I mean, sure, there is mummification and and some bodies being naturally preserved due to coldness or dryness, but I’m talking more about the idea of cryonics- the idea that you could stop a biological organism’s entire metabolism in some kind of suspended animation and then later thaw them out and be able to continue living. Most of this is just science fiction though and greatly exaggerated. All of the people who have gotten their bodies cryopreserved as adults are people who have died and it’s essentially just mummification instead of suspended animation.
In: Biology
In addition to what these others answers say I work in cell biology and can speak more of how we freeze the cells. But to freeze the cells we use a liquid called DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) which is a substance with a similar freezing temperature and osmotic pressure as water, but it doesn’t expand when freezing so that cells submerged in it won’t die. The trick is that DMSO is actually poisonous to cells so you have to quickly do the media transfer then immediately freeze the cells (but not too quickly) or they start to try to use the DMSO and get poisoned. So this presents a logistical challenge for freezing whole people because with cell suspensions you can just change out what all the cells are using at once. But with people you have lots of cells supplied by a circulatory systems which takes varying times to reach various regions of the body and it would take very long to replace the water in your body with DMSO
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