13 Surprising Things We’ve Learned About Cryonicists

An Overview of the 2020 Cryosphere Cryonics Survey

Who signs up for cryonics? We tend to picture wealthy old men, Silicon Valley billionaires, eccentrics terrified by death, and Trekkies making Spock hand gestures. In short, journalistic stereotypes.

Yet actual people do sign up, and do respond to survey questions. Shockingly few have ever been done, but not long ago, in 2022, a fascinating survey of 244 people involved in cryonics was conducted by Max Marty and published online with the help of Cryosphere Press. It offers one of the most detailed glimpses yet into who cryonicists and the cryonics market are. It’s not a perfect scientific sample: respondents were drawn largely from cryonics-related online communities, not all were fully signed up, and the selection was not a random cross-section. Nevertheless, it remains one of the richest portraits yet assembled of a movement that has usually been described sarcastically from the outside rather than examined objectively from within.

1 / Key Findings

Cryonicists are younger than their stereotype

The average respondent was 43 years old. The movement appears to attract people decades before they expect to need cryopreservation.

Most interested prospects haven’t actually signed up

Only about 55% of respondents were fully signed up. One implication is that cryonics may be losing potential members simply through clumsy member processing, paperwork and inertia.

Cryonicists are overwhelmingly male, straight, monogamous, and live in cities and suburbs.

Self-reportedly, about 85% of respondents were men, 77% were heterosexual, and 72% monogamous, and almost 94% urban or suburban. Rural cryonicists are a small fraction of the whole

Cryonics leans left

The stereotypical image of cryonics a libertarian movement is wrong. Approximately one-third identified with libertarian currents, but an almost equally large bloc identify with progressive or social-democratic viewpoints. Conservatives are few. Trump supporters barely pass 2%.

Cryonics is intensely STEM-oriented

Computer science dominated academic backgrounds. Computer science alone accounted for roughly 31% of reported degrees. The largest occupational groups included software engineering, scientific research, healthcare, technical fields, academia.

Cryonicists are not all atheists

Over half describe themselves as atheists, another 27% as Humanist and Agnostic, but that still leaves a quarter reporting traditional religious beliefs. Religious cryonicists do exist, contradicting the common assumption that the two are incompatible.

Family participation is low

Very few respondents succeed in getting spouses or close family members to sign up.

YouTube leads in media consumption.

Respondents reported spending far more time on YouTube (69.92%) than on almost any other platform. Reddit came in a distant second at 33.47%. Facebook, Discord, Twitter, blogs and podcasts jockey for third place, and legacy print media like the New York Times clocked in at 27.12%. Although social media appears to be the prime source of media for cryonicists, TikTok comes in a paltry 6.78%.

Cryonicists are not primarily motivated by terror of death

Questions about death anxiety and motivation did not support the caricature that most members are anxious and panic-stricken about dying. If anything, they are optimistic, stable, and generally satisfied with their lives.

Existential risks cluster around technology

Although most cryonicists celebrate technology, technology is also the cause of their greatest future fears. Respondents ranked threats such as advanced AI, nuclear war, biotechnology, the Singularity, well above more mundane possibilities such as social or economic collapse.

Cryonics appears to be part of a broader intellectual package

Perhaps the single biggest meta-finding is that cryonics rarely exists in isolation. Large fractions of respondents also identified as transhumanist, life-extension enthusiasts, rationalists or rationalist-adjacent. Cryonics seems to function as one component of a larger worldview centered on long-term thinking, scientific optimism, and skepticism toward conventional assumptions about death.

Unexpected cognitive findings

Aphantasia (the inability to form mental images) is unusually common among respondents, appearing to be at least twice as common for cryonicists for the general population. Also, Ambidexterity is astonishingly overrepresented

About 10% described themselves as ambidextrous. That’s ten times higher than the estimated roughly 1% of ambidexterity in the general population.

Cryonicists think unusually far into the future

Questions asking respondents to compare concern for their present selves versus versions of themselves centuries ahead revealed remarkably high time horizons. Most people have a limited range of future concerns and future planning and think in more immediate terms. Cryonicists have a remarkable capacity for thinking in the long term. The very long term. Many participants reported caring almost as much about a possible future self hundreds of years from now as about themselves today—a striking departure from the typical ways humans regard time.

The survey offers no explanation for these cognitive anomalies.

2 / Overview

So who are cryonicists? According to their responses, less a death cult of death than a remarkably distinctive social and intellectual subculture.

The first surprise is their age. Cryonicists are not primarily elderly people staring anxiously into the abyss. The average respondent was only forty-three years old. Many sign up decades before they expect to need the service. Whatever else cryonics may mean to members, it’s not an end-of-life purchase. It ssems more akin to buying life insurance than arranging a funeral, and in fact cryonics signups and insurance purchases tend to peak around the same age.

