“The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground (...) So clear indeed was [the ice] that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay motionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or merely of suspended animation which the warmth would revive puzzled the philosophers.”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, 1928

“Perhaps the law will come to recognize three classes of people in addition to active nuisances: those in suspended animation, those frozen after death, and those who are thoroughly dead because they were burned up, well rotted, lost at sea, or otherwise considered poor bets. We can anticipate some sticky lawsuits questioning the categories assigned in particular cases.”

Robert C. W. Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality, 1962

“Biological systems are remarkable in their cleverness. In the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “Human ingenuity may make various inventions, but it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting and nothing is superfluous.” We share da Vinci’s sense of awe at the designs of biology, but we do not agree with him on our inability to improve on nature. Da Vinci was not aware of nanotechnology, and it turns out that nature, for all its apparent creativity, is dramatically suboptimal. For example, the neuronal connections in our brains compute at only 200 transactions per second, millions of times slower than even today’s electronic circuits. Despite the elegant way our red blood cells carry oxygen in our bloodstream and deliver it to our tissues, it is still a slow and cumbersome system. Robotic replacements already on the drawing board will be thousands of times more efficient than red blood cells.”

Ray Kurzwell, Fantastic Voyage, 2004

“We cannot see in death an end-of-life, and an after-of-life, but this does not mean we only have recourse to an afterlife; and so too, in life we do not see a lack of death, a total vitality that would remove us from the nonliving.”

Toby Austin Locke, The Living and the Dead, 2006

“the hope of resurrection is also rooted in nature: we are used to seeing the natural world die back in winter, only to return with new vigor the following year. Billions of people around the world celebrate this triumph of life over death in spring festivals such as Easter (...) But as well as these ancient traditions, versions of resurrection are also gaining popularity among those who would rather put their faith in technology than in gods. Cryonics, for example, in which people pay to be frozen on death in the hope of one day being repaired and revived, is one new track on this route. As technology rapidly develops, even more high-tech versions are being proposed, such as the possibility that we will upload ourselves onto computers and then reload ourselves into new bodies or digital avatars.”

Stephen Cave, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, 2012

“Krokonen sagde til ham, til Gilgamesh:
'Gilgamesh, hvor vil du hen?
Det evige liv, du søger, vil du aldrig finde.
Da guderne skabte menneskene,
gav de døden tl menneskene
og beholdt evigt liv for sig selv.’”

Gilgamesh, En oversættelse fra akkadisk ved Sophus Helle og Morten Søndergaard, 2019

“There is, however, at least one major problem with arguments based on the supposed moral superiority of the natural over the unnatural: the difference between natural and unnatural is far less obvious than one might think (...)
If, as [John Stuart] Mill suggests, "nature" is the sum of all phenomena and their causes, then everything – including humans and their technology – must be part of nature. What is produced by humans, and is commonly defined artificial, cannot be produced by anything but natural forces. In other words, what we define as artificial is not the creation of something new, but merely the rearrangement of what is already found in nature, according to nature’s laws: “[T]he role of man is a very limited one; all we do is move things into certain places. By moving objects we bring separated things into contact, or pull adjacent things apart; such simple changes of place produce the desired effect by bringing into play natural forces that were previously dormant” (ibid.). If everything is necessarily natural then IVF and cryonics must be natural, too."”

Francesca Minerva, The Ethics of Cryonics: It it Immoral to be Immortal?,