Wired calls him "The Linus Torvalds of Antigravity", but NASA still won't return his calls. Since the birth of American Antigravity in 2002, Tim has been featured on a multitude of television networks, such as Nippon TV and the BBC, as well as extensively covered in print by sources as diverse as Wired Magazine and Jane's Defense Weekly.
Alcor calls them "patients", and right now, nearly 75 of these frozen souls are waiting for the future in vats of liquid nitrogen stored in Scottsdale, Arizona. We join Dr. Ralph Merkle, a director at the Alcor Foundation and a respected pioneer in nanotechnology, to learn how recent advances in cryonics just may enable long-haul interstellar spaceflight sooner than you'd guess...
"Alcor currently uses liquid nitrogen to keep patients at a temperature of 77 degrees Kelvin, which is cold enough that chemical reactions are effectively halted. Basically, once the patient reaches that temperature and is placed in permanent storage in our Scottsdale facility, they are in a form of stasis, and can remain that way unchanged for centuries. Obviously the important part is minimizing damage to the human organism before and during the cooling process. In the past, freezing an organism created ice-crystals that damaged cellular structure.
It might surprise most people to learn that this really isn't an issue in today's cryonic processes, thanks to the introduction of cryo-protectants and ice-blocking agents that suppress ice-formation entirely, meaning that you can now cool the tissue and not form ice, which is known as vitrification. It's making people take cryonics a lot more seriously..." - Dr. Ralph Merkle
Wired calls him "The Linus Torvalds of Antigravity", but NASA still won't return his calls. Since the birth of American Antigravity in 2002, Tim has been featured on a multitude of television networks, such as Nippon TV and the BBC, as well as extensively covered in print by sources as diverse as Wired Magazine and Jane's Defense Weekly.