Question: If you’re going to freeze yourself for an eventual shot at eternal life, are you gonna go with just the head, or the deluxe package that puts your entire mortal coil on ice?

Real people are facing this choice today, as David Casarett reveals in this interview on the developing science of death and revival with the World Science Festival. Cryonics, the, uh, pretty speculative science and technology of cooling people off to preserve them for future medical miracles, has conferences, apparently. And, at one of these conferences, Casarett learned that freezings come in the two varieties: full-body or head-only.

The difference between those choices? $130,000. That is, it’ll cost you $200,000 to freeze all your parts and a (relatively) skint $70,000 to simply ice your dome.

I wonder: who’s choosing the bargain deal here? It’s a long shot that it will work, either way. You’re betting your $70K to $200K on a couple of out-there hypotheticals: A) that future science will be able to revive frozen people and B) in many cases, that future science will be able to heal a deadly disease or disorder that it now can’t. (Many people paying for cyronics do so because current medicine cannot save their lives.)

But cryonics also has a place in the ‘singularity‘ crowd, folks who believe that immortality will become a technological possibility at some point in the future. If you die now, of whatever causes, you’ll miss your shot. So, freeze immediately after death. Save for later. Thaw at room temperature.

Going for the brain-freeze-only strikes me as pretty odd. As of last year, 270 people have had themselves chilled. Two-thirds of the cold folks at cryogenics company Alcor are head (or brain) only, as are half of the American Cryonics Society’s patients (though the group no longer offers the neck-up option).

So there are people — people who think there’s a chance future science can revive them and make them immortal — who said, “Yeah, I’m all for that. But just the head for me.” A good number of the people choosing post-life (and, hopefully, pre-immortality) deep-freeze elect to skim a few bucks off the bill by trashing their appendages, torso and genitals. (People! Do you remember what genitals are used for! It’s awesome!)

I don’t know, I think when you’re aiming at immortality, go for the Venti. You know, get the full-featured package. It’s like when you buy a home or get your first adult apartment — ditch the Ikea stuff that only saves you money in the short-term, and spring for a real wooden cabinet.

I could keep going with the purchasing metaphors. But you get the point. I’m clearly fixating on the cost differential, but I think it’s fascinating. There is a not insignificant difference in money. You could very understandably decide that $70K is your upper-limit on many purchases. And if someone were to offer you an upgrade for nearly three times that amount, it would make a ton of sense to turn it down.

But we’re not talking a normal purchase here. It’s, quite literally and emphatically, not something with a limited lifespan. If you believe that the singularity, technology-based immortality, and all that are a possibility, then we’re talking about purchasing eternity. People had to make economic decisions about eternity. And some chose the discount. That is amazing.

That Wikipedia entry on neuropreservation lists some reasons people have chosen to dump their non-head portions. For one, some say that focusing on preserving the brain is better, because that’s where memory, personality, etc. are stored. Fair enough — you gotta prioritize. (Though, I’m not clear why freezing the whole thing makes the brain-icing of poorer quality.)

But cost is also a big consideration. I understand that $130,000 is nothing to scoff at. I doubt many, if any, of these purchases come from middle-class folks, much less from the poor. I assume they are mostly well-off. I just like to imagine them seeking out this crazy long-shot for immortality, deciding to do it, and then asking for the daily special.

“I will live forever! I will be immortal!” Adjusts glasses, checks out the bill. “Ummm…”

I wonder if there are any people who saved money by freezing only their brains, and then put the difference into a trust fund for their future selves. What if they wake up, it’s the year 3014, and science has discovered how to revive these ancient person-cicles. Then, the heads get put in jars, “Futurama”-style. That trust fund could be worth a lot by then. So heads’ll be rollin’. But, when they look over at their old golfing partner, who’s galavanting around on real-life legs and pitching future-nurses on the butt with his revived fingers — Mr. Head is going to need to buy a reeeaallly nice jar to make himself feel better.

