robert c. w. ettinger

 

Robert C. W. Ettinger could be considered the father of the modern cryonics movement. His book, The Prospect of Immortality, lay out the case for immortality through cryonics and countered many of the possible objections.

 

Ettinger, Robert C. W. (1964). The prospect of immortality. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.

 

We have heard a great deal recently (to our shame) about the costly and childishly sentimental funeral practices referred to as the "American way of death." Here we have a book which proposes an American way of living on, a demand that our superb (and underemployed) technological facilities be used to implement in a realistic and mature way our avowed belief in the beauty and value of life and health and the immeasurable worth of the individual.

- from the preface by Gerald J. Gruman, M.D., Ph.D. (xv)

 

(1) The fact: At very low temperatures it is possible, right now, to preserve dead people with essentially no deterioration, indefinitely. . . .

The assumption: If civilization endures, 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.

Hence we need only arrange to have our bodies, after we die, stored in suitable freezers against the time when science may be able to help us. No matter what kills us, whether old age or disease, and even if freezing techniques are still crude when we die, sooner or later our friends of the future should be equal to the task of reviving and curing us. This is the essence of the main argument.

(4)(How strange that the many popular articles on suspended animation have mentioned chiefly its possible use by astronauts on long interstellar voyages! This aspect is trivial. Its importance lies not in travel to the stars, for the few, but in travel to the future, for the many. It will open a veritable "door into summer" for all of us.)

(127) Desperation makes fanatics, but hope – on a practical, personal level – may be the key to cooperation. . . . All problems take on a completely different perspective in the long view. When the future expands, the past shrinks; historical affronts lose their sting, and vendettas their fascination.

(136)If decay is to be regarded as just another disease, with a possibility of cure, then when may the body be considered truly dead? If “truly” dead be taken to mean “permanently” dead, then we may never know when we are in the presence of death, since the criterion is not what has already happened to the man, but what is going to happen to him in the (endless?) future.

(144) When people blithely assert that they "wouldn't want to live forever," it usually means only that they have not really thought about it.

The disclaimers fall perhaps into two main categories. The first concerns alleged moral considerations. “When I’m called, I’m ready to go. . . . We have to step aside for our children. . . We shouldn't impose ourselves on posterity. . . Trying to hang on beyond our natural span is undignified and cowardly. . . . Birth, growth, and death form a natural and necessary cycle. . . Fear of death is a sign of immaturity. . . ."

. . . When someone continues to insist that he would not want unlimited life, he is often wearing a mask which can be lifted by putting the question just a little differently. Let us ask first: “In case of a severe infection, would you refuse penicillin to stave off the 'natural' conclusion of death?" He can hardly claim he would. We ask next: “If a serum were to appear on the market, guaranteed to add twenty vigorous years to your life, would you refuse it?" He is not likely to say he would, nor would he refuse a perfected immortality serum.

And now we see his true face: he wants immortality, all right, but he wants it on a silver platter. It is not life he objects to, but effort and risk. Far from being stoic, or resigned, or well-adjusted, or complacent, or mature, or philosophic, or self-effacing, or altruistic, or any of the other dignified things he pretends to be, he is merely myopic and nervous.

(146). . . Disclaimers in the second category question whether extended life is worth while, even to the individual. "I've had a full life. . . . I’m already bored and couldn't endure a second life. . . . I wouldn't like a futuristic world. . There would be nothing to do . . . I wouldn't fit in. . . . etc.

The main difficulty is that few people have the remotest conception of what the future will be like; they think of it dimly as mid-twentieth century, plus maybe sliding sidewalks, family helicopters, and a twenty-hour work week. They fail to understand the differences will be qualitative as well as quantitative.

In particular, they completely fail to grasp that people will be different, including themselves. Mental qualities, including both intellectual power and personality or character, will be profoundly altered, not only in our descendants but in ourselves, in you and me, the resuscitees.

(156) But in the last thirty or forty thousand years, the supposed tenure of modern man on earth, cultural changes have been relatively small, and biological changes virtually nil. In the next few centuries, the changes will be incomparably greater.

I am convinced that in a few hundred years the words of Shakespeare, for example, will interest us no more than the grunting of swine in a wallow. Not only will his work be far too weak in intellect, and written in too vague and puny a language, but the problems which concerned him will be, in the main, no more than historical curiosities.

Neither greed, nor lust, nor ambition will in that society have any recognizable similarity to the qualities we know. With the virtually unlimited resources of that era, all ordinary wants will be readily satisfied, either by supplying them or by removing them in the mind of the individual. Furthermore, if civilization will have survived that long amid she titanic forces available, it would seem that satisfactory modes of living and mutual accommodation must have been worked out. Competitive drives, in the interpersonal sense, may or may not persist; but if they do, it will be in radically modified form.

