Here he was transferred to one of the early cryonics companies, Trans Time in the San Francisco Bay Area, and immersed in liquid nitrogen at -196☌ (-320☏), a temperature at which the natural processes of decay and putrefaction come to a halt. So he arranged for his grandfather to be flown across the Atlantic, in a steel casket packed with dry ice. In 1989 the only cryonics facilities were in the US. Similarly, cryonicists admit that we can’t know for sure that medical science will become as all-powerful as they hope, but a relatively small financial investment in cryonics will at least buy you a shot at immortality, whereas spending your spare money on a nicer car or a bigger house promises only certain death.īauge did not know for sure that he could save his grandfather, but he thought he had a chance. The 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that we don’t know whether God exists but, if He does, a pious life can earn you infinite reward in heaven in return for a relatively small investment in this world. The logic of cryonics is therefore a little like Pascal’s Wager.
To those who are unconvinced that disease, old age and the damage done by freezing will ever be entirely curable, cryonicists such as Bauge say this: the odds of you rising again from the freezer might not be high, but they are surely better than the odds of you rising again from a small urn full of ashes. Doing this to recently deceased humans - cryonics - is therefore an ambulance into the future, a way of transporting the terminally ill to a time and place where they might be healed. Like most visionaries, his ambition inhabits a middle space between the prophetic and the pathologicalįor those who simply cannot stay alive long enough, freezing (more formally, ‘cryopreservation’) is a well-established way of delaying degeneration and keeping bodies fresh. To have a shot at immortality, all we must do is reach that future. Yet scientific progress is rapid and even appears to be accelerating, to the extent that we might reasonably hope such diseases will find cures in the future. There are many diseases that cannot be cured by contemporary medicine, such as cancer or Alzheimer’s, so we cannot currently hope to delay death indefinitely. Many believe it is an idea whose time has come. The procedure for preserving whole human bodies by freezing is known as cryonics.
Then they just had to get him to America. What was death, anyway? So Bauge gave his mother detailed instructions to deep-freeze grandpa Morstøl. Then they could simply wait until the day came when technology was advanced enough to repair a failed heart, or even reverse the ravages of ageing itself. Ever since, he had been fascinated by the idea that the terminally ill or even the newly dead could be preserved at super-low temperatures. As a child he had read about the idea of suspended animation in a popular science book he had found in his grandfather’s library.
Bauge had not given up hope of saving his grandfather, even though he was many thousands of miles away. The young man persuaded his distraught mother that burial or cremation would be premature, acts of resignation. Now Morstøl himself could no longer fight back against the assaults of fate, but his grandson could. Neither man was inclined to give in to ill fortune. From his grandfather, Bauge had learnt independence and resilience. Not even an earlier heart attack had stopped this active, outdoor life. He had taken his grandson, Trygve Bauge, with him as soon as the boy was old enough, spending the summers fishing and hiking in the mountains, staying in the high-country cabin that Morstøl had built with his own hands. The grandfather, Bredo Morstøl, had been a vital, vigorous man, a nature-lover who skied and painted well into old age. But he had not woken up: he had had another heart attack in his sleep. She needed to tell him that his beloved grandfather had gone to take a short nap.
On the line was his mother in Oslo, where it was already evening dark with a November chill. Boulder, Colorado, 1989: the young Norwegian’s phone rang.