Dick Nixon was before my time, given I came into this world about five months before Ronald Reagan convinced 48 states he wasn’t on the precipice of senility. I was born in 1980, is what I’m trying to say.

So, I don’t have a lot of familiarity with how Tricky Dick spoke, outside of mostly cartoon (or, at least, cartoonish) parodies. I didn’t see him on TV. I didn’t listen to any radio addresses by the Dickster (Secret Service nickname, I’m pretty sure). Still, this Twitter account that brought Richard Nixon into the modern world always read as so…authentic to me.

I was not sure why. The account captures the paranoia, ruthlessness and propensity for cursing that I vaguely knew characterized the man. Here, for example, is something the fake, living Nixon wrote today (Aug. 7):

“He can’t and should not do this, attack our integrity, and by God I’m going to fight the little bastard.”

But more so than that, it’s the turns of phrase. They are unexpected, dripping with individual voice, and poetic in a fascinatingly brutal sort of way. Check out this other one, also from today:

“The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. Write that on a blackboard a hundred times and never forget it.”

It’s just so particular. “Write that on a blackboard a hundred times and never forget it.” Why a blackboard? Why 100 times? Why the need to punctuate the 100 writings with an admonition never to forget? They are parallel sayings; either would have done. But he hits you with both fists. And with that, “hits you with both fists,” I’m aiming at what Fake Dick does best, I think: Choose something colorful, illustrative — an image or a punchy word instead of just limply saying the thing you’re talking about.

The account reads so clearly like the sayings of a particular person — even if I am not all that familiar with the real-life person being parodied, the particularity rang out clearly. And it’s really a joy to read. It must be a joy to write, too, to speak in the voice of someone who used words so brutally.

I was happy to read, then, this profile today of the account and its author — happy to see, first, that others found the account equally impressive as I did. Happy, second, to see that it actually does sound like Nixon. Unsurprisingly, the man behind the account is a writer, a playwright named Justin Sherin. Somewhat surprisingly, at 33, he’s younger than me. I guess he paid closer attention to historical speeches than I did. Or is just a better writer. Both are likely true. That fellow can write, the little bastard.

Jeff Goldblum looks really charming running from the dinosaur in this wedding photo. He’s not playacting fear; he is clearly aware of being Jeff Goldblum, star of two “Jurassic Park” movies, doing what he was born to do.

Is that it? Is that what’s behind the wry expression and running pose that looks more like the little dapper dance of a slightly older man? Is this just fun, is this just how Jeff Goldblum has fun? Maybe when he gets a high score on a video game (a “Jurassic Park” video game!) or is attending a really excellent concert by his favorite band (Dinosaur Jr? The Byrds?), that is how he looks.

No, there’s more going on there. Look at that face. Look at the angle of his shoulder. He is flirting. He is making sexy face and doing slithery, dance-like running at you with a T. Rex behind him.

See how natural he appears. It’s not just that Jeff Goldblum has previously escaped dinosaurs. It’s that Jeff Goldblum’s best move is to be dinosaur-adjacent. You see, the beast gets your heart pumping; your pupils dilate; suddenly you are aware of yourself as a mortal being, a creature made of edible flesh. You are aware of yourself as a physical creature.

A physical creature with physical needs.

It is then that Jeff Goldblum knows you are his. Every guy has a go-to move. For many, it’s the fake yawn. George Costanza’s dad had “the stop short.” Maybe you speak softly to draw her in for the kiss. Perhaps you merely gaze into her eyes.

For Jeff Goldblum, it is dinosaurs. “Jeff,” you say, as the two of you walk along the beach of a tropical island owned by an eccentric rich man, “this has been such a perfect night.”

“Just wait,” Jeff Goldblum says, and looks to the puddle in the road, now rippling in concentric circles. “Just wait.”

