The Way the Future Blogs

 

Mike Darwin’s response to my piece on the loss of that very good man, Bob Ettinger, caught me completely unaware. I am grateful to you for repeating the offer of a free freeze, Mike, just as I am grateful to the people who sometimes tell me that they’re going to pray for me. Even though I can’t accept your offer, it’s a kind thought.

Let me quote from a poem that was written long ago by John Dryden, in an attempt to sum up the teachings on this subject of the even longer ago Roman philosopher Lucretius. The last six lines say it all, but I’ll give you the whole thing. It goes like this:

So, when our mortal forms shall be disjoin’d.
The lifeless lump uncoupled from the mind,
From sense of grief and pain we shall be free,
We shall not feel, because we shall not be.

Though earth in seas, and seas in heaven were lost
We should not move, we should only be toss’d.
Nay, e’en suppose when we have suffer’d fate
The soul should feel in her divided state,
What’s that to us? For we are only we
While souls and bodies in one frame agree.

Nay, though our atoms should revolve by chance,
And matter leap into the former dance,
Though time our life and motion should restore.
And make our bodies what they were before,
What gain to us would all this bustle bring?
The new-made man would be another thing.

But I do appreciate the offer.

Robert C.W. Ettinger

My friend Bob Ettinger deanimated on Saturday, 23 July, after a prolonged period in hospice care. A tub of crushed ice was by his bedside, and the certificate of death and perfusion of his blood vessels with a chilling solution were expedited. Since then he has been in the “cooling box,” to lower his whole-body temperature to liquid-gas cold.

I first encountered Bob half a century ago, when I was editor of the Galaxy group of magazines and he submitted his paper The Prospect of Immortality to me for publication. He had done his homework, and I had to admit that his proposal of freezing on death, and then being kept in ultra-cold conditions, did seem capable of keeping a corpse from deteriorating for long periods.

Moreover, it seem probable that medical science, which had made such great gains in the century just past, would continue to develop, perhaps to the point of defrosting and repairing the damages caused both by the original cause of death and the act of freezing itself. Put them altogether and his idea seemed to offer not a guarantee, but at least a reasonable gambling bet that the idea might possibly work.

So I published Bob’s essay in one of my magazines, then began publicizing it. I was a regular on Long John Nebel’s radio talk show, and he was glad to schedule several shows about Ettinger’s idea. I was doing occasional writing for Playboy, and when I queried them about an article, they loved the idea, which in turn led to a prolonged interview on the then-dominant Johnny Carson show.

Bob was appreciative of that. So were the action groups that began springing up to put Ettinger’s ideas into practice, and as a reward for my activities, one of them offered me a free freeze, which I declined with thanks.

By then Bob no longer needed me to carry the torch for his idea, and further publicity pieces, including a lead article in Esquire entitled “New Hope for the Dead,” Bob wrote himself. We remained friends, and when Bob came to New York or I visited the Detroit area we usually managed to share a meal, once with his uncle, Pee Wee Russell, one of the most famous clarinetists of the Jazz Age.

I should say that one of the major reasons why we remained good friends was his personality. Bob had a great sense of humor. When I told him what Long John called the people in the deep freeze — “corpsicles” — he got a good laugh out of it and began using the term himself. And once, when I’d asked how many people had signed up, he grinned and paraphrased the Bible: “Many are cold, but few are frozen.”

He was always regretful that I wouldn’t sign up, not for the sake of another scalp to hang but because he believed I was giving up on a tangibly real hope. A few months ago, I got a long, friendly letter from him, doing his best to change my mind. I wrote back at once to say that I hadn’t decided the plan wouldn’t work. I agreed that it had at least a non-zero chance of doing as he hoped. But, I said, although I would give almost anything to stay alive and in good physical condition indefinitely, I wasn’t attracted to the idea of being reborn into a society where I had no role and all the things I cared about had disappeared.

He wrote me one more letter, good-naturedly urging me to change my mind. That was the end.

I still think it’s a reasonable gambling bet. If it turns out it works, I hope Bob will be among the first to demonstrate its success, and I wish him well in that future.

 
Related post:
Inventing Cryonics

Chilling out at the Cryonics Institute

It was my practice to come in to the Galaxy office in New York once a week, generally on Thursdays, to deliver edited manuscripts and proof sheets for forwarding to the printer and to pick up the latest batch of submitted manuscripts to read on the way home. On one Thursday in the early 1960s, though, something unusual fell out of the mail sack. It wasn’t a story. It wasn’t exactly a manuscript at all. In its plastic binder, it had more the look of a self-published book, and it had an intriguing title: “Life Extension Through Freezing.”

Because it intrigued me, I read Robert Ettinger’s text right through then and there — skeptically at first, to be sure — and then I sat staring into space for a while because, against all expectations, the document made sense. I played its implications through in my mind, starting with someone dying. It didn’t matter what he was dying of — run over by a truck, cancer of the private parts, suicide by jumping off a bridge, whatever. Dead was dead, and what the cadaver’s nearest and dearest were to do was to get it down to cold.

I’m talking real cold here — not the wimpy temperature of your kitchen freezer where you keep the lamb chops and the broccoli, or even of dry ice, but liquid-gas temperatures, −250 degrees Celsius or colder. At temperatures like that organic material — including human corpses — does not decay. It doesn’t change at all for long, long periods of time.

All right, now the nearest and dearest have got their dearly beloved stiff in the very deep freeze. What has that accomplished for them?

Why, it has given them the indispensable gift of time. Time for the medical profession to identify what specific damage has been done to what specific parts of the body, either by being made dead in the first place or by being frozen itself. And then to repair all that damage, and then to start up once more all the body’s functions of breathing and pulsing and eating and excreting — that is, of being alive. And then, if any of that is beyond medical science’s capacities to do at the time, to get their asses back into their research facilities until they do have it all figured out.

The point, as this Ettinger fellow saw it, is that medical science, which has achieved so many wondrous successes in dealing so many of the harmful events which can take place in the human body, isn’t likely to quit the endeavor very soon. There is, to be sure, no guarantee that the researchers will keep on discovering new therapies indefinitely. But it’s still a pretty good gambling bet, especially if you stop to think of what the alternatives are for that poor, beat-up mortal frame you’ve been carrying around if you do nothing.

Anyway, if Ettinger’s idea got me that interested, I was pretty sure it would do much the same for many of my readers. So I sent this Dr. Ettinger an offer for the right to publish excerpts from his work and sat back to consider what to do next. First to schedule it: that was easy. I decided to put it in my new third magazine, Worlds of Tomorrow, mostly because it was so new that there weren’t going to be any indignant letters from old subscribers complaining that a cherished tradition had been violated.

Copy-editing the manuscript presented no problems; Ettinger had done a thorough job, even going so far as to check out the bulk prices for several kinds of liquid gases. I was confident that, by and large, my readers would have no problem encountering the piece in the magazine. But I wanted more than that. This was the kind of thing that might attract new readers for the magazine, if I only had some way of telling them about it. . . .

Fortunately I did. I had the hundreds of thousands of insomniacs who were addicted to the all-night radio talk show run by Long John Nebel.

 
Related post:

• The Cryonics Institute’s 106th Patient: Robert C.W. Ettinger