Equally surprising: many believers never actually enroll. Nearly half of respondents either had not completed the process or admitted they intended to join “eventually.” Given the life-or-death, stakes, it seems that the largest obstacle to cryonics membership may be not skepticism but procrastination. The distance between believing in cryonics and signing the paperwork appears surprisingly wide.

There is a stark demographic imbalance. Roughly eighty-five percent of respondents were male. Nearly as many describe themselves as heterosexual and monogamous, however only 37% are married, and only a quarter, roughly, have children.

Moreover, relatively few respondents reported that spouses or close relatives had joined them. Cryonics remains, for many, an intensely individual decision rather than a shared family commitment. One can’t conclude from this a lack of interest in maintaining personal links. Paradoxically, there appears to be an intense interest by cryonicists in preserving the lives of their pets.

The political findings overturn another familiar assumption. Cryonics is often portrayed as the preserve of hard-core libertarians. Certainly, libertarians are well represented: they’re the dominant segment, at 31% of respondents. But the next largest are progressives, social democrats. Conservatives are vanishingly small.

Nearly all respondents live in cities or suburbs. There are very few rural cryonicists. That may be because of the practical obstacles involved should cryopreservation require rapid medical response.

Educationally, STEM dominates. The list of academic backgrounds bristles with software engineers, scientists, physicians, researchers, and technically trained professionals, who appear in numbers far beyond those found in the general population. Cryonics seems less a fringe social movement than a mainstream engineering culture.

Religion is another surprise. Nearly ninety percent of respondents identified as non-religious in one way or another, and just over half are explicit atheists. Yet roughly one quarter is more agnostic than atheist, and roughly one half are not. The survey punctures the myth that religion and cryonics are mutually exclusive. Religious cryonicists certainly exist. They make up roughly 20% of the community surveyed, and are extremely splintered, representing Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, and ‘Other.’ But they are a sizable minority, not an absence.

Lack of interest in religion seems to have been replaced with exceptional philosophical curiosity. Around two-thirds of respondents reported a strong interest not only in philosophy proper, but in questions about consciousness, identity, ethics, and the meaning of personal survival. The ‘Big Questions’ aren’t peripheral to the cryonics movement; they’re central, and a part of its daily intellectual landscape.

Critics often imagine cryonicists as people consumed by fear of death. The survey paints a different picture. Most respondents did not describe themselves as terrified or desperate. Instead, many approached cryonics as a rational wager. If the potential reward is another lifetime—or several—and the cost is acceptable, then the decision resembles more a case of purchasing insurance against an uncertain but irreversible outcome than a romantic escape into a science fictional future.

Contrary to stereotype, respondents generally described themselves as reasonably satisfied with their lives. Cryonics did not appear to be attracting a population defined by despair. If anything, the movement seems populated by people who want to extend life because the value life more intensely.

The movement’s media habits are striking. YouTube, rather than books or newspapers, emerged as the dominant source of information, with social media as a strong second. Yet print lingers on. About 27% of cryonicist still read The New York Times. Nonetheless, if one wanted to disseminate cryonics ideas to the cryonics community, the survey quietly suggests that documentary videos and long-form interviews on Youtube would likely reach far more more than magazine advertisements.

But even more striking are the completely unexpected findings.

Respondents reported unusually high rates of aphantasia: the inability to form mental images. An exceptionally large number described themselves as ambidextrous.

Equally remarkable were the respondents’ relationship to time. Most people routinely choose present comfort over distant reward. Not cryonicists. They appear to at least occasionally consider the future much more often and deeply. Many reported caring almost as much about the person they might become centuries from now as about the person they are today. Whether that outlook is sensible or not, it represents a highly unusual psychological orientation.

That orientation is not always optimistic. Longer-term existential risks occupy an outsized place in the thinking of cryonicists. Artificial intelligence, engineered pandemics, biotechnology, and nuclear conflict ranked prominently among perceived threats. Concerns that mirror a broader culture of rationalist thinking, where humanity’s future is a matter of serious calculation rather than science fiction.

Taken together, these twenty-one observations suggest that cryonics is not primarily a medical movement, or even a movement centered around death. It’s a community of people who share a particular style of thinking. Of course the sample is too small to support sweeping conclusions. Even so, these anomalies suggest that cryonics may attract people whose minds differ from the statistical norm in subtle but measurable ways.

They are unusually technical. They think in long time horizons. They display an uncommon willingness to entertain improbable possibilities if the expected value appears sufficiently large. They enjoy philosophy almost as much as engineering. They tend to believe that difficult problems are solved not by accepting present-day limitations but by improving technology. They are people who regard centuries not as abstractions but as planning horizons, who see death as a technical problem, and who are ready to organize part of their lives around the possibility that tomorrow may be far longer than anyone has yet imagined.

What unites cryonicists is an attraction to analytical thinking, technological optimism, and long-term visionary planning, a new kind of human subculture not defined by race, nation, religion, or politics, but by a shared orientation toward the future.

Whether cryonics itself ultimately succeeds is a separate question.

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