0

Shows > Motherboard

I Was a Teenage Cryonicist

Motherboard

Matthew Deutsch is a teenager. He’s made plans to put his brain on ice after he dies so that he might be revived in the future. At 17, he is very likely the youngest cryonics candidate in the world.

I met the Maryland high schooler last October at the Singularity Summit at New York’s 92nd St. Y. There, he and hundreds of other expert and amateur technologists rubbed elbows with futurist luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, investor Peter Thiel, techno talker Jason Silva, and Aubrey de Grey, the biologist-philosopher who calls aging a disease. Deutsch says it was de Gray, in the documentary Do You Want to Live Forever, who inspired him to sign up with a neuro contract at Alcor Life Extension Foundation—or rather, to ask his parents to sign him up.

“I don’t remember how I first brought it up to them,” he says, “but my mom is supportive of me. She’s now an unfunded signup, like my dogs. My dad thinks it’s crazy, but he signed the contracts so I’m not bothered by it.”

Read the rest at Motherboard.

Comments

More From This Show

  • Click, Print, Gun: The Inside Story of the 3D-Printed Gun Movement

    Cody R. Wilson is a 25-year-old University of Texas law student who is working to build semiautomatic weapons using a 3D printer. Cody is an articulate and tech-savvy mouthpiece for the fight against

  • 'Click. Print. Gun.' (Trailer)

    Cody R. Wilson has figured out how to print a semiautomatic rifle from the comfort of his own home. Now he's putting all the information online so that others will join him. Our documentary 'Click. Pr…

  • The Space Suit Makers

    When they first met in 2007, Ted Southern and Nik Moiseev came from two very different worlds. They didn't imagine they'd eventually be in business designing space couture in a modest studio at the Br…

  • Valley of the UFOs

    We ventured to Hooper, Colorado (population: 105) to investigate some of the stranger things that have gone down there—from shooting stars to strange weather patterns to aliens descending to Earth in…

  • The Space Composer

    As we started planning the second season of our 'Spaced Out' series, we wanted to feature non-scientists thinking about the future of space. Enter composer Robert Alexander, who is helping NASA make n…

  • Libya in Vitro

    Last summer, we met Mohammed and Nadia, a couple from Tripoli who had left their distressed home for six months to live in Jordan. They hoped to conceive through in vitro fertilization with the help o…

  • Open Source Outer Space

    Anyone with enough brains and balls can build their own rocket and fly it to space. Or at least that’s what the nonprofit, open-source space-project Copenhagen Suborbitals wants the world to realize…

  • Drone On

    From weapon expos in Jordan to idyllic California beaches, we caught up with the people who are building and selling unmanned aerial vehicles all over the world, and even convinced a few companies to

  • The Satellite Hunter

    Thierry Legault is not your average amateur astronomer. He’s a renowned astrophotographer, painstakingly chronicling the orbits of planets, distant galaxies, spaceships, and—to the chagrin of the inte…

  • The Silent Dish

    In 1956, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory was formed in rural Green Bank, West Virginia, and became the hotbed of radio astronomy in the United States. But now, with cell phones, wi-fi, and ra…