In 1972, astronauts on Apollo 17 set foot on the moon for a final time, collecting samples in the Taurus-Littrow valley, on the edge of Mare Serenitatis ("The Sea of Serenity").

At the end of the mission, like with earlier missions, NASA took the extremely valuable and interesting lunar specimens and did something strange: they hid them away in storage without even opening the containers. Some stayed that way for nearly fifty years. Why? Because the scientists of the 70s understood that future generations would have better machines, methods, and ideas for studying the lunar rock and soil, and they wanted to make it easy for those researchers to run tests without having to go back to the lunar surface.

This foresight paid off twice over. Advances in mass spectrometry enabled scientists in 2008 to detect water in volcanic-glass samples returned by Apollo 15 and Apollo 17. And when curators finally opened one of the last sealed containers in 2022, they could extract the trapped lunar gases with technology that simply didn't exist in 1972.

Some people describe cryonics as a new, and speculative technology. There's a sense in which they’re right. It's predicated, in large part, on the [...]