Robert Ettinger, a physics teacher and science fiction writer who kicked off the cryonics movement, died on July 23 in Michigan. He was 92. “We’re obviously sad,” said his son David, but “we were able to freeze him under optimum conditions, so he’s got another chance.” Robert Ettinger is widely considered the father of the cryonics movement, whose supporters believe they can attain immortality by quick-freezing their bodies at death in anticipation of a future revival.

Mr Ettinger’s body now lives in a vat of liquid nitrogen at a nondescript building outside Detroit, home to over 100 of his fellow immortalists – including his mother and two wives – who are waiting for revival. Mr Ettinger envisioned that he would remain in a period of frozen stasis for decades – or centuries – however long it would take doctors, equipped with the technology of the future, to thaw him out and restore him to good health. “Our patients are not truly dead in any fundamental sense,” he told the New Yorker magazine in 2010.

He described a world in which people would become nobler and more responsible as they grappled with the reality of living forever – what he dubbed the Freezer Era. And if the earth became too crowded with all those immortal humans: “The people could simply agree to share the available space in shifts,” he wrote, “going into suspended animation from time to time to make room for others.” ~ Washington Post, Jul 25