The Original Inspiration for Cryonics: An Appreciation of The Jameson Satellite

Robert Ettinger (1918-2011, at least for now) is known as the father of cryonics. As most of my readers know, cryonics – or human cryopreservation – is the practice of preserving human beings as soon as possible after legal death with the hope that more advanced technology in the future can repair and revive them.

After being wounded in Germany and being honored with a Purple Heart, Ettinger went on to get master’s degrees in physics and mathematics. His 1962, book, The Prospect of Immortality, created the cryonics movement. Ettinger also went on to found the Cryonics Institute and The Immortalist Society.

Where did Ettinger get the idea of cryonics? He grew up reading “pulp” science fiction as published in Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories. (The weightiest fan-bestowed award in SF, the Hugo Award, is named after him.) Along with John W. Campbell Jr., Gernsback stimulated the market for science fiction in the 1920s and 1930s.

Ettinger’s imagination was ignited at the age of 12 by a story in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories. This was the short novel The Jameson Satellite by Neil R. Jones. The story introduced Professor Jameson who went on to star in the longest running series in SF, from 1931 to 1961. That longevity is impressive but pales next to that of Professor Jameson. I’ve been interested in cryonics for around four decades and yet never read Jones’ story. Until this month. After reading some (quite impressive) early 1930s SF stories by John W. Campbell Jr., I was reminded of The Jameson Satellite and finally picked it up.

The plot is simple: Professor Jameson sought a way of preserving his body indefinitely after death. He aimed to arrange to have his body preserved until the Earth fell into the sun in the distant future. The story doesn’t make clear why Jameson wanted to perfectly preserve his body forever. He doesn’t seem to have had any expectation of returning to life.

Jameson didn’t want to crash into an asteroid or remote planet so he planned to go into orbit around the Earth. He devised a means of repelling any threatening meteors with “radium repulsion rays”. He chose an orbit sixty-five thousand miles from the Earth –decaying over the millions of years to twenty thousand miles.

After 40 million years in suspended animation Jameson is revived by aliens called the Zoromes, a race of machine men. Jameson discovers that humanity has perished and he is the only one alive. The Zoromes extract his brain and place it into a mechanical, robotic body, making him one of them in form. As the leader of the Zorome exploratory party, 25X-987, explains: “We found your dead body within it… Your brain was removed to the machine after having been stimulated into activity once more. Your carcass was thrown away.”

“So I did die!” exclaimed the professor. “And my body was placed within the rocket to remain in everlasting preservation until the end of all Earthly time! Success! I have now attained unrivaled success!”

The story tell us that: “The Zoromes, several hundred thousand years before, had reached a stage in science, where they searched for immortality and eternal relief from bodily ills and various deficiencies of flesh and blood anatomy. They had sought freedom from death, and had found it, but at the same time they had destroyed the propensities for birth.”

James goes on to explore the universe with the Zoromes, having endless incredible adventures. According to the introduction to a recent collection of the first two stories, these stories profoundly imprinted on the young Isaac Asimov who said of The Jameson Satellite that it was “a story that stayed with me”. The Zoromes of the Jameson stories inspired Asimov’s own famous robots. Asimov said: “What I responded to was the tantalizing glimpse of possible immortality and the vision of the world’s sad death…” Despite that statement Asimov never had long-lived characters and his stories did not explore the elimination or extreme delay of death. Nor did Asimov ever champion extended life. On the contrary, he went along with many humanists in accepting death and rationalizing it as a good thing.

A few excerpts from The Jameson Satellite:

“Any material substance, whether of organic or inorganic origin, cast into the depths of space would exist indefinitely… He would remain in perfect preservation, while on Earth millions of generations of mankind would live and die, their bodies to molder into the dust of the forgotten past.

“Never would his body undergo decay – and never would his bones bleach to return to the dust of the Earth from which all men originally came and to which they must return. His body would remain millions of years in a perfectly preserved state, untouched by the hoary palm of such time as only geologists and astronomers can conceive.

“He had begun to wonder whether or not he had been dead all these forty millions of years – suppose he had been merely in a state of suspended animation. He had remembered a scientist of his day, who had claimed that the body does not die at the point of official death. According to the claims of this man, the cells of the body did not die at the moment at which respiration, heart beats and the blood circulation ceased, but it existed in the semblance of life for several days afterward, especially in the cells of the bones, which died last of all.

“Perhaps when he had been sent out into space in his rocket right after his death, the action of the cosmic void was to halt his slow death of the cells in his body, and hold him in suspended animation during the ensuring millions of years.”

With his physics background, Ettinger wondered whether Jameson’s method could actually work. Only the objective would be not to be revived by aliens but by humans of the future. Ettinger first put forth the idea in a 1948 short story, “The Penultimate Trump”, published in Startling Stories. The story relates the development of a method of putting people into “suspended animation” until medical science can restore their health, and then the experiences of the first revived person in a changed world.

In 1962, Ettinger privately published the seminal book, The Prospect of Immortality. He made a compelling argument that that future technological advances could be used to bring people back to life if they had been sufficiently well preserved at extremely low temperatures. A major publisher discovered the book and send a copy to Isaac Asimov to get his opinion. In a nice bit of payback, Asimov said that the science behind cryonics was sound. Doubleday went on to publish the book in hardcover in 1964. It is entirely coincidental that I was born the same year.

I have never been a member of Ettinger’s Cryonics Institute (which is still operating after 47 years) but I have great respect for the man who not only had the idea but put it into practice and launched the cryonics movement. The movement has grown slowly but remains crucial because, in my view, life extension research has been moving far too slowly with far too little funding. As a result, I and many other people are unlikely to see much of the future without cryonics or some form of biostasis.

Robert Ettinger, I salute you! I’m glad that you were cryopreserved under good conditions and hope to see you one day, perhaps in the 22^nd Century.