A CERTAIN POETIC TRUTH LAY in what Arriaza said, and it seemed perfectly possible to me that these ancient ideas still stirred and fermented in Chile today. I had discovered long ago from my writing about archaeology that rituals for the dead are among the most conservative and enduring of all cultural traditions, changing only gradually over time. This makes much sense from a psychological point of view. Our relations with the dead are fraught with bewildering emotions—regret, sorrow, guilt, fear, longing, and hope—and mourners feel bound to do all they can to make things right at the end. For most, this entails falling back on familiar, time-honored formulas of solace, whatever those might be—vigils, eulogies, last rites, mummification, funerals, graveside partings, wakes. To depart from these too radically has long seemed a sign of disrespect to the dead, a kind of casual good riddance at parting.
So I didn’t doubt that many Chileans still revere the dead and feel a deep psychic attachment to their bodies. Indeed, I had come to suspect something of the sort during the final morning of the Mummy Congress in Arica. After nearly a week in the confines of the congress hall, concentrating on an assembly line of papers delivered in two languges at a frenetic staccato pace, and after evenings spent socializing over bottles of Chilean cabernet with the strange crowd of mummy experts I had fallen in with, I was beginning to feel rather the worse for wear. I had been barely able to drag myself out of bed. I was certainly not alone; more than half the chairs in the congress hall for that last morning were empty. But as Chilean researcher Julia Cordova took to the podium and began warming to her subject, “The Fascination for Mummies,” I felt my interest pique again.
Cordova had taken it upon herself to conduct a small survey at the nearby archaeological museum in San Miguel de Azapa, which houses, among other things, a splendid display of Chinchorro mummies. She wanted to find out what visitors thought about the mummies on exhibit, and people had kindly obliged her. Just over half of those she talked to ranked the ancient bodies as the most impressive part of the museum: three-quarters badly wanted to see more of the preserved bodies. But the thing that interested me most was a rather odd question Cordova had slipped into the survey: “Would you like to be mummified?” I was very curious about the results. Thirty-one percent of the respondents, it transpired, were all in favor of being mummified. They definitely wanted their bodies preserved. But the majority, 60 percent to be exact, demurred at the thought: they feared that future generations would put them on display in a museum.
Cordova’s survey said a great deal about the fascination that many Chileans still feel for the preserved dead, but it occurred to me later that her results also perfectly captured a curious paradox about mummies I had noticed. We are, most of us at least, enthralled by the sight of ancient preserved bodies, with their gaunt faces, their fringe of eyelashes, their tresses and curls, their lustrous fingernails, and their bony leanness. We are enchanted by the immortality that they represent. Even so, most of us shrink from the thought of actually becoming one ourselves. We are repelled by the vision of the embalmer’s cold loveless hands on our bodies. We shudder at the idea of being stripped, splayed, inspected, carved into, hollowed out, stuffed, chemically treated, and wrapped. Most of all, however, we fear the prospect of looking less than our best for eternity, serving as pathetic figures of fun for future generations.
These, of course, are all legitimate fears, quite enough to convince most that speedy putrefaction is far preferable to lingering, moth-eaten mummification. But in some parts of the world, people are unable to relinquish the idea of eternity so easily. To transcend death, they have embarked on a bizarre quest: to preserve and mummify their own bodies. In America and Europe, for example, a host of new industries has arisen to pander to these desires among aging baby boomers. As I began thinking about these rabid self-preservationists—it was impossible to ignore them—I became very curious. I wondered just how far human beings were prepared to go in their quest for immortality. How far was I prepared to go? In search of answers, I turned first to some of the world’s most extreme self-preservationists: a select group of ancient Buddhist monks in Japan who had perfected the art of self-mummification.
IWATORO MORIMOTO WAS in failing health and said as much in the very first lines of his neatly typed letter. Felled just three months earlier by a major stroke, the venerable Japanese anatomist explained in flawless English that he was now paralyzed along one side of his body and that his heart could no longer be depended upon: it relied for its spark on the invisible circuitry of a pacemaker. For Morimoto, a man of great curiosity who had studied mummies from Egypt to Bolivia, this was a luckless fate. His life had begun shrinking into smaller and smaller circles. As a result, Morimoto had reluctantly decided to retire from his post at the Japanese Red Cross College of Nursing in Tokyo and had set aside his research on Japan’s little-known Buddhist mummies.
