Tim Elliott

1. DEEP FREEZE

2. ANCHOR
Some Australians are spending this lifetime
hoping to have another one later. Tim Elliott
meets those planning to put their bodies on
ice.

3. [1]
Historians and the compulsively curious have
for millennium pondered the whereabouts of
the Fountain of Youth.
Herodotus thought it was in Ethiopia.

4. [1] cont.
The Spanish put their money on the
Caribbean. The Bethesda Pool, in Jerusalem,
has also been a solid contender.

5. [1] cont.
What Herodotus and the conquistadors didn't
know, however, is that the Fountain of Youth is
actually in Bankstown, just around the corner
from the train station, in Sydney's western
suburbs, in the tiny, third-floor rental apartment
of Mark Milton and his wife, Yan.

6. [1] cont.
Milton is 47 years old, with short sandy hair,
small ears and a pot belly. He has been a
policeman, elevator operator, theology
student, carer for the intellectually disabled,
landscape gardener, house painter, plasterer,
factory foreman and IT consultant.

7. [1] cont.
He gets bored fairly quickly. Right now,
however, he is the co-founder and director of
Stasis Systems Australia, a not-for-profit
company that aims to build Australia's first
cryonics storage facility. Umm.

8. [2]
For those of you who don't subscribe to
Strange Horizons magazine, cryonics is the
low-temperature preservation of human bodies
in the hope of future resuscitation.

9. [2] cont.
When Milton dies, or "de-animates", as he
calls it, he will be packed in ice ("just normal
party ice"), and cooled down. His blood will be
drained and replaced with anti-freeze, and his
body stored in a vat of liquid nitrogen at minus
196°C.

10. [2] cont.
If all goes to plan, he will be defrosted some
time in the future - "100 to 200 years from now
is my best guess" - when science will be able
to restore him to peak physical fitness.

11. COMMENTS [1]
It's not just highly speculative, it's fantasy.
Vitrification is just more jargon. You are still
freezing the body after you use the cryo-
protectant, which means that the fine structure
of the tissue would be blown to bits.

12. COMMENTS [2]
I'm not really interested in being frozen then
revived in the future, but I am cranky about
spending 80 years accumulating lots of
memories and experience and expertise and
then having it all disappear when I die. So just
freeze my brains.

13. CREDITS
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-
tech/deep-freeze-20121015-
27lqf.html#ixzz2A67ORRRp