Note: This is a philosophical essay written in my capacity as an inaugural Fellow of CryoDAO, a decentralized science community dedicated to advancing cryopreservation research. Any comments and suggestions are welcomed.
Decentralized science is disrupting the stagnation in science and ushering in a new era of human progress. Guided by the philosophy of Cosmism, now is the time to be bold in our ambitions: to transcend death and expand across the cosmos. CryoDAO is spearheading the charge to cosmical fulfilment and the awakening of consciousness, moving us one step closer to a morality of interplanetary immortality.
Studies of the long-term trajectories of human civilization have typically put humanity’s future under several scenarios. Philosopher Nick Bostrom outlines the four families of scenarios as extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthumanity. A more recent study by a cross-disciplinary group of researchers formalizes four broad classes of trajectories: status quo, catastrophe, technological transformation, and astronomical. In his book Future Stories, historian David Christian labels the four global scenarios of our imagined futures as collapse, downsizing, sustainability, and growth.
Whatever terminologies are used, there are some common conclusions we can draw from these studies. The first is that a status quo or plateau trajectory, one in which the level of civilization will remain confined within a narrow range, appears implausible. Instead, civilization is likely to either go extinct or transform, for the simple reason that the cumulative probabilities for these scenarios increase monotonically over time such that the range will eventually be broken. However, our survival into the far future through transformative technology or astronomical expansion is by no means guaranteed. The prevalence of major extinction events in Earth’s history, coupled with our current technological capabilities to cause serious environmental and social harms, suggests a catastrophe trajectory is more likely.
The Stagnation of Scientific Progress
In fact, humanity may be at a technological level where we are capable of total self-destruction, whether through nuclear wars or artificial intelligence (AI), but never reaches the technological maturity needed for a posthuman or astronomical future. We are still far from being a technologically mature civilization where members could live extremely long and fulfilling lives through biological modification or engage in space colonization. To make matters worse, scientific inertia has been the defining feature of our society since the mid-20th century. The epoch-making technical advances in the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, across fields as diverse as automobiles, energy, materials science, and communications, transformed our society from “an animal-powered, low-mass civilization to an electrified, mechanical, high-mass civilization.”
Indeed, a recent paper published in Nature reveals a marked decline in disruptive science and technology over a recent six-decade period, reinforcing concerns about slowing innovative activity. This is in part due to scientists’ narrow focus on their own field of knowledge, lacking broader ambitions to advance science more generally. As pointed out by the likes of Peter Thiel and Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, recent advances in information technology merely create an illusion of rapid progress. They only make our society work more efficiently but do not transform the material or energy basis of civilization itself.
We must not grow complacent. For the very first time in Earth’s history, humanity has developed the technological capability to manage it on a planetary scale, be it atmospheric compositions or geographic features. David Christian terms this new complex entity “a managed or conscious planet.” We may be on the verge of overcoming the “Great Filter,” a concept invoked as a solution to the Fermi paradox and which refers to the insurmountable challenges that prevent the spreading of intelligent civilization in the universe. We have reasons to be hopeful of an astronomical future provided that we do not destroy ourselves before becoming spacefaring and muster the resolve to acquire the technology required to do so.
To achieve this feat requires a transcendent goal capable of motivating society for decades, if not centuries, to make the investment and break out of the stagnation that has set in across many fields of science and technology. The history of our species is a history of the ever expanding scope of life and intelligence across space and time as we populate the Earth and live longer lives. It is therefore only natural that we build upon this legacy and be bold in our ambitions: to expand across the cosmos and transcend death. Only through such ambitions can we ignite new social forces that can channel enough resources to make the technological breakthroughs required to accomplish this transcendent goal.
Revitalizing our Cosmic Ambitions
We already have the solutions to this. In the early 21st century, American sociologist William Bainbridge proposed the creation of a galactic religion, the Cosmic Order, that is capable of rallying this demanding social movement. With the religious view that “the heavens are a sacred realm, that we should enter in order to transcend death,” people will see the meaning of life in a cosmic context and that it can be achieved through science and technology. Such views have deeper roots in Cosmism, a Russian philosophical and spiritual movement at the turn of the 20th century that explores our place in the universe, immortality, and resurrection. Seeking to extend humanity’s spatial and temporal reach beyond current limitations using science, the Cosmist movement inspired the Soviet space program and led directly to contemporary transhumanism. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a follower of Cosmism and the founding father of astronautics, famously said that “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.”
Tsiolkovsky’s mentor, the Christian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, conceptualized Cosmism in his Philosophy of the Common Task. In short, the project of the common task is to create the technological, social, and political conditions to resurrect all people who have ever lived, so that past and future generations are reconciled and united. This has to be the conscious work of the human race rather than relying on divine grace. Secular technology is seen as the messianic force to overcome death and fulfill the Christian promise of universal salvation. Fedorov firmly believed that the ideal of science and progress is to study “the blind force that brings hunger, disease and death in order to transform it into a life-giving force.”