“Science vs. religion” is sort of a big topic. That could refer to a lot of things. It could mean an individual choosing between a philosophy reliant on evidence and an outlook rooted in faith. It might mean Georgia Tech vs. Notre Dame on a fall Saturday.

In this excellent post on evolution over over at Salon (via AlterNet), Greta Christina is not talking about the Yellow Jackets taking on the Fightin’ Irish. But the broad “science vs. religion” in the headline has about the nuance of a football broadcast. Christina’s actually talking about a specific religious response to a specific scientific theory: She takes on those progressive Christians who seek to maintain a belief in God while allowing that evolutionary theory mostly gets the whole “how we got here” thing right.

Their position sounds reasonable, especially if you’re used to believers who discount evolution entirely and say things like this. But Christina’s not having the accommodationism. She presents a number of excellent reasons why God is not necessary for evolutionary theory to work. And I think the version of the “evolution-but-now-with-more-God” viewpoint that sees a supernatural deity tinkering with evolution from time to time is pretty weak. It’s an easy take-down. A universe governed by natural laws that just needs the rare supernatural goosing should really just fall under Occam’s razor, anyway.

But Christina makes no quarter for those who believe in an even more distantly involved God, either. Maybe it just works like this, the faithful but reasonable, say: God sets up the watchworks at the beginning, then the universe runs, a steady little machine, and evolution is a part of this mechanism. I don’t have a big problem with that point of view. It, of course, takes God so completely out of the picture, that he’s basically unnecessary. But is there any harm in that belief?

Christina thinks it’s still wrongheaded. Why? Because, she argues in part, look at the brutality of evolution: most organisms die, and often painfully, in a struggle to survive just long enough to reproduce. This, historically, happened to most humans, and continues to happen to a great many. How, Christina asks, could a caring God who loves us set up such a cruel system?

So, at least for this part of Christina’s argument, it becomes the familiar “problem of evil”: How could a god who is both all-powerful and good let bad things happen? There’s a long line of philosophical and religious argument over this, but it’s sort of weird to see it used here. Christina is presenting scientific evidence — and then gets into a theological argument that predates Darwin. Clearly Christina is attacking a very particular conception of God: the fatherly, magic man in the sky. She even uses the term “magical creator god” several times. That’s why she concerns herself with disproving, specifically, a morally good father figure.

There are definitely people who believe in such a god. But are they the same people accommodating evolution to their faith? It’s a very simplistic conception of God, “the magical creator in the clouds,” and it’s a bit unfair that Christina assumes this is the only option. She basically dismisses any more complicated or abstract notion of god by calling it deism. So, your choices, according to Christina are: atheism, Sunday morning cartoon God, or deism.

What about a God who is more mysterious than that, who cannot be reduced to a human-sized caricature? A God who cannot be logically understood, but who nevertheless has a relationship with existence? I get that this perhaps abstracts things into a hooey that doesn’t end up meaning anything. But I also think the “magic man in the sky” conception is an easy target. And a very specific one.

It’s the one Christina chose to wrangle, though, and she does it with some really interesting and accessible science. It’s certainly not the end-all on “science vs. religion,” though.

I’ve heard this one before — in-person, actually: “If people evolved from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys around?” It’s been a few years, but this Mashable post on evolution myths reminded me of it.

For some reason, I actually kind of like it. I think it’s…cute? That’s really condescending, isn’t it? But the whole thing reminds me of child reasoning: There’s a certain amount of sense to it. You can see the logical steps the thinker made. But they totally miss the greater context, making for a rather silly (read: adorable) conclusion.

Yeah, that’s really condescending. Whatever. Here’s what I mean. Check out this excellent Reddit post on “child logic.” Here’s a particularly good one:

“I had always been taught (regarding hunting and fishing) that you only kill something if you’re going to eat it.

So I reached the brilliant conclusion that in the old West, cowboys ate most of the Native Americans.”

This is logical. There is a direct line from premises to the conclusion: Given A) You eat what you kill; and further, given, B) Cowboys killed Native Americans; therefore, the conclusion C) Cowboys ate Native Americans, necessarily follows.

