: how is cryopreservation able to somewhat preserve and sustain a person without them slowly dying due to a lack of basic necessities like oxygen and water?
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In theory cryopreservation works by putting your cells in a kind of stasis. Your body’s chemical functions need energy in the form of heat to work so that the different molecules and enzymes can move around and interact with each other. If you lower the temperature enough then those molecules can’t move around any more, so all of the chemical reactions in your body stop. If you can do that in a way that keeps the cells intact, then you can perfectly preserve the cells in a state of suspended animation, ready to resume when thawed.
Now I say “in theory” because there’s no actual evidence that doing this to a human actually preserves them to a degree where you’d be able to revive them again later. It works for cultured cells grown in a lab, but you have to freeze a lot of cells at a time because ~50% of them will die as soon as you thaw them out – if that happened to a human that would be very bad indeed. But it can certainly be used to prevent the body from decaying if someone is already dead.
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