However, technology will overcome not only temporal but also spatial limitations. Resurrected beings cannot all fit on Earth, and the celestial expanse will be where they settle eventually. “By resurrecting all the generations who have lived on this Earth, consciousness will be disseminated to all the worlds of the Universe,” Fedorov writes. Alexander Svyatogor, a later Cosmist and key representative of the political party Biocosmists-Immortalists, took one step further and evolved the goal of resurrection to realizing personal immortality. In his 1922 manifesto, he outlines the ambition to conquer time and space all at once: “The struggle for individual immortality – for life in the cosmos – manifests the universal will.”
Toward Decentralized Science and a New Frontier
Nikolai Fedorov also ponders about the social organization required to achieve the Cosmist vision. Since science and technology play a key role in achieving immortality, resurrection, and universal salvation, participation in knowledge and research must embrace everyone. Only in this way can the division between the learned and unlearned be bridged and kinship feelings be restored. Then, applied science can be directed toward the higher purpose of regulating the blind death-bearing force of nature. This belief in the power of universal participation in science has parallels in today’s decentralized science (DeSci) movement.
In an era marked by scientific stagnation, DeSci offers the social organization that Nikolai Fedorov envisions and holds the promise of reinvigorating scientific progress. Today’s academic establishment is ossifying with a “publish or perish” culture that prioritizes quantity over less popular but impactful research. Furthermore, the scientific publishing and peer review system is plagued with opacity and inefficiency, resulting in limited data availability and transparency that hampers crucial replication studies. By contrast, DeSci initiatives utilize blockchain technology to implement novel governance mechanisms such as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), allowing the democratic participation of a broader base of scientists and investors. The result is that more high-risk, high-reward, or unconventional research can be supported under open-access and transparent principles. In the DeSci space, DAOs focusing on impactful fields ranging from longevity science to space exploration have been formed.
The emergence of parallel institutions, powered by decentralized technologies, displacing traditional establishments is part of the larger network state movement pioneered by entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan. In his conception, a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition. While Balaji attempts to use this concept to reopen the physical frontier on Earth and rekindles the American frontier spirit, we can employ the same digital technologies but set our sight on the ultimate frontiers: overcoming death and colonizing space. DeSci as a global coordinating institution will be well suited to cultivate planetwide human networks of collaboration and new loyalties and commitments to our transcendent goals.
CryoDAO: Transcending Death through Cryopreservation Research
The longevity field is the perfect example of how DeSci can inject fresh and disruptive ideas. Over the course of the 20th century, human life expectancy rose by decades thanks to advances in public health and medicine. However, it has become increasingly clear that we are reaching the limit of existing approaches and radical human life extension is implausible if we stay on the current course. In its Longevity Acceleration Roadmap, the Longevity Biotech Fellowship (LBF) outlines three parallel strategies to indefinite lifespan. The first two are full body replacement and advanced bioengineering with the aim of solving aging entirely. However, given their uncertain timelines, biostasis is a critical third approach and backup plan. Biostasis is a buy-time strategy of pausing aging indefinitely via cryopreservation of a human when all other contemporary options for life extension are exhausted, offering the potential for revival in the future.
Due to public perception and other legacy reasons, biostasis is an underfunded life extension strategy and very few startups and academic laboratories exist in the field. According to the LBF, the total cost for a whole-body cryopreservation and revival project is around $2.4 billion. However, this is relatively little compared to the research budget of the pharmaceutical industry. Even small amounts of attention and funding can achieve significant advancements in the field. In this context, DeSci is well placed to attract unconventional funding and talent to achieve breakthroughs in this field which, if realized, can radically extend our lifespan.
Among the DeSci DAOs, CryoDAO is at the forefront of biostasis. Its objective is to contribute to cryopreservation research projects that have a high potential to increase the quality and capabilities of cryopreservation, and ultimately the future revival of humans. There are numerous challenges in biostasis, including preservation techniques, methods to evaluate the quality of preservation, and future revival technologies. The good news is that these are mostly engineering problems and we already have a preliminary roadmap with well defined objectives and key technical milestones to achieve successful preservation and revival. This coherent plan is critical to attracting talent and funding.
In its initial fundraising in early 2024, CryoDAO raised about $3 million and has already funded several groundbreaking initiatives. One project aims to use molecular profiling and machine learning to discover safer and more effective cryoprotectants, chemical compounds used for biological tissues to enter extremely low sub-zero temperatures without ice crystal formation (vitrification), thereby maintaining the cellular structure. Another project hopes to achieve the world’s first live birth from a vitrified and replanted whole ovary in a sheep. This will demonstrate, for the first time in history, that it is viable to recover complex organs from storage at extremely low temperatures back into a state of full viability. In December 2024, CryoDAO closed another fundraising round, securing $900,000 for the highly ambitious Cryorat project. It aims to demonstrate the first-ever cryopreservation and revival of a small mammal (a rat). These whole-body resuscitations have not been attempted since the 1960s.