Airtight. Within the pure, logical arena in which only those premises are given, the conclusion does in fact follow. The child, of course, misses the greater complexities and details that make the conclusion absurd: most importantly, 1) people kill for reasons other than hunting, and 2) humans are considered a different class from animals, particularly when preparing meals.

Now let’s look at the evolution-is-wrong-because-moneys argument. Premise A) Evolution says humans evolved from monkeys (or apes); Premise B) Evolution means changing from one form to another; therefore, it necessarily follows that C) The monkey should all have changed form and disappeared.

Airtight! But, yeah, it’s adorable in its simplicity. Do people really imagine that scientists picture individual monkeys — poof!! — transforming into individual humans? I suppose if you’re predisposed to want to disbelieve in evolution, it would be easy to accept such a caricature of the theory’s claims.

If that is your premise, then yes: It would make sense that monkeys would no longer exist. But, as people with much better credentials than me can explain, that internally consistent logic falls apart because that’s not what evolution claims at all. Instead, a monkey-like common ancestor diverged — it split into (at least) two lines.

And the *poof* individual transformation definitely does not occur. It’s gradual changes over generations. To be less of a condescending dick (briefly), I understand why this is hard to wrap your head around. Evolutionary time is massive. I wonder if it’s possible for human brains to truly comprehend such timescales, other than simply dealing with them abstractly as figures. So, if you have reasons to mistrust evolutionary science — perhaps because it contradicts your deeply held religious beliefs — then how can you be expected to voluntarily wrack your thinking to accept the idea of billions of years of gradual change?

But, still. Come on. At least understand that no scientist imagines monkeys *poofing* into your uncle Charlie. Though, admittedly, that would be really cool.

I looked a little more deeply into what the AIDS research and advocacy community lost on Flight MH17, in this piece for Live Science Health. There were not, as originally reported (and as referenced in my earlier blog post) upwards of 100 AIDS scientists and activists on the Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over Ukraine. The International AIDS conference in Australia to which they were traveling confirmed six people headed to the conference died on that flight.

That included Joep Lange, who was, by all accounts, a pioneering HIV/AIDS researcher, as well as a passionate advocate. The others lost worked as advocates and activists. If nothing else, their work suggests the many ways people can have an effect on this pandemic (and vice versa) — from letting people know that the female condom is a thing to fighting for sex workers’ rights.

Let’s say you had to make a new Ark, a SPACE ARK, and a returned Elohim declared that you must reconstitute every species now living on Earth on a new home.

He might make it easier on us by using the old “two of every kind” algorithm. Then, we could more simply estimate what we needed, and the size of our Space Ark. Some of this work has already been done (probably not for that purpose). Here’s an estimate for the number of species on planet Earth: 8.7 million (with an error margin of 1.3 million). That comes from a “new analytical technique” published in 2011 by the Census of Marine Life (don’t worry, they estimated both land and sea life numbers.)

But what if we then were charged with replicating Earth once we arrived, jet-lagged and really sick of spotting inteplanetary license plates, at Earth 2.0? We’d need to breed our stock up to an Earthlike level of biomass. That means we might need to know, so as not to grossly imbalance our felines vs. our lepidoptera, for example, how many animals live on Earth. Not how many species — how many animals? More accurately, how many individual organisms? If you took a head count? Heads on tables, you creepy crawlies, and one hand up.

That’s tougher. I wanted to find a ballpark figure for that number when I was writing yesterday’s post about the dinosaur die-off — basically, I was curious about how many individual dinosaurs lived at any one time (before the mass extinction). So, I thought I’d look into how many animals exist today…and there’s not much on it (that I could find). Here’s an essay from 2009 attempting to estimate how many wild animals roam the planet.

