the outer limits of optimism

faith, fiction and human remains

Just a heads up that this essay is going to talk about dead bodies, including the cutting up of some of them. If that isn’t your bag—well, that’s totally understandable. Not everyone is as inherently troubled as me.

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One of the benefits of having written a book about sex robots and tech delusionists—a tiny book that nonetheless was about six years in the making—is that now I have a veritable library of literature on or by the types of people who believe that they can cheat death, or upload their consciousness to the cloud, or push humanity forward in ways that defy time, space and the extremities of logic. And sometimes, though I think I know the wildest claims and excesses of those people, I have cause to go back into that library and I’m surprised all over again.

A couple of months ago I got one of those dream essay commissions that asks you to investigate all the things you’re interested in anyway, and have thought about for ages, and it sent me back to my most unhinged bookshelves—specifically, to a book called The Prospect of Immortality, by Robert C. W. Ettinger, the ‘father of cryonics’. Ettinger truly believed, and wished to convince the general public, that recently-dead human bodies could be preserved indefinitely via low-temperature freezing (at almost -200°c), with a view that they would then be resurrected / defrosted in the future once their cause of death had been ‘cured’ by medical science—or, as he wrote in 1964:

Most of us now breathing have a good chance of physical life after death—a sober, scientific probability of revival and rejuvenation of our frozen bodies.

Those of you who’ve read my first novel will no doubt be recognising, within these words, the seed of Wilhelm von Tore, the monstrous co-protagonist of that book. But this is not fiction—at least, it wasn’t in the mind of Ettinger and those who believed him. And a not-insignificant amount of people did; the first body was cryonically frozen in 1967, and it remains so today.

Yet Ettinger knew that what he was asking people to believe would test the limits of not only their belief in science, but their ethics as well. For this reason, he set out an argument that would convince them that his ideas were not only possible, but ethically passable as well:

The argument will attempt to show: first, that immortality (in the sense of indefinitely extended life) is technically attainable, not only for our descendants but for ourselves; second, that it is practically feasible and does not raise any insurmountable new problems; third, that it is desirable from the standpoints both of the individual and of society.

At no point does he seek to hide the fact that cryonics as a ‘science’ is entirely based on assumption—that medical science will, at some point, not only find out how to bring the frozen back to life, but will cure their diseases too. He even specifies it, saying early on in the book that ‘definite reasons for such optimism will be given’. We can disagree as to whether he achieves this goal, but there is something oddly charming about his refusal to hide behind claims of inevitability. Yes, I do believe, he seems to say throughout. And so should you.

The physics of the freezing process take up a relatively small portion of the overall text; chapters five to 11 tackle everything from the legal issues arising from cryonics to the religious take on it. One subchapter is entitled ‘The Question of God’s Intentions’, and it warmly invites the faithful to consider that if God created a world in which cryonics would be possible, perhaps He did it because he wanted you to freeze yourself. For every man rescued from death, Ettinger says, there is a potential soul to be saved when he has been resurrected. Would God not prefer to give people more time to repent?

Pushing past religion, the book goes on to consider the economics of its own proposal, the issues of identity that face those brought back to life, and even the ‘manners, modes, and morals of tomorrow’. It imagines the ‘freezer-centred society’, asks what might happen if the technology is used only to preserve the elite, and even tackles the concept of martyrdom. Ettinger, you see, had thought about this from every angle—more or less.

The thing you realise when you read The Prospect of Immortality is that the overall theory is light on the most important details—he doesn’t attempt to say how cancer might be cured, or how the human body might be stopped from aging, or how the ravages of dementia might be reversed and undone—because it doesn’t need to have all the answers. All you need to be convinced of is that the human body can be frozen, which it inarguably can. Robert Ettinger is not telling you how your ailments will be cured, or how the future scientists will have overcome the one thing that all people before us have suffered from: death. He only needs to convince you that there’s a tiny possibility that they will, somehow. As he himself puts it, ‘the freezer is more attractive than the grave’. He only needs to make you have faith.

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You might think a man proposing nothing so small as the possibility of defying death would have to be on fairly sturdy footing; you might assume that he had a background in medicine, for instance, and that he rooted his theory in that practice. You would, unfortunately, be wrong. Robert Ettinger was not a doctor, but a physicist and a mathematician, gaining degrees in both and teaching the subjects at university level. But his interest in cryonics came from somewhere else altogether.

In July 1931, the 12-year-old Robert Ettinger picked up a copy of Amazing Stories, the American science fiction magazine; in it was a story by Neil R. Jones, entitled The Jameson Satellite. Set in 1958, it told the tale of Professor Jameson, who, seeking to preserve his body indefinitely after his death, had his nephew shoot it into space on a rocket, to settle into an orbit sixty-five thousand miles away from Earth. At this distance, he figured, the body would be kept near absolute zero (-273.15°c), and therefore would be saved from any level of decay, ‘preserved against the ravages of time’.

