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"I went [to the top of] Vehicle Assembly Building and looked down, and tears burst from my eyes. The size of this cathedral where the Rockets take off to go to the moon is so amazing."
- Ray Bradbury
 |
| Corpsicle | ||
| Cryogenically frozen person who could (hopefully) be revived later. |
The basic idea is simple; freeze the person so they can be revived later. Small insects, for example, have been frozen and then revived successfully. Human embryos are routinely frozen, thawed and used to create viable human fetuses. Children have been revived after immersion in very cold water for up to an hour. But what do you call a person who has been frozen?
| No corpsicle has yet been thawed and returned to life, and there's no firm estimate of when one will be. |
| From The Age of The Pussyfoot,
by Frederik Pohl. Published by Ballantine in 1966 Additional resources -
|
Larry Niven offers some helpful etymological material in his use of the word from his 1971 novel A World Out of Time:
"Your newspapers called you people corpsicles," said the blond man. "I never understood what the tapes meant by that."
"It comes from Popsicle. Frozen sherbet." Corbell had used the word himself before he became one of them. One of the corpsicles, the frozen dead.
More than 100 people have been frozen since the first person placed in "cryonic suspension" 1967. Alcor provides you with some options; just have your head frozen for $50,000, or have your whole body frozen for $120,000.
Interestingly, Alcor does not really freeze your tissues:
And, best of all, the root word for "quiescently" means "in a restful state." Requiescat in pace, popsiculo.
Apparently, many science fiction writers were offered free services, and turned it down. Robert Heinlein said “How do I know it won’t interfere with my next stage?” Isaac Asimov said “I don’t think I should impose any kind of cost on the future, even the cost of just topping off my nitrogen.”
Not quite ready to be a popsicle? Try a few months in the hibernaculum, from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.
Compare to Suspended Animation (Frigorific Process) from The Senator's Daughter (1879) by Edward Page Mitchell, cold-sleep from Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children (1941), stasis from Heinlein's Door Into Summer (1951) and the EverRest Cryotorium from Roger Zelazny's Flare (1992).
And there was this frozen thing.
Alcor's most advanced procedure is called "vitrification". In vitrification more than 60% of the water inside cells is replaced by a mixture of cryoprotectant (antifreeze) compounds so that tissue does not freeze (or freezes negligibly) during cooling. Instead, below a temperature of -130 degrees Celsius, the tissue becomes a rigid glass with no ice crystal damage. Chemistry is stopped, and tissue is stable essentially indefinitely.
The reason I find this interesting is because a popsicle is not really frozen either; it is a "quiescently frozen treat" according to the labels. Popsicle makers use stabilizing ingredients to keep the flavoring agent, color, sugar and other elements from separating from the ice as the water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Age of The Pussyfoot
More Ideas
and Technology by Frederik Pohl
Tech news articles related to The Age of The Pussyfoot
Tech news articles related to works by Frederik Pohl
Corpsicle-related
news articles:
- Terasem Conference On Law Of Transhuman Persons
- Dynasty Trusts Lively Topic For Corpsicles
- Owada's Freezing Method Vs. Carbonite
- KrioRus Brain Freeze Technology
- Cryonics Movement Loses Founder (Temporarily)
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