Would you like to be alive in the year 5000 AD?
Whatever else has happened, you have remained frozen all these years
“Most of us now living have a chance for personal, physical immortality.” It’s not Dickens, but it’s strong as opening lines go.
The author wastes no time hitting his central thesis. “This remarkable proposition,” Robert Ettinger continues, “which may soon become a pivot of personal and national life - is easily understood by joining one established fact to one reasonable assumption.”
With low enough temperatures, the author explains, it is possible to indefinitely preserve the dead. “If civilization endures,” Ettinger adds, “medical science should eventually be able to repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing damage and senile debility or other cause of death.”
First published in 1962, The Prospect of Immortality has echoes of an earlier Ettinger piece published 14 years prior, in the pages of Starling Stories. "The Penultimate Trump" is the tale of Harley D. Haworth, a wealthy Wall Street investor who is revived 323 years after entering a cryonic state.
Bleary-eyed and confused, the millionaire slowly regains consciousness in his hospital bed,
His wildest hopes were realized. He snatched the mirror smilingly proffered him and there it was, that face of youth once lost to faded photographs! Then a great wave swept in with a rush, a roar, a dazzling sparkle of spray.
He emerged from his faint to find the head of his bed elevated, the woman in white holding his wrist to count his pulse. Well, this is it, H.D. thought jubilantly, it actually panned out. I did it, I did it!
Ettinger’s interest in cryonics were, fittingly, inspired by the pulp magazines of his youth. In July 1931, Amazing Stories published "The Jameson Satellite.” Set in the far off space age of 1958, the story finds its hero’s body sent into orbit to be preserved at absolute zero.
Neil R. Jones’ story opens,
In the depths of space, some twenty thousand miles from the earth, the body of Professor Jameson within its rocket container cruised upon an endless journey, circling the gigantic sphere. The rocket was a satellite of the huge, revolving world around which it held to its orbit. In the year 1958, Professor Jameson had sought for a plan whereby he might preserve his body indefinitely after his death. He had worked long and hard upon the subject.
Professor Jameson’s cryonic stasis lasts far longer than Haworth’s. A million years later, long after the death of the final human, a cyborg race extracts his brain, placing it in a robotic body like their own.
In The Prospect of Immortality, however, Ettinger promises that the notion of cryonic immortality is no longer the realm of science fiction. No less an authority on the subject than Isaac Asimov – who counted debunking pseudoscience among his hobbies – gave a self-published edition of the book his scientific seal of approval. It was good enough for Doubleday to publish the book.
The appeal was immediate, and Ettinger quickly found himself at the center of a publicity storm. In a March 1969 episode of The Tonight Show guest hosted by Jerry Lewis, he shared a bill with a 32-year-old George Carlin and a singing saw player.
“Would you like to be alive in the year 5000 AD?” New Scientist asked a few years later. “Professor Robert Ettinger has been working hard and saving his money. He intends to become an immortal superman.”
On the strength of his new celebrity, Ettinger founded by the Cryonics Institute and the Immoralist Society. Three years after his book saw wide release, psychology professor James Bedford became the first person to be cryopreserved after death by a pair of doctors and Robert Nelson, the president of the Cryonics Society of California. Nelson celebrated the preservation the following year with a book titled, We Froze the First Man.
Thirteen years later, Nelson, a former television repairman, found himself at the center of a lawsuit brought by five people whose cryonically frozen parents had been allowed to thaw.
“The society ran out of money, out of people to help and just the energy to go any further,” Nelson told the court. “The money was regarded as a donation to advance research into cryonics, the science of life at low temperatures […] everyone knew it was an experimental venture.” Nelson and his collaborator, undertaker Joseph Klockgether, were ordered to pay the families $800,000.
The episode damaged much of the goodwill Ettinger had built up in the previous decades. Bedford, his “first man,” mercifully escaped the early 80s thaw, his body having been moved several times overs the years.
“I cannot describe the feeling of elation I had when I peeled back the sleeping bag that enclosed you and saw that you appeared intact and well cared for,” Mike Darwin wrote in 1991 after receiving Bedford’s body. “What’s more, that the water ice that Nelson had said was left on you when you were transferred to dry ice was still there and unmelted. Whatever else has happened, you have remained frozen all these years.”
Most weren’t so lucky. A single first wave cryonics company is still in operation. Bedford’s is the sole body frozen before 1974 that remains preserved. All others were thawed following their respective companies’ failure.
Like his fictional cryonics pioneer H.D. Haworth, Ettinger lived to the age of 92. Unlike, Haworth, however, he was declared dead prior to freezing. In 2011, Ettinger became the Cryonics Institute’s 106th patient, joining his mother and two wives.
Sources:
The Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger
Dear Dr. Bedford – An Open Letter to the First Frozen Man https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/dear-dr-bedford-an-open-letter-to-the-first-frozen-man/
Two men who froze human corpses to await scientific https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/06/05/Two-men-who-froze-human-corpses-to-await-scientific/7868360561600/
“The Long Tomorrow,” New Scientist, December 1972
“The Penultimate Trump” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/68842/68842-h/68842-h.htm