Over the succeeding forty million years, the sun cooled to a ‘dull, red ball’, the Earth’s atmosphere thinned, and the human race, somewhat inevitably, wiped itself out; still, Professor Jameson’s body remained in orbit. But entering the solar system was an entirely different race of being:

The bodies of these queer creatures were square blocks of a metal closely resembling steel, while for appendages, the metal cube was upheld by four jointed legs capable of movement. A set of six tentacles, all metal, like the rest of the body, curved outward from the upper half of the cubic body. Surmounting it was a queer-shaped head rising to a peak in the center and equipped with a circle of eyes all the way around the head. The creatures, with their mechanical eyes equipped with metal shutters, could see in all directions. A single eye pointed directly upward, being situated in the space of the peaked head, resting in a slight depression of the cranium.

It was these robot-hexopods (‘Zoromes of the planet Zor’) that finally rescued Professor Jameson from his near-endless stasis, and eventually offered to make him into one of them. Having built their own indestructible bodies into which their fleshy brains had been placed, they could offer the same service to Jameson, freeing him from the tyranny of the fallible human body and into a metal encasement that would give him eternal life. By the end of the story, Jameson has decided: ‘He would become an immortal after all’.

The young Robert Ettinger read this story, was fascinated by it, and quietly ruminated on it for the next thirty years. Reaching his early 40s, he thought it was time to revisit the idea, apparently finding little unrealistic about it; he had waited for someone in the field of medicine to propose the cryopreservation of bodies, convinced that they must have came to the same conclusion as him in thinking it possible, but was frustrated by the lack of movement towards immortality. He would tell people how they might cheat death and live forever, just as the story had set out. But, he asked himself, why bother shooting a body out into space, when you could freeze it right here and save yourself from having to wait for metal aliens?

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When I was diving back into cryonics for the essay commission, I did a bit of digging into the companies currently offering to freeze people. There is not a lot of longevity in this industry (ironically), mostly because those who believe in life after death are standouts in their families. Sure, you might leave enough to have yourself frozen for a number of years, but when the bills start going to your children or your next of kin, they may well decide that funding your un-evidenced belief is not a good use of your/their money.

Most of the original companies established in the wake of Ettinger’s book publication have gone bust. Only one that started in the cryogenics boom, pre-1973, still remains today: Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Alcor is perhaps more forward-thinking than many of its now-defunct competitors were: a third of its yearly budget comes from membership fees. If you wish to be frozen by Alcor you have to become a member while you’re alive, but the fees do not cover your preservation. That will cost you $220,000 for your whole body, or a budget-friendly $80,000 if you only want to have your head frozen (presumably to facilitate a Krang-like future existence).

Alcor recommends taking out life insurance policies that will cover these costs, and which name Alcor as the sole beneficiary. There are surcharges up to $50,000 that apply if, for instance, you’ve become a member late in the day and die less than three months after you joined, or if you want a non-member to be frozen. Of the $220,000 for whole-body preservation, only $60,000 is actually used to preserve you; the bulk of the money goes into low-risk, long-term investments, intended to generate enough money to keep you frozen until such time as your particular death situation has been rendered curable by science. Given that the time frame for this is practically infinity, I think this is putting a lot of faith into the stock market and the current economic system, but that’s just a minor quibble in a what is already a vast landscape of improbable things.

Of course, the minute that you’re talking about signing over life insurance policies or leaving money to a company, you’re almost certain to find conflict with families, not to mention potential financial abuse of the elderly and a lack of corporate ethics. But when it comes to cryonics, the possibility of all of these seems even more heightened. And there’s one case in particular that really piqued my interest.

In 2009, an 81-year-old man named Orville Richardson died, having been a member of Alcor with a view to preserving his head after his death; he had paid a lump sum lifetime membership fee. CaseNotes explains that Richardson had suffered from dementia, but didn’t clarify whether this occurred before or after he’d decided upon this course of action. His brother and sister, who were his co-conservators, evidently did not agree with his plan for cryopreservation and requested some of the money back from the company. When he passed away, they had him buried, contrary to his apparent will.

Two months after his death, the relatives demanded a refund of the lifetime membership fee, which seems to have annoyed the company; Alcor subsequently sued to be allowed to exhume Richardson’s body, and though they lost initially they won on appeal. The Iowa Court of Appeals then ordered the Richardson family to dig up their late sibling, cut off his head and give it to Alcor, so they could freeze it. Grim.