Japan, let it be said straight off, is not a place where many specialists would bother looking for mummies. There are good reasons for this, the first being environment. In the north, the climate swings wildly between hot, sultry summers and bitter winters, with a few typhoons thrown in for good measure; in the south, conditions are subtropical. Neither seems terribly promising for natural preservation of a human cadaver. Then there are the Japanese themselves. By ancient tradition, they abhor dead bodies: They see corpses as impure, and this sense of repugnance runs deeper still among the country’s many Buddhists. To them, according to Buddhist scholar Robert Sharf, a dead body is nothing more than “a lifeless lump of fetid flesh to be disposed of posthaste.” To rid themselves of this rubbish in times past, families cremated or buried their dead; not to do so smacked of ignorance, for Buddhists saw the body as something inherently transient.
So Morimoto and his medical colleagues were much taken by surprise in 1961 when they learned of the chance discovery of six mummies of Buddhist priests hidden away in temples in the remote northwestern mountains of Japan. The news seemed too bizarre to credit, but it turned out to be absolutely true. Devout Buddhists had tended to the mummies for centuries, although they were not much to look at. Most of the bodies were mottled, blackened, and thin to the point of emaciation; they sat crumpled over in a lotus position, wearing the grotesque rictus of death. Holes gaped in the chests of some like great rips in a sere cloth. Others looked as ragged and torn as mangled toys. Yet all the same, dutiful priests had enshrined them in special halls in their gilded temples and guarded them carefully: only a small group of modern devotees knew anything about them. Television crews from Tokyo raced to the remote region to capture the images for an astonished public.
Japanese anthropologists, historians, folklorists, and religious scholars were entranced by these discoveries. So, too, were many medical people. They formed an official committee led by the late Kôsei Andô and set about ferreting out more of these ancient priests. Eventually they counted nearly two dozen throughout the country. Most of these priests had lived between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries and many were followers of Shugen-dô, an antique form of Buddhism that blended elements of mountain worship, shamanism, Taoism, and magic. Those priests who devoted their lives to Shugen-dô retired from the world and made their homes for many years in lonely places with names like the Swamp of Wizards. There they lived lives of great asceticism. They crawled up to tiny shrines on sheer mountain pinnacles and immersed themselves for hours in cold waterfalls. They sat in rooms filled with the stinging smoke from burning peppers.
By such acts of self-denial, Morimoto learned, Shugen-dô masters obtained great powers for the good. These they often employed on their travels through the countryside in order to to protect others. Indeed, some legends described the magical ways in which these priests controlled nature itself, curbing plagues, droughts, earthquakes, and typhoons. The eighteenth-century master Tetsumon-kai, for example, was particularly renowned for his feats of healing. According to legend, Tetsumon-kai once ripped out his own left eye in order to earn enough divine merit to cure the sufferers of an infectious eye disease. On another memorable occasion, he reportedly lopped off his own genitals.
As old age approached, Tetsumon-kai and other great Shugen-dô ascetics began contemplating death. If they could transform, by dint of their immense self-discipline, the sickly transience of flesh into something immutable and eternal, they could perfect the self and become enlightened beings, Buddhas. So Tetsumon-kai and others set about mummifying themselves. For a thousand days or more, they abstained from eating the staples of their diet: rice, barley, soybeans, red beans, sesame seeds, millet, broomcorn, panic-grass seeds, buckwheat, and corn. They nibbled only at such things as the bark of pine trees or the meat of torreya nuts and sometimes they sipped at bowls of lacquer, a varnish made from tree resin. As they grew weaker, they endured all the torments of slow starvation: bone-weariness, melancholia, mental dullness, and endless cravings for food. When at last they were little more than skin and bone, they announced their readiness for death. Some asked to be buried alive in wooden caskets. Others died chanting in stone chambers underground. Only later did their disciples open these tombs. The ascetics, said legend, were untouched by decay. Their followers were practical men, however: they often salted or smoked the mummified bodies to further preserve them.
Morimoto and many of his medical colleagues were intrigued by these stories. They wondered how much truth lay in them. Had the Shugen-dô masters really succeeded in mummifying themselves or had their followers secretly practiced some unknown form of artificial preservation? The physicians decided to investigate. Like modern pilgrims, they toured the Buddhist shrines and, with the permission of the priests, undressed and studied the mummies. The stories of self-mummification, they soon discovered, were true. Only one of the Shugen-dô masters they found, the nineteenth-century abbot Tetsuryu-kai, had failed to mummify naturally in the tomb. Morimoto concluded that the mysterious diet of the ascetics had played a vital part in what had transpired. “By abstaining from five or ten cereals during three years or more while in life,” he observed in Acta Anatomica Nipponica, a prominent Japanese medical journal, “the [priests’] body composition was altered to be strongly resistant to decomposition.”