Drawing from various sources, the author lists numbers of, for example, mammals of 10^11 to 10^12 — so on the order of 10 trillion. Land birds (i.e., the remaining dinosaurs) come in a bit lower, at up to 4 trillion. The number of animals, then, if these numbers are at least ballpark believable, will likely stick to the trillions. Tens of trillions, maybe. Possibly up to the 100s of trillions.

The real heavy-hitters come with the insects, at up to 10^19 — or (if I’m counting zeros correctly) 100 quintillion (!!) — the zooplankton, at up to 10 sextillion, and the nematodes, coming in at up to 100 sextillion.

So, in other words, the head count of individual organisms on Space Ark Earth is a lot simpler if you just say, “Several sextillion microorganisms…plus an order of magnitude less insects…and odds and ends of other stuff.” Mammals, numbering merely in the trillions, amount to a millionth, at best, of the insect crowd, and a billionth of the nematodes.

So, how many animals are there on Earth? Doesn’t matter. Focus on the nematodes, Space Noah.

What if…the dinosaurs never died?

Think of that. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Of course, there is the somewhat unfortunate caveat that we, meaning humans, would likely not exist had T. Rex and friends (and meals and competitors) not perished under the clouds of a post-asteroid nuclear winter (or however, exactly, it happened).

But for anyone who was into dinosaurs as a kid (and isn’t that nearly everyone?), I think there must remain a bit of sadness that these big beasts we love  all died. (Yes, I know: birds. But you know what I mean.) It’s a strange bit of tragedy to be aware of as a mostly coddled child: Yeah, those colorful brontosauruses (again, I know) and triceratopses you thrill to see in books at the local public library? They all died. It is real history that all of them, billions of them, trillions of them? — died. All at once. And that’s why you can’t see them in real life.

That’s also what makes this finding a bit heartbreaking: the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, well, it didn’t HAVE to end them. It wasn’t such a cataclysmic force that there’s no way the big lugs could have survived. Instead, it caught them when they were vulnerable.

A group of paleontologists found that a set of ecological stresses (volcanoes,  sea level changes, temperature fluctuations, and probably all those brachiosaurus farts) had put the late-Cretaceous world of the dinos in a precarious position. Then the asteroid came and kicked them down the stairs.

Mean.

It says something, too, about how the asteroid event has come to dominate the theories of how the dinosaurs’ age ended. When I was a kid, I remember there being a lot less certainty. The killer asteroid was just one of several equally plausible theories, e.g., widespread diseases, or volcanoes.

Over time, though, the asteroid has come to be accepted as THE answer. This surprised me when I started writing about popular science in recent years, and so became aware of dinosaur science for, really, the first time since the ’80s. The big-asteroid event had so come to dominate thoughts on dinosaur extinction that the idea that other factors played a role, too, now comes as a surprise.

So, this new finding actually seems to represent a return to previous ways of thinking about dinosaur extinction: volcanoes may have had their say. Other ecological stresses, too. The asteroid was the last word, but not the only one.

To my mild embarrassment, I still sometimes watch superhero movies. I mean, I thought I was out, but then Marvel dragged me back in with their, in retrospect, brilliant idea to make an interconnected universe of films and TV shows. It’s designed to elicit obsessiveness and loyalty. The movies don’t even have to be that good, though several are.

Anyway, so I’ve watched “The Avengers” several times. Too many times. And one part always bugs me. When Agent Coulson tries to explain to Captain America (dear God, I’m 34 years old) that Bruce Banner is a scientific genius, he says, “He’s like a Stephen Hawking.” Whom, Steve Rogers (the Captain, for the un-nerd) amusingly does not know — because he’s been frozen since the ’40s.

It’s a funny moment, but the joke requires a strain — why wouldn’t Coulson then say, “He’s like an Einstein”? In fact, why wouldn’t he reference Einstein from the beginning? Even were he not speaking to a WWII superhero who had been in freeze storage for 70 years (again, I am a 34-year-old adult), but just to, like, you or me, Einstein would be the natural scientific genius to name drop. You could have been frozen for  even longer than the good captain, wake up today, and the world would still have the same poster boy (literally, often) for the genius of science as when you went under.

