As you may know, some transhumanists (and others) are interested in cryopreservation as part of their goal of achieving immortality, and if not immortality then greatly extended life span. The hope is that at some point in the future, when medical science has greatly improved, their bodies might be able to be resuscitated and/or their brains revived and uploaded into a computer or placed in an artificial or robotic body.

Photographer Murray Ballard has a new exhibit, The Prospect of Immortality, based on six years of work photographing cryopreservation efforts around the world. Wired magazine’s “Raw File” photo blog brings us some of the images.

What do you see in the pictures? Hope or sadness? What should we say to the people in these pictures? How are our own hopes for the here and now (and for the future) shaped (and misshaped) by a reliance on and the prospects of science, technology, and medicine?