Philip Rhoades plans to be on this earth far beyond his natural expiry date.
“If I got hit by a bus tomorrow then a number of people in various organisations would do what they could to cool me down quickly,” he said.
The 71-year-old is an avid follower of the cryonics movement — the practice of deep-freezing human remains in the hope they will be thawed out and reanimated in the future.
The Southern Hemisphere’s first cryonics facility, Southern Cryonics, opened its doors last week in Holbrook, in the NSW Riverina.
Mr Rhoades is a member of the American-based Cryonics Institute, where he plans to be frozen.
But as an inaugural employee of Southern Cryonics, he now hopes to become a member and be frozen at the facility when the time comes.
“There’s a 70 to 80 per cent chance I’ll end up at Holbrook,” Mr Rhoades said.
Human remains will be deep frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored in large, steel chambers at the facility for what Mr Rhoades hopes will be a future defrosting.
There is currently no method or technology that allows for the reanimation of frozen human remains.
The practice is also costly — newer customers at the Holbrook facility have been asked to take out a life insurance policy worth about $200,000.
Experts raise ethical concerns
Deakin University Human Ethics Advisory Group faculty chair Neera Bhatia described cryonics as a mixture of “hype and hope” that ethically posed “lots and lots of red flags”.
“There is little to no scientific evidence to my mind that suggests it’s possible to revive a person and reanimate a person to a living state,” Dr Bhatia said.
She said while there was an argument a person could make their own decisions about how they wanted remains to be disposed of, there were a range of ethical concerns that needed to be considered.
“Do we actually have an obligation at some point to die and hand over the world to the next generation,” she said.
Mr Rhoades said he and other members accepted the possibility they may never be revived, and swallowed the cost because they preferred the unknown of freezing over the finality of burial or cremation.
“Even though there’s no guarantee about what’s going to happen in the future, at least if you’re frozen you’re still in the game to some extent,” he said.
Family affair
Mr Rhoades said he hoped to be reunited with his parents, Gerald and Dorothy, if he was ever thawed.
With their consent, Mr Rhoades had his mother and father’s brain tissue preserved at his foundation, the Neural Archives Foundation, after their deaths in 2016.
He said he hoped his parents’ consciousness could return to the world in some form, be it a “biological brain in a biological body, or a synthetic brain in a synthetic body, or even a virtual person in a virtual world”.
Dr Bhatia described the idea of a virtual world as “a step too far out of reality”.
“It just beggars belief that they would not only be preserved and brought back to life, but that even further, they would wake up to an entirely different world to the one you and I and we all live in,” she said.
“I think this is probably something for science fiction novels rather than reality.”
She said in the unlikely scenario that a person could be reanimated, other factors such as the likelihood of brain damage or the consciousness being “trapped in uncontrollable pain” needed to be considered.
“I don’t see how that would be hopeful to wake up to that world, I think it would be a hellish world to be trapped in that kind of consciousness,” she said.
Mr Rhoades said he had weathered years of jokes about “being a popsicle” for his outspoken support of cryonics, but with the opening of the new facility, he believed public perception was shifting.
“Over the last couple of decades people have started to think that anything might be possible,” he said.