People are just so disappointing, aren’t they?

Simon Cowell does not, he says, plan to have himself cryonicly frozen at the moment of death. I am hugely saddened.

Stop sniggering. I actually am. And let me tell you why…

It just seemed like the start of something. Here’s Cowell – at dinner with Gordon Brown, by the way, and isn’t that one of the most alarming notions you’ve ever heard? Honestly: the economy is in the tank, and here’s Gordon having a quick bite with the bloke who brought you The X Factor.

Mind you, there might be some much-needed home truths in that conversation – “I’m sorry, Gordon – no, I am – but honestly, you just haven’t got it. You may have been a big brain when you were chancellor, I really couldn’t say, but right now, here, today, as Prime Minister, you’re not showing me anything I need to see. I’m telling you to go home, and pick another career. And that’s just all there is to it. But for God’s sake, don’t leave us with that bloke Straw, because he lives his life upside down and he’s frankly scary.”

Anyway, for those of you coming late to the party, or just not unruly enough to have considered dipping your naked brain in liquid nitrogen to preserve yourself against future medical advances towards immortality, here’s the skinny:

These days we routinely revive people who would have been considered corpses when I was a kid. The definition of death has become slippery. The way you know that is that people start hyphenating adjectives when they discuss what death means. You might think it’s clear cut, but it gets mucky around the terminator line. The idea behind cryonics (which is not, not, not the same as cryogenics) is that you put the whole debate on hold until the blurry line can be stretched to drag you back to the mortal realm. Basically: you’re pronounced non-revivable, then vitrified (not frozen, technically) and when medical science is sufficiently advanced, you get warmed up and returned to life. Possibly to serve as a drinks gimp for our alien bondage overlords, but let’s not go there right now.

I am, by the way, incredibly disappointed in Google and in the entire world, because I just searched for the term “drinks gimp” and there are no real results, and definitely no pictures to link to. And yet we all know what ought to be there. I tell you, you’re all slacking. (On which subject, by the way, that pic of Simon Cowell was taken by someone who wants attribution but does not appear to have supplied their name, so if you want to use it you should please click through and sort it out for yourself.)

And now it seems that “alien bondage overlords” is a blank as well. You have to be kidding me. I thought there was a whole industry out there which talked about nothing but that kinda stuff. (I mean, you know, for conservatives and morally upstanding folks.)

Returning to the discussion in hand: cryonics gets laughed at a great deal, and lots of scientists in related fields will go out of their way to avoid discussing it in any serious way. And yet, and yet… well. As a couple of very smart people will tell you, it’s a lifeboat option. It’s really not a good thing to bet on, but as an alternative to certain, permanent death, it has some appeal. And I’d love to see a proper public sphere discussion of longevity and life-extension get started, because it’s overdue.

Yes, it is. And do you know why it is? Because we’re starting to rub up against understanding how aging happens. We’re getting towards a point where we might be able to do something about it. We’re also starting to read the firmware code for our bodies. We’re learning to build organs from scratch and repair nerve tissue.

And when we can repair or even modify our own code, certain assumptions common in financial markets and economies and even basic social structures are going to become obsolete very quickly. Everyone’s in a snit about Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension right now, and there’s some debate about whether it will eventually cost £15m or £30m, which is contingent upon how long he lives. Imagine he could expect to be two hundred, or three… and now multiply that effect across the entire workforce.

See? Yeah, sure, I know, we’re not there yet, and we may never be. On the other hand, we’re already seeing a population-based health care crisis on the horizon in many industrial nations. 

Cryonics is many things, but ‘totally stupid’ isn’t one of them. I’ll go with ‘very optimistic’. I had hoped that the archpriest of bitchy was going to open the door to some serious discussion. I also thought maybe he’d found a proper cryonics setup here in the UK, which would have been interesting.

Alas, he was making with the easy funny. Probably telling Gordon to have the economy frozen until someone can figure out how to fix it.

Could be a while…