CryoDAO shows how bold and unconventional projects are made possible by the DeSci movement. It also shows that if we set transcendent and ambitious goals, despite being difficult and taking a long time, scientific progress can be reinvigorated to provide benefits to humankind even in the short term. For example, advancing cryopreservation methods can improve organ and tissue banking capability. This will not only benefit many thousands of people worldwide by increasing access to transplantation, but also improve tissue engineering, trauma medicine, and basic biomedical research. In addition, the ability to bank large quantities of tissues and cells will also facilitate the discovery, development, and evaluation of drugs.
Tying back to Cosmism, cryopreservation can also help achieve the other plank of the philosophy – interplanetarism. Currently, manned, long-duration space travel faces challenges such as limited resources for normal physiology and metabolism, exposure to interplanetary radiation and zero-gravity, and psychological stresses. Low-temperature biostasis or cryopreservation could render these limiting factors negligible. In this vein, CryoDAO will join organizations such as the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency in exploring the feasibility of cryosleep for deep-space travel.
The Morality of Interplanetary Immortality
The second law of thermodynamics posits that the entropy of the universe is ever increasing, marching relentlessly toward disorder. Nevertheless, pockets of order emerge along the way. In his book Until the End of Time, physicist Brian Greene provides a lucid account of how gravitational and nuclear forces work hand in hand to give birth to orderly structures like stars and galaxies from the primordial universe, creating low-entropy pockets while observing the second law by releasing the entropy potential locked within matter. From then on, photons released from the sun, as a low-entropy, high-quality energy source, are exploited for the processes of life and sustaining the orderly structures of living beings.
Therefore, as our knowledge of the universe improves, we have come to understand that nature needs not be a blind death-bearing force, but instead is a source of life-giving low-entropy fuel. The meaning of life is to battle against the steady march toward disorder that characterizes the universe and preserve pockets of order and low-entropy. For us, this will be made possible by cryopreservation technology. If we can preserve the structures of the brain before an individual’s information-theoretical death so that his or her memories, personality, and identity are retained, we may one day be able to revive the individual using advanced future technologies. This is akin to the technology of museum preservation described in Fedorov’s The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission. In his vision, all people who have ever lived should be preserved in museums and resurrected by future generations. As he writes, “transferring all the remains of life to the museum was a transfer to a higher order, to a domain of investigation, to the hands of descendants, to one or several generations.”
This leads naturally to the prospects of intergenerational justice, both looking backward and looking forward, brought by a future of long-term preservation and potential revival of individuals. As pointed out by the philosopher Boris Groys, Fedorov’s project of resurrecting the dead is a technology directed toward the past. Previous generations will no longer be excluded from the better society of the future. The dead will therefore not be exploited in favor of the living. One caveat, however, is that revival is technically impossible if the brain is not properly preserved in the first place. After all, the perfect reversal of thermodynamic systems is impossible due to the entropy barrier. The resurrection of all previous generations from less advanced eras would therefore be impractical.
A more hopeful prospect is to direct our attention toward the future, aiming to preserve today’s individuals informationally intact and resurrect them using future technologies. In Bainbridge’s Cosmic Order, such a biological resurrection system can give people new lives. However, a person is only worthy of being resurrected for a new life by contributing to the development of the Cosmic Order. Individuals with extraordinary contributions will earn the right to live several lives, possibly on different planets, resulting in the spreading of advanced minds across the galaxy by “arrival of the fittest.” In this way, “each generation has a moral compact with the ones that follow.” Those alive today will not be exploited in favor of those who will live later, as future generations will honor this moral compact if they are to have any hope that those who come after them will do the same.
This prospect of interplanetary immortality will vastly deepen and enrich the human experience. We need not be afraid of a life lived indefinitely. In Jorges Luis Borges’s short story The Immortal, the infinity of time has stultified and ossified the lives of the troglodytes, as “every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past.” In the cosmic context, however, one can live new lives on new worlds and gain an ampler and richer experience and personality. In his influential paper Time without end: Physics and biology in an open universe, theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson provides a quantitative proof of how an open universe will provide a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory. No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening and new worlds to explore. If this is correct, we must press forward with expanding our consciousness across space and time.
DeSci is ushering in a groundbreaking era of how science is conducted, reinvigorating human progress. Now is the time for us to be bold in our ambitions. Guided by Cosmism, we should aim to extend humanity’s spatial and temporal reach before a catastrophe trajectory of our civilization sets in. To borrow a quote from philosopher and science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon’s Interplanetary Man, “there is a race between cosmical fulfilment and cosmical death, between the complete awakening of consciousness in the cosmos, and eternal sleep.” CryoDAO is firmly advancing cosmical fulfilment and the awakening of consciousness. As the biocosmist poet Olga Lor wrote over a century ago:
Into death I plunge the spirit of a knife,
Something to blow open the darkness of the grave.
The god of death is a disgusting god
Overthrown by the hand of reason!
Andy Yee 