A 100-year slumber might not be so cool
Your uneasy adjustment to 22nd-century life will start small: medical staff politely hiding their discomfort when you use a gendered pronoun to thank them for unfreezing you from your cryonic slumber.
Then, as you pass through rehab therapy and psychological debriefings, they’ ll discover the sheer horror of the monster they’ve awoken. The human from the 21st century requests the flesh from slaughtered animals, is wearing a ring studded with conflict diamonds and uses the antiquated racist term “Indigenous” instead of the modern “Autochthonous.”
Then comes the media attention. Ten minutes into your first interview on holotelevision, the host asks you your opinion of Canada appointing its first dolphin to the federal cabinet.
“This is a great moment for mammal equality, is it not?” says the host, Jayxxson.
“I’m sorry, did you say a ‘dolphin?’ But … how would it even get into the cabinet room?” you reply.
Gasps issue from the audience. Protests immediately begin to form outside the studio. Denunciations. Death threats. Petitions to “put the hater back in the freezer.”
Barely a week of living in the future and you’re already a pariah.
Last month, B.C. “life- extension activist” Keegan Macintosh signed a contract he hopes will grant him bicentennial powers of longevity.
The legality is still being hashed out but the contract, inked with the Lifespan So- ciety of B.C., would see Macintosh’s body preserved in cold storage after his clinical death. Then, after some “profound improvements in future medical science,” the idea is some future civilization will have Macintosh’s cold-stored body resurrected.
Cryonics — the science of keeping dead bodies in cold storage with the anticipation of future revival — is nothing new. The first “cryo-patient,” a psychology professor who died in 1967, is still preserved at a facility in Arizona.
But amid endless discussions on whether resurrection will even be possible, what’s less discussed is how the future would welcome a traveller from our time.
The classic 1819 short story Rip Van Winkle follows the fictional saga of an American villager who wakes up after a 20-year sleep. Having slept through the American Revolution, he gets in trouble for proclaiming his loyalty to King George III.
Van Winkle had it easy; he only had to keep track of which powdered wig-wearing patrician named George was in charge. Imagine the challenge today of a Rip Van Winkle awaking from a 20- year slumber.
In 1996, sex change jokes were a prime time staple. The words “fag” and “retard” weren’t the thermonuclear career- enders they are today. The modern Van Winkle would come from a world where gay marriage was accepted by the mainstream as a social evil. Heck, he might not even have been cool with his kids marrying along the colour spectrum. In the U. S. in 1995, a mere 48 per cent of citizens approved of interracial marriage — compared to 87 per cent by 2013.
That’s just 20 years. If reanimating the dead is even possible, it could be more than a century before medical technology becomes advanced enough to awaken your cryonic corpse.
Maybe Internet historians from 2116 would unearth your 21st- century Facebook account and realize your favourite movie was Revenge of the Nerds. “Cryo-patient’s favourite movie glorifies sexual assault,” reads the headline splashed across Future Post.
They also might learn you were a committed follower of the bacon trend — which might not play well in an era where meat is grown in a lab and science has taught pigs to do calculus. And you’re definitely going to get some awkward questions about all the oil you used. When the world’s last oil reserves can only be extracted with Arctic submarines, it’s going to seem unbelievably frivolous that you burned 1,000 litres of gasoline on a scenic drive through the Maritimes.
“Now l et me get t his straight: even when it was 20 below outside, you still had a box in your house that was using electricity to generate cold temperatures? And you powered this all with coal?” says a horrified attendee at one of your I Came From the Year 2016 book signings.
A communist frozen in 1917 would have no idea what the word “gulag” even meant. A Cuban revolutionary frozen in 1958 might throw up when he saw what Fidel Castro did to his dreams for national liberation. Even eugenics wasn’t all that controversial before the Nazis got their hands on it. Just ask Nellie McClung.
If we could unfreeze an average Canadian f r om 1916, you’re almost guaranteed to get a racist, sexist homophobe who would find it utterly wussy that we’ve stopped beating our children. Go back 200 years, and you’ve got a Canadian who isn’t convinced slavery is wrong and may see the term “animal cruelty” as a propagandistic invention.
So yes, by all means, seal yourself in cold storage with visions of retiring in a land of hyperloop commuting, robot brothels and world peace. But you know how your dad is baffled by selfcheckout machines and can’t understand why the cinema lineup gets quiet when he asks, “What’s the name of the negro guy from Moana?” Be prepared for a future where you are at least 500 per cent more old-fashioned.
Most of all, try not to think about the idea you might be leaving a perfectly preserved corpse for future generations. Remember what we do with perfectly preserved corpses from the distant past?