The backstop, not the plan
Almost everyone misunderstands what Max More is arguing for. He is not campaigning to be frozen. His first sentence on the subject is that his goal is certainly not to die in the first place — that is the number one priority, and everything else is contingency.
The contingency matters because biology does not respect your timeline. You could be hit by a car tomorrow, or have a heart attack. So he treats biostasis — his preferred, broader term for cryonics — as one component inside an overall plan for life extension. Get the arrangements in place, because if you don’t make it as far as the medicine does, it is the only remaining chance.
The technical claim rests on a distinction he insists on and most people miss. Cryopreservation begins at the point of legal death — which is emphatically not the same thing as real death, or biological death. At that point the cells are protected chemically and the body cooled rapidly to −196°C, at which nothing whatsoever is happening: no molecular activity at all. From there, you can wait as long as it takes.
He is unusually honest about the state of it. It is not mature — it is maturing. It is far better than the late sixties and early seventies, when they could barely protect tissue at all. And the field is, in his own words, ridiculously small: only a few thousand people worldwide have arrangements, which means the organisations have almost no resources. Response is reasonable in the US and much of Europe; in South America it is genuinely risky.
What makes him valuable to this project, though, is the last thing he said. Being pro life extension does not, for him, mean believing the field’s claims. Longevity has a long history of supposed cures that did not work, and he thinks the community’s obligation is to stay critical of itself — ask why someone says a thing, ask why they think it will work, and get other opinions on it.
