OK, I know I’ve been all over the cryonics stuff like Michael Moore on a plate of double cheeseburgers, but I hear you all asking–just what the heck does all this have to do with space?

First of all, space may offer a solution to a problem faced uniquely by cryonicists. As the Ted Williams (and the earlier Dora Kent) case shows, a cryonics patient in suspension is not necessarily safe from interference by others.

Storage in space could prove a solution to the “peasants with pitchforks” problem. A suspension repository in orbit or on the lunar surface could be designed to be passively cooled, eliminating the requirements of power for refrigeration, or the topping up of liquid nitrogen, reducing the chances of thawing due to natural disasters or business problems. And it would put the patients safely out of reach of most who, for whatever reason, would attempt to deliberately thaw (and thus destroy) them.

In addition, as more people sign up, it might present another market for space transportation, which is badly needed to reduce the cost. I wrote on this subject extensively for Cryonics magazine over a decade ago.

But there are other relationships between space and cryonics.

One of the concerns that’s often raised by cryonics, and by life extension in general, is the population problem implied by new people being continually born, with few dying.

The problem, if it is one, is not immediate. Our home planet is capable of supporting many times as many people as it currently does at a comfortable living standard, given adequate technology, and rational governance (the latter being a commodity unfortunately still in short supply in much of the world). And I think that fixing the bad government problem is a much more ethically desirable and otherwise worthwhile approach than throwing up our hands at the problem, and instead murdering the millions who might like to live longer (which is what forcing someone to die prematurely surely is).

The biggest problems from a resource standpoint are water, and energy. But given affordable energy, the water problem is easily solved with desalinization of ocean water. And it would be foolish to bet that we won’t come up with affordable new energy sources in the future (improved nuclear fission plants, nuclear fusion, more efficient solar and energy storage, etc.).

Also, there’s no shortage of land, and won’t be for a long time, considering how much of the planet is still relatively empty of people.

But sometime in the next few centuries, assuming that we don’t stop breeding (not necessarily a good assumption) on a mass scale, we will run out of room on this planet.

Fortunately, the rest of the universe is almost unlimited, in volume and critical resources. If we do become essentially immortal, space settlement will provide a safety valve for the additional population, and in fact, it may allow us to actually depopulate the planet, and use it as a vast park, in which to breed diverse wildlife and enjoy scenic vacations.

Another problem often postulated by opponents of long life is that people will become bored. That may be true of some–even many. But while many people seem sanguine about the prospects of dying as they approach the ends of their lives, it isn’t clear whether this is because of boredom, or because the currently-inevitable infirmities of advanced age have made living tiresome and unpleasant, and even excruciatingly painful.

It seems likely to me that, in most cases, their enthusiasm for life would be dramatically increased if they were given twenty-year-old bodies (and matching hormones) again, particularly if they were chronologically older and wiser, and thus knew much better what to do with them. In a world of rejuvenation, the old saying about “youth being wasted on the young” would no longer apply.

It will, of course, depend greatly on the individual. As I wrote once in a letter to The Economist, for Joe or Josephine Sixpack, who comes home from work each night and sits in front of the television drinking beer, three score and ten will seem plenty. But for a Leonardo or Leonarda da Vinci, a lifetime of centuries might still seem all too brief.

But for those who like to travel, longer life will offer more opportunities to visit new places, and in the future, most of those new places will be off planet, so for many, space offers a solution to the boredom problem as well.

Space and extended life go hand in hand. The universe is so vast that we will require many human lifetimes to explore it, at least as individuals. And it offers new ecological ranges for the increased numbers of conscious beings that will result from advances in technology. And finally, unfortunately, at our current rate of progress, I occasionally think that I’m going to have to live several hundred years just to have a chance to get off the planet, at least if the government stays in charge…