"I was an atheist," Chamberlain said. Then, she said she came across Ettinger's 1964 book, The Prospect of Immortality. "So I had pretty much accepted the fact that when you die, you just turn to dust and that's the end. When I read Bob Ettinger's book, I said, 'Holy Tamales! Maybe not!' It intrigued me as a possible answer to death when I found no other answer to that for myself. It was a very positive, life-affirming, happy idea when I read about it.""I had pretty much accepted the fact that when you die, you just turn to dust and that's the end. When I read Bob Ettinger's book, I said, 'Holy Tamales! Maybe not!'"
The more romantic elements of Ettinger's pitch for a better second life could help improve one's attitude during the first one. "We need assurance that we can be revived," he said, "And not only that; if we die we want to be made well; if we die broken, we want to be made whole; and if we die old, we want to be made young."At least one of Ettinger's predictions seemed true. Although the first Industrial Revolution, he said, involved human and animal muscles being replaced by machines, the second Industrial Revolution, he said, "now barely beginning, rests on the replacement of human brains by machines. The computers already have remarkable problem-solving capacities, and it appears to be only a matter of time until they can 'really think.'""The future will reveal a wonderful world indeed, a vista to excite the mind and thrill the heart. It will be bigger and better than the present—but not only that. It will not be just the present, king-sized and chocolate-covered; it will be different. The key difference will be in people; we will remold, nearer to the heart's desire not just the world, but ourselves as well. And 'ourselves' refers to people, not just posterity. You and I, the frozen, the resucitees, will be not merely revived and cured, but enlarged and improved, made fit to work, play, and perhaps fight, on a grand scale and in a grand style. Specific reasons for such expectations will be presented."
Ettinger also concerned himself with some of the more abstract implications of freezing, and proposed that, Atomic Age anxiety aside, freezing could herald a "golden age" of morality and ethics. If people are going to stick around for longer, the consequences of being unkind could, as well."Our actions will be strongly influenced by the realization that not only ourselves, but the other fellow also, will be around a long time," he said. "The people we meet in business life and in casual encounters of every kind can no longer be counted upon to fade away and disappear; instead, our paths may cross repeatedly in a long future dimply seen. All business becomes 'repeat' business; there are no more one-shots."He argued that the "failure to freeze" could even be a crime, and pondered whether frozen cadavers had the right to vote. He asked if the words "till death do us part" in wedding vows would continue to suffice for cryonic couples and considered, in dated terms, the possibility that a man could awaken "still old," he wrote, "but before long we will gambole with the spring lambs--not to mention the young chicks, our wives."Practicing what he preached, Ettinger's body is preserved, along with his mother's and his first and second wife, and he may have to live out some of the very ethical concerns he spent his first life debating. Chamberlain pointed out that if Ettinger and his two wives are thawed simultaneously, by definition, his first wife would not know of the second wife. It could very well be cryonics first-ever love triangle."We'll have to see how that works out," Chamberlain said.Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter ."The computers already have remarkable problem-solving capacities, and it appears to be only a matter of time until they can 'really think.'"