(171-172) We recall that suspended animation of humans (by freezing alive, without serious freezing damage, so that the subject can be thawed out and restored to active life at any time) is generally agreed to be in the cards.

. . . As soon as suspended animation is practicable, persons with incurable diseases will surely be frozen alive to await the time cures are discovered. It can scarcely be doubted that this development, at the very least and latest, would provide the entering wedge for the freezer program.

(172) When an initially adverse reaction to the freezer idea is voiced, no matter what "reasons" may be given, it is usually based on nothing but pure funk. The idea unsettles people; it makes them nervous; it disturbs the established order; it raises questions and demands decisions. To many, especially those long beaten down by adversity, nothing is so precious as the "security" of a fixed routine and a known end; it is notorious that in the death camps of Nazi Germany many inmates refused any risk, preferring certain death to exertion.

Ostensible reasons for opposition often include various forms of asserted altruism. "We shouldn't burden later generations." “The future doesn't need us.” “I wouldn't want to live on unless I could do some good." "The money freezers would cost should (173) be spent on cancer research or longevity research." "I'd rather a year were added to the life of a cancer victim than hundreds of years to my own." (The last two, of course, are non sequiturs.)

Such self-styled altruists, who would martyr our generation, understand neither society nor themselves.

We may be largely the intellectual heirs of the Greeks, but our moral heritage is Judaeo-Christian, and in this tradition no babes are exposed on hillsides nor thrown to the wolves, no grandfathers are abandoned to die on the trail. We risk a division to rescue a battalion; we carry our wounded with us. We recognize duty downward as well as upward, from the state to the individual as well as conversely.

In fact, the worship of the State, or the Race, or Society, or Posterity, is merely a twisted and senseless sentimentality characteristic of totalitarian ideologies; it is nothing but fanaticism. In an important sense, there is no such thing as the state, no such thing as posterity: there are only individual people, and the living deserve as much consideration as the unborn. When someone who wouldn't give an extra hundred tax dollars to a real, starving Indian claims he would sacrifice his life to make things easier for some hypothetical descendant, he is merely making an ass of himself.

In any case, of course, the direct remedy to the "burden" problem is easy: let us practice industry and thrift, so that the money for freezers is either extra money produced by extra work, or else savings diverted from fripperies. We can pay our own way, and need not be mendicants. Our estates and trust funds, through their investments and administrators, will contribute to future production and will share in control of the means of production. While we owe a moral debt to the future, the future will owe us not only a moral but a legal debt.

As to our "usefulness in the future, it has already been pointed out that after resuscitation and rejuvenation we will be (174) just as educable and adaptable as anyone else, young or old.

After maybe forty thousand years of struggling through the wilderness, the race has arrived at the banks of Jordan. Crossing will not be easy, nor will life in the Promised Land. But to pitch camp on the near shore for a generation would be a bootless waste.

(175) Time to Go Sane

Human life has always been based largely on fanatic lies and self-deception, a consequence of the endless struggle to solve the unsolvable, reconcile the irreconcilable, and scrutinize the inscrutable. Most of us have always preferred make-believe to frustration. But now at last it will be safe to go sane – at least partly.

The loyalties of the past have been mainly to ideas – usually stupid ideas, like the divine right monarchies of post-medieval (176) Europe, and often revolting ideas, like the blood-sacrifice rituals of the Aztecs. But the loyalties of the future will be to people – not disembodied abstractions, but individual human beings – and in this direction lies sanity.

. . . We have usually thought of people as ephemeral, and ideas, especially "principles," as immortal. But now the people will persist while ideas come and go, and the results should be most salutary.

(176) Even after considerable thought, some people have to fight the feeling that to seek personal immortality is somehow ignoble, that the freezer-centered society is somehow distasteful and may rob us of our manliness. The reason is partly that bravery in the face of death has always been deemed a virtue, that abstract ideals are extolled above "selfish" ones, and that logic may seem to equate immortality with timidity. Even though the error of these notions has already been indicated, another remark or two will not be out of place.

Immortality is not an end in itself, nor do we reach for it in blind and breathless panic. It is an opportunity for growth and development otherwise impossible, and it is consistent with our current values.

(180) After all, the prize is Life – and not just more of the life we know, but a wider and deeper life of springtime growth, a grander and more glorious life unfolding in shapes, colors, and textures we can yet but dimly sense. Large numbers of Americans and Europeans will soon come not only to perceive but to feel the vastness and the grandeur of the prize, and to understand that all other prizes, all previous goals, are secondary. Their demands cannot be long ignored.

These demands will be of two general kinds, and will be aimed, among others, at physicians, biologists, morticians, lawyers.

First, make available routine and regularly updated procedures for freezing those now dying, making the most of current means.

Second, provide massive scientific and financial support for accelerated research in non-damaging freezing methods, as well as for a complete range of ancillary facilities.