The thing that makes no sense at all is that, in all of the literature, it is stated clearly that in order for cryonics to be even theoretically possible, the body has to be frozen almost immediately after legal and clinical death. Time is so vital that Alcor itself recommends either moving close to the company headquarters near your death or having a cryonics team on standby for up to a week before you expect to die. As they state on their website, when you do cark it, the process should start without a moment’s delay:

The cryopreservation process should begin as soon as a dying person experiences cardiac arrest and can be declared legally dead. While the patient is legally dead at this point, they are still early in the dying process, with cells and organs still viable.

Within two hours of legal death, the company specifically says that steps have to be taken to stabilise the brain:

Blood circulation and breathing are artificially restored temporarily, to protect the brain, and so protective medications can be administered intravenously. The patient is then cooled in an ice water bath, and their blood is replaced with an organ preservation solution.

After this, cryoprotectants—the substances which are said to stop total freezing of cells, which would be catastrophic—are administered, and full cryopreservation, or ‘deep cooling’ should occur within seven days. What is the possibility, even within the weird world of cryonics, that a brain that’s been decomposing and putrefying for over a year will be in any state to be removed and frozen, let alone brought back into action at some far-future date? Surely it is absolute zero. Surely that brain is [redacted to save you all from puking] and sloshing around into the the rest of the coffin by then?

As many of my grossest friends can tell you, the body begins to break down incredibly quickly post-mortem, and the brain especially so. With that in mind, the question is: what is the point of Alcor demanding that they be given a [redacted for the same reasons] brain? The only reason can be that, by taking possession of whatever remains of the head, the can at least claim to have undertaken (pardon the pun) the wishes of their former member. Having done so, they can then lay claim to the all the money left for this purpose.

At this point, it seems it’s all about the moolah, and less about your eternal life.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of faith, and what it means to entrust your body to others—not only after death, but while living.

This past weekend, I spent time with three of my oldest friends. We only see each other a couple of times a year, and when we do we spend the entire time talking: about the state of the world, about the twenty years we’ve known each other, about what our lives have held in the previous six months, and what they might hold in the next six. As we get older, these conversations are increasingly physical; last week they encompassed the many operations that ourselves or our loved ones had underdone lately: a caesarian birth, a heart procedure, a cataract operation. Bodies cut open, alien objects inserted in, human people pulled out. We hand ourselves over to the care of medical practitioners despite the fact that we often don’t understand the details of what they’ll do to us, and if we do understand, we would rather not put ourselves through it. Even outside the hospital, we commit ourselves to external knowledge we have chosen to believe in, whether that’s advice about breastfeeding, workouts written by Crossfit coaches, or apps that tell us what we need to eat or where we should put our money so that one day we might have some semblance of retirement. Some of us find it easier to have faith in these things than others. But all of us have faith in something.

If you ask even a small group of people what they want to happen to their body after they die, you’ll find yourselves fielding a heated discussion about what is more affordable, more ethical, better for the planet or best for the family you leave behind. Very few of us choose to die and leave the details to other people; none of us can help having an opinion on what happens to us, even when the concept of ‘us’ is long gone. Ask enough people, and you’ll find someone who mentions being frozen; they may only be semi-serious, but the idea is semi-convincing. Even if you have read the books.

Currently something like 600 people around the world are cryogenically frozen, in whole or in part. Most are in the United States, though there are facilities in Russia, China, Australia and Switzerland too. Alcor currently has around 1,500 members (at best estimates), and the body of Robert Ettinger itself remains frozen, waiting for that future point where six-legged metal aliens might pick him up and bring him back to life.

Having a death plan seems to me to be very much like having a birth plan: you can lay out things as you’d like them if you really want to, but when it comes down to it, almost all of that is out of your control. The plan functions more as a security blanket in the lead up than as a roadmap when it’s actually happening. However, you do have a choice to make, as to where you put your faith: just as expectant parents can decide whether a midwife or a hospital is more likely to consider their wishes when the going gets tough, the expectant-dead can decide whether a funeral director, a family member or a company peddling totally unproven future ‘cures’ for death will be most likely to do what’s best for them, and most in line with their wishes, when proceedings are finally taken out of their hands. And I don’t know about you guys, but when the time comes for me to shuffle off and I’m considering what I want done to my mortal body, I’ll trust my partner and my friends a lot more than I’ll be trusting DeathCanBeCuredHonestly.com, and a ‘science’ based almost entirely on a short story. My optimism just doesn’t stretch that far.

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My next novel Carrion Crow—a dark, physical book that ‘deduces an unutterable Gothic horror of class and gender from the pages of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management’—is forthcoming in Feb 27th 2024. You can support me, and this substack, by pre-ordering it here: