I’ve been thinking a lot about cryopreservation lately—like the kind Alcor does—and whether it’s actually science or more like a very sophisticated form of hope. People often say it’s not pseudoscience because it “doesn’t violate known physics.” And I get what they mean: the argument leans on this idea from statistical mechanics that, in principle, even irreversible processes might be reversible at a fundamental level.

But that always makes me wonder—if physics eventually showed that some processes really are irreversible in principle, not just in practice, wouldn’t that undermine the whole premise? And even if it didn’t—maybe mind uploading could still be possible—there’s another issue that bothers me more.

Even if, somehow, we could decode every bit of information in a dead person’s brain and perfectly copy it into a computer or an AI system, how would we ever know whether the person was actually “back,” or whether we’d just built an incredibly good replica? We already see early versions of that today with AI mimicking people’s voices, personalities, even writing styles. At some point, resemblance alone stops meaning identity.

And then there’s an even stranger problem. If the mind is just classical information, in principle you could copy it more than once. You could put the same brain pattern into multiple bodies or machines. Would that mean the person had been reanimated many times over? That feels wrong. Intuitively, it seems much more like you’ve created several new beings who all share the same past—more like procreation than resurrection.

Once you follow that line of thought, it starts to feel like we keep circling back to the same conclusion humans reached thousands of years ago, all the way back to Gilgamesh: individual immortality may just not be on the menu. What can endure is the species, the lineage, the continuation of consciousness itself.

And in a strange way, that makes sense. I call myself “me,” but the basic texture of my inner life—the way pain feels, the way happiness feels, the way desire or ambition feels—doesn’t really belong to me. It’s shared. Anyone who has ever lived, or will live, knows those feelings from the inside. What changes are the details: the memories, the specific experiences, the social and genetic circumstances. But beneath all that, the constant hum of consciousness probably feels more or less the same from any human head.

That realization is both sad and comforting. Sad, because it goes directly against the deeply ingrained urge to want this self to last forever—an urge that’s probably just an evolutionary mechanism pushing organisms to preserve themselves. But comforting too, because while that urge doesn’t really line up with the physical and cognitive reality of how minds work, something else does endure. 

From an evolutionary perspective, it also makes sense why biology wouldn’t support our immortality dreams. Natural selection had no reason to shape brains that could be perfectly preserved, decoded, and reanimated later. Consciousness evolved as something useful in the moment—powerful, yes, but disposable. There was never any payoff for making it copy-proof or eternal.

Thinking about mortality more generally, another idea keeps coming back to me: scientifically speaking, being dead is the same as being not-yet-born. There’s no experience either way. So a lot of the fears people have—like being trapped in a dark void, or suffocating in a grave—are really category mistakes. They assume experience continues, just in a worse form. The problem is that consciousness evolved to imagine futures, not to imagine its own absence. We can’t picture non-experience, so we substitute scary images like darkness or emptiness (people who beleive in some faith system probably substitute a more pleaseant imagery, I think—and they aren't loosing anything by doing so). 

What’s interesting, though, is that none of us feels dread about the millions of years before we were born. Dinosaurs, ancient wars, past lovers who lived and died—we missed all of that, and it doesn’t bother us. Maybe that’s because the past can be learned after the fact. Like the way you can come into the movie late and still ask your friends what you missed.

Dying early in human history—which the 21st century might still count as, if the story has a long way to go—feels unsettling for a different reason. It’s not about nothingness; it’s about not being around to hear how it all turns out. Coming into a movie late doesn’t bother us much, but walking out before the ending does. That, I think, is the real source of the fear. It’s a kind of existential FOMO.

If that’s right, it’s tempting to think that people born closer to the end of the story—if there even is one—would feel better off than we do, or than someone who lived twenty thousand years ago and “missed” the Enlightenment, the pyramids, healthier lives, and so much else. But then you remember that no one feels anything afterward. Satisfaction only exists while you’re alive.

And the interesting thing is that satisfaction doesn’t really depend on whether you “saw everything” or made it all the way to the universe’s end credits. It just has to feel vivid and coherent. Someone who died in 4000 BC imagining gods and angels could feel just as complete and fulfilled as someone far in the future, looking back on how the universe’s real fate actually turned out. Imagined futures can be just as emotionally powerful as real ones—sometimes even more so.

What that highlights is how important strong beliefs about “what comes next” have always been. In the past, it was gods and heavens. In an ideal future, maybe it’s a sense of having fully understood the universe and looking forward to the heat death. Both can offer closure. The problem is that we’re stuck in between. We can’t fully believe the old myths, but we don’t yet have a complete picture of reality either. That limbo might be why 20th-century philosophers were so obsessed with existential dread.

It also suggests that tying death anxiety to FOMO might be relatively new. People have always feared death, but often for different reasons—leaving loved ones behind, facing judgment, punishment, or salvation—not because they were worried about missing the rest of human history.

So maybe the best consolation for our time is a kind of humanism: treating humanity itself as something sacred, something to care for and be grateful for. Not eternal individuals, but a continuing process of thought, feeling, and shared meaning in front of the vast, indifferent cosmos.

I keep thinking of that line from Ted Chiang: “The universe began as an enormous breath being held. I am glad that it did. Until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.”

And somehow, that feels like enough.