the ideologists of transhumanism Ray Kurzweil has been working at Google since 2012). But you need to put them in one row very carefully.
"Elon Musk wants to take from the present and preserve for the future such values, for example, as the protection of privacy or human dignity, the absence of discrimination on racial and other grounds," says Alexey Grinbaum, "he wonders how to teach artificial intelligence this. And people engaged in cryonics want to preserve some biological tissues in liquid nitrogen. The difference is fundamental: on the one hand, we are talking about the values of human culture, civilization, and on the other hand, about corpses."
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The cryopatients stored in Sergiev Posad are looked after by the silent Sergey – it is he who regularly checks the nitrogen level in the dewars with the help of a cable and cargo. Sergey lives on the same plot in a separate wooden house – the house and the site for the construction of the hangar were provided by one of the partners of the KrioRus company.
– Do you believe that they will be able to unfreeze? I ask Sergei.
– It was different fiction, Nautilus, Garin's hyperboloid, flight to the moon... Something has come true.
– Would you like to freeze yourself?
– I didn't think so. Still alive.
Medvedev recalls that a few years ago, at a party, he was told that slavery still exists in Russia. "I thought – is it right to engage in transhumanism, to think about the man of the future, while the man of the present buys and sells his own kind? – says Medvedev. "And I started helping the anti–slavery movement Alternative."
Sergey is one of several hundred slaves freed with the participation of Medvedev and the Alternative movement created by Oleg Melnikov. He worked in a clay quarry in the vicinity of Makhachkala, at one of the many artisanal brick factories, deprived of liberty, and now works in "KrioRus". "He can quit at any time," laughs Danila Medvedev.
Maybe this alone gives Medvedev the right to the wildest dreams of eternal life.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru
16.05.2017