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PostPosted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 3:25 am 
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Deep freeze
October 23, 2012
Tim Elliott, smh

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I'll be back … Mark Milton is planning Australia’s first cryonic storage facility, and hopes to be frozen
and defrosted some time in the future. Photo: James Horan


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

Historians and the compulsively curious have for millennia pondered the whereabouts of the Fountain of Youth. Herodotus thought it was in Ethiopia. The Spanish put their money on the Caribbean. The Bethesda Pool, in Jerusalem, has also been a solid contender. 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.

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. "I get bored fairly quickly," he says. 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 cryonic storage facility.

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. 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. 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.

Milton first heard about cryonics as a kid, through reading science fiction, but only became seriously interested four years ago, while researching life-extension techniques. One night he attended a meeting of the Cryonics Association of Australasia (CAA) in a cafe in the city, where he met Peter Tsolakides, a retired manager for ExxonMobil, the oil company. At the meeting, both men were disappointed to discover that there was no cryonics facility in Australia. If you wanted to get frozen, you had to go to the USA. This is not impossible - the Cryonics Institute, in Michigan, has six Australians in cryopreservation, and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, has two - but it is certainly inconvenient. You either had to be aware you were on the way out and get on a plane, quickly, or wait till you had de-animated and have someone, usually an obliging member from CAA, pack you in ice and mail you over. Either way, it was a logistical nightmare, and so Milton and Tsolakides decided to start a local operation.

That was in 2009. Since then, Stasis has recruited 11 investors, each of whom has agreed to put in $50,000. This money will fund the construction of the facility, which should be complete by 2014, and pay for the investors' cryonic suspension, when the time comes. Milton, who works from home, spends his time liaising with NSW Health, which has been "very supportive", and, more recently, scouting for suitable land sites. "We are currently looking for a couple of acres in regional NSW - Yass, Wagga Wagga, Goulburn ... It has to be a low-risk area for natural disasters, like bushfires, earth tremors or flooding, and it needs to be somewhere with reliable power, sealed access and liquid nitrogen delivery routes, because liquid nitrogen is essential."

....more at link
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-te ... 27lqf.html

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