Rich and Immortal
Frozen in Perpetuity
How do the uber rich steer clear of the pandemic or even of death itself? Some buy islands, some buy self-contained yachts like the music and film billionaire David Geffen, who noted with great concerns on his now-deleted Instagram account, “Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.”
And some, like billionaire Peter Thiele, the founder of PayPal, lay out $200,000 to have his body cryopreserved when he finally shuffles of this mortal coil or as little as $80,000 just to preserve his head, with the hopes that he can be rejuvenated when the technology allows it, next week, next year or a 1,000 years from now.
And like Thiele, you might also invest heavily into an Arizona company called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which was founded in 1972 by cryogenic pioneers Fred and Linda Chamberlain and named after a faint star in the Bid Dipper, a company that was thrust into the spotlight when it was reported that the firm had the head and body of baseball great Ted Williams that were severed and then frozen after Williams’ death in 2002. In 2003, Sports Illustrated published allegations that Williams’ head was mishandled and that drilled holes accidentally cracked the head of the Splendid Splinter. Alcor denied the allegations.
Another notable member of the frozen few is FM-2030, whose given name was Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, an Iranian-American author, teacher, transhumanist philosopher, futurist, consultant and a basketball player and wrestler representing Iran in the 1948 Olympics who died of pancreatic cancer on July 8, 2000, and was then frozen. The oldest stored body is a 101-year-old woman, and the youngest is a 2-year-old girl.
Alcor researches, and performs cryonics, the freezing of human corpses and brains in liquid nitrogen after legal death, with hopes of resurrecting and restoring them to full health in the event some new technology can be developed in the future, according to the foundation website. And while the mainstream scientific world is skeptical of cryonics as quackery and pseudoscience, people like Thiel and Williams may get the last laughs if they are returned to life. Who knows, but Thiel, who is very much alive, may one day pass into purgatory and later be revived, thereby outliving Jeanne Calment, a French woman who married her double second cousin when she was 21 and whose husband’s wealth allowed her to live without ever working and who all of her life took care of her skin “with olive oil and a puff of powder” and who gained fame as the older person on earth when she died in 1997 at 122 years and 164 days.
This being Halloween time, it creeps me out when a company like Alcor is funded by a man like Thiele, who famously filed lawsuits that destroyed the Gawker website because the Gawker owner had outed Thiele as gay, a man like Thiele who is a far right conservative and staunch trumper. Will the future be filled with frozen trumpers and others who have been picked for pickeling because of their QAnonish politics? Hopefully not but who knows.
Alcor is pretty clear about how cloudy the future but how their hope is eternal: “No cryonics organization can currently revive a cryopreserved patient, but we at Alcor have confidence revival may be possible. Nanotechnology and other future medical technologies are expected to have very broad capabilities.”
Alcor performed its first human cryopreservation on Fred Chamberlain’s father on July 16, 1976, and as of April 30 had 1,832 members, including 182 people who have died and whose corpses have been subject to cryonic processes; including 116 bodies whose heads only were preserved. And if you want your pooch, Spot, to be preserved after his last bark and maybe returned to nuzzle you with love, Alcor also applies its cryonic process to the bodies of pets. As of Feb. 13, 2009, there were 33 animal bodies preserved.
So if you happen to have the dough and all goes according to plan, here is how you’ll be frozen with the hopes of one day returning to eternal life, according to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
A cryonics standby team will be waiting near you up to a week in advance of your demise, ready to get to work almost immediately after cardiac arrest, so that the cells and organs are still viable. 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 the blood is replaced with an organ preservation solution.
So far, so good.
The chilled patient is carefully transported to Alcor’s operating room in Arizona and many Alcor members choose to retire or enter hospice near Alcor for shorter transport time and better procedural outcome. Cryoprotectants are then perfused into the bloodstream to reduce and even prevent freezing because uncontrolled freezing would cause damage to the blood vessels, brain and other organs and that would not be good. You are now ready for cryopreservation.
Don’t worry about the cold because your body won’t feel it when you are cooled down to -196° C, which cryopreserves the patient in a solid state. You are now protected from deterioration for theoretically thousands of years, and the dying process has been effectively stopped. Then it’s off to a vacuum-insulated metal dewar, a special vacuum flask for storing cryogens like liquid nitrogen or liquid helium to maintain subfreezing temperatures. The dewar, named after its inventor James Dewar and not the Scotch, may be an open bucket, flask with stoppers or self-pressurizing tanks. And there you will stay, in your private bucket, until revival becomes possible.
So it concerns me that research into eternal life is significantly funded by Thiel who wrote in “Cato Unbound,” the organ of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Thiel describes himself as a Christian and has participated in events hosted by the Veritas Forum, a non-profit organization which works with Christian students on college campuses “to host forums centered on the exploration of truth and its relevancy in human life, through the questions of philosophy, religion, science, and other disciplines.”
Thiel spoke in support of trump at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and donated around $1.5 million that cycle to pro-Trump groups. He also has contributed to other right wing candidates like Rep. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas and is close with Steve Bannon, who is among those leading the fight to get the 2020 election overturned because of unproven fraud and return trump to office. And as an indicator of his conservative ways, Thiel started Palantir, a software company that works on big data analytics and does a lot of business with the Defense Department and the CIA, and Anduril, a defense tech startup backed by Thiel.
And Thiel is just one of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who have invested heavily into research to keep them from dying or getting older including Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle; Larry Page, co-founder of Google; and Peter Diamandis. the founder of the X Prize Foundation. So will the billionaires be able to influence the world in life and beyond? Happy Halloween.