Robert Ettinger, a physics teacher and science fiction writer who kicked off the cryonics movement, died on July 23 in Michigan.
Robert
Ettinger, a physics teacher and science fiction writer who kicked off the cryonics
movement, died
on July 23 in Michigan. He was 92. “We’re obviously sad,” said his son David,
but “we were able to freeze him under optimum conditions, so he’s got another
chance.” Robert Ettinger is widely considered the father of the cryonics
movement, whose supporters believe they can attain immortality by
quick-freezing their bodies at death in anticipation of a future revival.

Mr
Ettinger’s body now lives in a vat of liquid nitrogen at a nondescript building
outside Detroit, home to over 100 of his fellow immortalists – including his
mother and two wives – who are waiting for revival. Mr Ettinger envisioned that
he would remain in a period of frozen stasis for decades – or centuries –
however long it would take doctors, equipped with the technology of the future,
to thaw him out and restore him to good health. “Our patients are not truly
dead in any fundamental sense,” he told the New Yorker magazine in 2010.

He
described a world in which people would become nobler and more responsible as
they grappled with the reality of living forever – what he dubbed the Freezer
Era. And if the earth became too crowded with all those immortal 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.” ~ Washington Post,
Jul 25

Founder of cryonics movement dies at 92
Jared Yee
cryonics

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