Cryonics and Brain Preservation
$220,000 to keep the connectome—and "you"—intact
If luxury is "more life," cryonics is the extreme endpoint: paying to preserve the substrate of consciousness for a speculative future. Alcor lists pricing of $80,000 for neuropreservation and $220,000 for whole-body cryopreservation. Tomorrow Bio, the European entrant, lists member pricing of €75,000 for brain-only preservation and €200,000 for whole-body.
The Story Angle
There is real technical literature on structural brain preservation and its theoretical bridge to future restoration technologies. Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC) combines fixation with vitrification to preserve brain ultrastructure—proposed as a route to long-term structural preservation.
The Guardian profiled arguments for brain preservation as a death-abolition strategy while acknowledging what remains speculative. Europe now has a high-end entrant: Tomorrow Bio frames cryopreservation as a membership plus procedure model.
Why It Matters for Luxury
Cryonics is the ultimate luxury purchase: betting that wealth today can buy more life tomorrow. The science of brain preservation is real—the technology to verify and reverse it is not. This makes cryonics a story about what people will pay for the possibility of continuity, and whether preserving structure is the same as preserving the self.