Many Years Ago He Was Dead... And He's Still Dead

I get the Wikipedia daily article email. It's very interesting. Random stories are picked... there's a word of the day, a quote of the day. And, for history lovers like myself, the icing on the cake is "This day in history..." Some of them are things that I know about anyhow. Some are things I'm glad to learn. And other things, like something that I learned about today... Well, it's just a little disturbing.

Have you ever heard of cyropreservation? I have. In Mission: Impossible, they pretend to preserve a guy in order to get information out of him. (Man! Now I want to watch that show!) Anyhow... On this day in history, the first man was preserved by cyropreservation. I would tell you about it in my own words, but I find that Wikipedia did a fantastic job telling about it. Fantastic as in... I was laughing at the whole idea, but was... well, disturbed. Here's what is on the Wikipedia page for cryonics:

Cryonics is the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals that can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine until resuscitation may be possible in the future. Currently, human cryopreservation is not reversible, which means that it is not currently possible to bring people out of cryopreservation alive. The rationale for cryonics is that people who are considered dead by the current legal or medical definitions will not necessarily be dead by future standards – the most stringent standard being the information-theoretic definition of death – and that such people could be brought out of cryopreservation in the future.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Just how far do people think that technology is going to take us anyhow???