It’s almost spring, and if you look around you can see that the world outside is beginning to thaw. Most of the trees still seem pretty barren, and most of the grass is still an unhealthy shade of murk, but the birds have been chirping and a few brave co-eds have even been wearing shorts. Yes, it’s almost come back to us. I don’t care to make a prediction about when, though, because there’s no guarantee that we will get to spring blossom again.

Though for many of us the thought of dying seems untimely, the truth of the matter is, that no matter how far off it may seem, the day of our death could be any day of our lives. Except, of course, any of the days that we’ve already lived. That may seem an obvious thing to say, but perhaps not if you’re one of thousands of Americans who believe that one day the fruits of cryonics will be made manifest.

Even if you don’t recognize the word, you’ve probably heard about human preservation. Cryogenics is the science of extremely low temperatures, and the people who study how various materials handle being kept at temperatures lower than negative-240 degrees Fahrenheit are usually pretty recognizable by their crazy shocks of white hair, white lab coats and thick glasses. The preservation of deceased human beings is what we call cryonics, and that’s where the field of cryogenics has gotten it’s reputation for being a little, well, crazy.

You may ask why anyone would even want to have his or her body preserved after death. For the average person (not some cult or political figure like Mao Zedong, for instance), the thought of having your body on permanent display might seem a bit grotesque. But being cryogenically frozen isn’t really about being put in a tube for people to gawk at. In fact, cryonics laboratories where preserved bodies are housed are entirely unlike museums — I would imagine that for both safety and confidentiality these labs are loathe to give nickel tours to any interested person off the street. So what’s it all for? It’s to live again.

Those of you who are up on your science already know that at this point we are unable to reanimate even the most meticulously preserved human. There are different theories about how one day we may be able to do it, but none of them are, to date, feasible. Most of the men and women who are currently being held in tanks of liquid nitrogen (just around 200 individuals in the United States) are suspended there because they believed that human technology will one day be advanced enough to revive their preserved bodies.

Cryonics is not without its detractors, of course. Many opponents of the practice say that the expense and the risks of failure are too great, and that the ethics behind it are questionable at best. The question of what death, as we know it, actually is has been a stumbling block for many scientists — is there something else that happens when our biological systems shut down? Is a “dead” person really dead, or are they just awaiting an as-yet-undiscovered treatment? Because we don’t have the ability to test these questions, we still don’t have any answers.

And that is what, to me, makes this whole business of cryonics so fascinating. Sure, you have to wonder what kind of person wants to live “forever,” and you’ve got to wonder who assured them that the people of the future even want to be subjected to their presence. But petty concerns of “would I get along with this person if he or she weren’t dead?” are largely irrelevant. What really sticks out about these indefinitely frozen people’s personalities is this: They all must have had an incredible faith in the human mind. Not in their own (though of course that’s an assumption that you’ve got to make when you’re banking on memory preservation), but in the minds of countless people who haven’t even been born yet. Something obviously gave them hope that at some unknown point in time some scientist, somewhere, will figure out how to restore them to their former glory. Whether you agree with them or not, you have to admit that it’s a confidence booster. After all, aren’t we all of that same stock?

— Anna-Lise Burnette is a senior in interdisciplinary studies. She can be reached at kburnet7@utk.edu.