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Looking forward to life after death? Forget that stuff
you learned about the Ten Commandments and the golden rule. With a
little luck, you can win it in a contest.
It seems one can win just about anything these days.
Cash is almost passé; get on the right television show and you might
walk away with a husband, a wife, pop stardom, or for you PBS fans,
a frontier home in 1883 Wyoming.
If the past doesn’t grab you there’s always the future.
Pepsi is reportedly negotiating with Russia’s space agency to send
the winner of a yet-to-be-designed promotion into space. Have a
hankering for power? Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has just the ticket
with “American Candidate,” a reality show under development in which
the winner will become a genuine presidential candidate. This may
not be the most dignified way for the greatest nation on earth to
choose its leader, though I suppose it can’t be any worse than the
last election.
With all
these extravagant prizes for the taking, how does a forward thinking
contest sponsor up the ante? How do you top space shots and
presidential bids?
The British
magazine New Scientist is offering one fortunate person eternal life
– or at least an encore of this one. Just collect three tokens from
upcoming issues, answer a few questions, write a 25-word essay, and
you
have a chance at being frozen after death.
Yes, Vanna, upon being pronounced dead the lucky
winner’s remains will be sent to the fabulous Ted Williams Memorial
Hospital (OK, it’s really the Cryonics Institute in Michigan) to be
frozen until a remedy is found for the cause of demise. A cure will
also have to be found for freezing; the state-of-the-art in thawing
currently leaves the thawee with a fatal case of freezer burn.
But that’s a detail. The more intriguing question is
why anyone would want to be iced and revived to begin with.
Personally, I will be mightily irked if I’m yanked back to “life” by
my great, great, great grandchildren. Let them face their own
problems, even if my generation is probably creating them. When my
race is run, I want no rerun.
I suspect cryonics mainly appeals to those who believe
this life is all there is. I find the notion depressing and
pointless, but from that standpoint it makes sense to grab every
last moment, glaciated or not.
Fortunately New Scientist doesn’t leave out those of us
who’d rather stay dead. At the winner’s option, he or she and a
friend will be treated to a week in Hawaii and a visit to the Mauna
Kea Observatories. It is interesting to note that the Hawaii prize
can be shared with a friend but the seal-a-meal treatment cannot.
Maybe they’re concerned about people sticking together.
The required 25-word essay must explain why the entrant
wants whichever prize he or she prefers. This would be a snap for
the trip to Hawaii but a bit of a challenge for freezing, at least
from my point of view. Still, being in the word business, I offer
one essay for each prize free of charge to anyone interested.
For those who prefer the beach: “Send me to Hawaii
because I expect more after death than locked-in freshness. Also, I
want to be sure I actually get my prize.”
If you’d rather take your chance on ice, try this:
“Freeze me. Birdseye carrot and peas me. A second chance would
really please me.”
And that, in the end, is what cryonics is all about. We
all want more from existence, whether we think it ends here or
continues beyond. I’ll take Hawaii on this earth, but life’s real
prize won’t be found in contests.
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