Einstein’s last major work, the general theory of relativity, dropped on the scene in 1916. Special relativity came out in 1905, as did Einstein’s paper on the photon theory of light, part of the physicist’s ‘miracle year.’ So, we’re talking roughly 100 years of dominance in the unofficial category of “Scientist Most Likely to Appear on Your T-Shirt.” That’s probably not going to change. He’s a logo now. He’s Mickey Mouse. He’s a Nike Swoosh. He’s Che.

But why? It’s a great question, and not one that I think I’ve explicitly asked myself. Why this guy? There have been other scientific geniuses, before and since (and contemporaneously). But Matthew Francis over at Aeon Magazine did ask. His answer (which, unfortunately, is the very last sentence of the piece) is:

“But because he lived in a special sliver of time, after the lights of fame had begun to shine bright, and before science came to be seen as a team sport, he has become our genius.”

It’s not a bad one. Einstein “arrived” just as the technology for today’s fame machine was coming into prominence. His theories had bearing on the global conflagration that would spawn the atomic age — an age of broad respect, fear and valuation of science and technology. He happened to be a refugee from the source country of said global conflagration, who arrived in the nation that would be the primary economic and political beneficiary of the war’s end. It was also the nation that would be primarily responsible for the coming celebrity culture: the nation with Hollywood and Madison Avenue in it. Plus, he had the hair and the playfulness of a lovable eccentric.

I’m not so sure about the second half of Francis’ reasoning. Does the general public now understand, more than they did in the past, that science is a collective effort, not the province of lone geniuses? I doubt it. The continued power of Einstein the image in the popular imagination would seem to suggest the opposite. I think Einstein maybe just got there first, and fit the spot really well. He worked, and continues to work, fantastically as a logo and mascot — for many reasons that a marketing expert might be able to explain.

You can look over at the burgeoning online fandom for Nikola Tesla. People still want to celebrate the eccentric, lone genius of science (and technology). They still want, wait for it, superheroes (callback!). Captain America and the Hulk are mascots of science fiction. They’ve got great branding that looks good on T-shirts. And for fans of science and sci-fi, they emblematize science in a digestible, tasty snack. Einstein does that, too.

An abomination! A sin against nature! The Devil’s garden!

These are things you might say of the “Tree of 40 Fruits” if you were insane, which I try not to be most of time. But artist Sam Van Aken clearly had vague Biblical allusions in mind when he named his project, right?

Right, the project: It’s a cool mashup of art and horticulture. Van Aken used a technique called “chip grafting” to construct an Ur Tree that produces 40 varieties of stone fruit.

A “stone fruit” is not, as you might have guessed, a cherry-flavored igneous. Instead, it is a type of fruit with a stone inside — think peaches and cherries. Van Aken’s Frankenfruit Tree offers up nectarines, cherries, plums, almonds and etc., all grafted from an heirloom-rich orchard in New York. In spring, the tree transforms into a surreal technicolor cloud of different blossoms, which in turn birth the different kinds of fruit. Check out the picture. It’s downright Seussian.

But, right: “Tree of 40 Fruits.” That’s something that could come right out of King James. Trees and fruits, obviously, are go-to images and metaphors for the authors of the Biblical stories. And 40: From years in the desert to days-and-nights of temptations, it’s pretty Biblical. I’m guessing Van Aken sees the tree, which is saving the fruits of a bunch of heirloom trees from destruction (the orchard was set for the bulldozer), as a sort of horticultural Ark? Or a trial of survival in a trying ecological age?

Or maybe the 41st stone fruit really sucked. But I think there was something, at least subconsciously, about 40 and trees and fruit. For an artist, and for all of us, living today, encroaching ecological destruction should seem Biblical, if not larger, in magnitude.