Robert C. W. Ettinger, a physics teacher and science fiction writer who believed death is only for the unprepared and unimaginative, died July 23 at his home in Clinton Township, Mich.
He was 92 and had suffered declining health in recent weeks, said his son David, who could not specify a cause. “We’re obviously sad,” said the younger Ettinger. But “we were able to freeze him under optimum conditions, so he’s got another chance.”
Mr. Ettinger is widely considered the father of the cryonics movement, whose adherents believe they can achieve immortality through quick-freezing their bodies at death in anticipation of future resurrection.
Mr. Ettinger’s frozen body is being stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen at a nondescript building outside Detroit, home to more than 100 fellow immortalists — including his mother and two wives — who are awaiting revival.
If all goes as Mr. Ettinger envisioned, he will remain in a period of icy stasis for decades — or perhaps centuries — however long it takes for doctors, armed with technology of the future, to defrost him and restore him to good health.
“Our patients are not truly dead in any fundamental sense,” he told a New Yorker reporter in 2010.
Mr. Ettinger was a little-known community college professor in the mid-1960s when he wrote the founding document of cryonics, “The Prospect of Immortality,” a manifesto that described the practical and moral aspects of deep-freezing the dead.
Introducing what he called the Freezer Era, Mr. Ettinger described a world in which people would become nobler and more responsible as they were confronted with the reality of living forever.
And if Earth became too crowded with long-lived humans? “The people could simply agree to share the available space in shifts,” he wrote, “going into suspended animation from time to time to make room for others.”
Originally self-published in 1962, the book was put out by Doubleday in 1964. It struck an “instantaneous public nerve,” according to Life magazine, and launched Mr. Ettinger to celebrity.
Mr. Ettinger’s deep-freeze dogma was covered in the New York Times and Newsweek, and he was invited to appear on talk shows hosted by Johnny Carson and David Frost. Once, Mr. Ettinger told the New Yorker, he shared a stage with conservative commentator William F. Buckley.
“He was aghast at everything I said. He thought it was immoral, unethical, unsanitary, against the will of God!” he recalled, laughing. “Buckley understood nothing.”
Most scientists also scoffed at Mr. Ettinger’s vision, but his manifesto came as the world was adjusting to the atomic bomb, Sputnik’s robotic spacecraft and a host of other sci-fi-seeming technologies. To many at the time, Mr. Ettinger’s optimism seemed appropriate.
His book helped spur the development of a number of organizations devoted to deep-freezing the dead, one of which — the now-defunct Cryonics Society of California — successfully froze a person for the first time in 1967.
The next decade, Mr. Ettinger founded his nonprofit Cryonics Institute. He served as president until 2003, attempting to democratize immortality through discount rates. Total fees for guaranteed icy perpetuity start at about $28,000, whereas a main competitor, California-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation, charges almost five times as much.
Loading...
Comments
The Post Most: LocalMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
Local Features
Loading...
Comments