Dear Members,
A couple of months ago, I was listening to a lecture during Biostasis Week at the Vitalist Bay event in San Francisco. The famous Aubrey De Grey, who was in the audience, made a comment about membership of cryonics organizations:
“It is basically a philanthropic donation”
Aubrey De Grey
That stuck with me and it is a hard truth. For years, we weren't sure about what we could do differently than other CSOs related to the value of our membership.
We got busy building Tomorrow.bio's infrastructure, protocols, experience, technology, and a way of work that has been widely copied afterwards in the cryonics world.
The topic of membership is something that we have been discussing internally at Tomorrow.bio for a few years, always asking this question:
How can we increase the value of membership for our members and also for individuals interested in life extension, biostasis and in the future?
It is a tough question, but an interesting one. Recently, we organized interviews with some members to better understand their journey into Biostasis, how they got interested in the topic, why they signed up, etc.
One recurrent subject was the membership.
Most of our members contribute to support our mission and want to see us win, and we are very grateful for that, but as entrepreneurs, we believe in providing value and therefore, we also believe that our membership has to be much more than a "philanthropic donation”.
We are not offering a recurring “service” directly back to our members, although the revenue is used to make sure we are the best-in-class and SST is always ready.
Still, we were treating the membership more like a subscription. That's why we used to go with words like “plans”.
When you think about membership, you think about being a member of something that matters to you, a movement, a society with purpose or even a social club.
I don't like to use the word “community”, because it is overused and distorted from its original meaning. In today's world every company, topic, object, stuff, etc, has its own “community”.
Our industry has its own example of this phenomenon, the cryonics community. While I'm more libertarian by nature and believe people should live as they see fit, I've observed over the years what I consider a bit of a problematic trend in our field.
There's an excessive focus on the technical details, the 'whats' and 'hows' of human cryopreservation, which has led some individuals to center their entire identity around being “cryonicists”.
For some, this technical obsession seems to have transformed what could be a simple personal life choice into a defining characteristic of who they are.
I will say something that may sound controversial to some people, and Emil also agrees with me on this:
We don’t want to cater to “cryonicists”.
To us, this would be equivalent to people with life insurance policies calling themselves “life insurancists”, or iPhone owners identifying as “iPhonists”.
We think that signing up for Biostasis is something that you do, a tool, a service, a way to try to achieve something, but not the something itself.
You don't change the way you live because you have a Biostasis contract (maybe a bit :)
I don't believe it is anyone's dream or end-goal to be vitrified and submerged in LN2, upside down inside a 3 meter high vacuum-sealed cryogenic dewar :)
For me, since the beginning of this journey, it has always been about living.
I took this picture after a lot of reflection, on an Island in Brazil, back in early 2020, at the moment I decided to join Emil in this project. I wanted to remember WHY I decided to dedicate my life to this journey. Mostly because I wanted to live more little moments like this one.
Circling back to the current year of 2025 and the topic Tomorrow.bio membership, we decided to start the "Club of Tomorrow” initiative.
It will be an organic experience, where we will be building this membership program with you.
From our conversations with our members, one of the most interesting insights was the decision to sign up, mostly by themselves, even if some close family member didn't support the idea.
There are so many of us that decided to take a non-zero chance of returning without family members and friends. Hopefully, it will be a very, very long ride until we have to defy the end.
If we have to walk this path together, let us build a society of like-minded people. So here comes the point I want you to take home.
As I mentioned before, we are not catering to cryonicists but to everyone who values life. We work hard everyday to make cryopreservation infrastructure, protocols and technology/science better, that is our calling! And I promise you, we will ALWAYS make it better, but that's not what we wish this membership to be about.
People interested in discussing the never ending topics of what cryoprotectant is the best, the pros/cons of brain-only/neuro vs whole-body, etc, there are other online communities more suitable for these discussions.
And of course, we’ll keep you up-to-date on how we do things and host dedicated events on the technical details.
But we want to do more. We want to build a group of people interested in building and doing cool stuff. Real life stuff. We understand that this is not for everyone and that is okay.
Our vision is to make this life-long cruise, a platform for a happy, longevous and fulfilling existence, until we or other ambitious organizations figure out longevity escape velocity or how to safely pause and reverse biostasis (and by extension, death).
I personally believe that, if we walk this long path together, we will build some meaningful connections in this group during our lifetime. And maybe we're lucky enough to keep them for the next one.
We are born alone and we die alone, human existence is, in its essence, inherently solitary. But if all of this works, then maybe, we won't have to wake up alone.
“Man is condemned to be free"
Jean-Paul Sartre