Just how human flesh could be so transformed by these methods has never been scientifically tested—perhaps because so few people today are willing to volunteer for experiments which would have them dining out for years on sparse salads of pine bark and torreya nuts washed down by bowls of lacquer. But as I mulled over Morimoto’s papers and neatly typed letters, I realized that this fierce desire to transcend the ceaseless ticking of the clock and to escape the ruinous touch of time was not confined to an obscure cult of ancient Buddhist priests. It blazes intensely in modern North America and Europe. To ward off the first portents of decay—sagging skin, rippling cellulite, flabby stomachs, and drooping rears—millions of baby boomers have turned into ascetics, too, devoting themselves to the new cult of fitness and beauty.
Indeed, I am no stranger to this cult myself. Like many others of my generation, I hustle off daily to the local temple of sweat for my own regular ritual of self-denial. As I heave and hoist, crunch and curse, I watch my fellow devotees closely. Surrounded by mirrors and outfitted in form-fitting Tactel and Lycra, they grimace and wince as they push themselves to the brink of exhaustion. They pump iron, jump rope, pound rubber, spin wheels, crunch abs, squeeze glutes, tighten triceps until their weary muscles vibrate like tuning forks. On the weekends, they rise at dawn for fun runs, marathons, triathalons, and dragon-boat races; in their spare time, they mountain-bike, canoe, kayak, ski, snowboard, windsurf, and kickbox. In the locker room each day, they pirouette and preen in front of the full-length mirrors, checking for the slightest sign of decrepitude.
To stay motivated is no easy matter. But, like other devotees, they have found sources of inspiration. Indeed, they even have their own Incorruptibles. The most famous of these is undoubtedly Jane Fonda, whose exercise videos exact much admiration and whose motto, “Discipline is liberation,” seems so apt. It isn’t so much Fonda’s workouts, Lean Routine and Favorite Fat Burners, that dazzle; these are thorough, but they are rather routine. Instead, what truly fascinates the fitness crowd is the spectacle of Fonda’s uncanny youth. The actress was well into her fifties when she filmed Favorite Fat Burners. Decades past her Barbarella days, she appeared more svelte, toned, and youthful than many a twenty-year-old. No mere exercise regime seemed able to account for such superb physical condition. Self-preservationists shook their heads in awe: Fonda’s flat stomach and lean thighs seemed proof that miracles could and did happen in the gym.
As age takes its toll, however, many devotees move on to other forms of self-preservation. They radically prune their diets. An intimate relationship exists, after all, between the natural process of growing older and the accumulation of fat. As American feminist Naomi Wolf has pointed out, postadolescent women naturally put on fat tissue, which is needed by the body to store sex hormones and maintain fertility. Cross-cultural studies reveal that the average middle-aged women is padded with nearly 38 percent body fat, a big jump from the 28.7 percent layering the body of a twenty-year-old. Such increases, observed Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth, have little to do with North America’s penchant for batter-fried potatoes, Big Macs, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, and double-foam lattes. “They are norms characteristic of the female of the species.”
Even so, few women watch the creeping advance of their scales with anything less than despair. Intent on staying willowy and young, many shun food with a sense of self-discipline that would do a Shugen-dô master proud. Moving relentlessly from one diet to another, from Pritikin to Dr. Atkins, and from Weight Watchers to The Zone, they sup for days at a time on cabbage soup and grapefruit and sip at carrot juice and vinegar. They boost their serotonin levels and balance their eicosanoids. They fret daily about their weight, commiserating in the locker room with their many dieting friends. “On any day,” writes Wolf, “25 percent of women are on diets, with 50 percent finishing, breaking, or starting one.”
To reach their ideal of thinness, many endure what Wolf has dubbed “self-inflicted semistarvation.” A woman on the Hilton Head Metabolism Diet, one of North America’s best-selling diets, dines on child-sized portions of protein and carbohydrates, consuming just 800 calories a day. This is far less than the 2,000 to 2,250 calories that a moderately active woman needs daily. On such spartan fare, dieters are consumed with hunger. They crave thick porterhouse steaks, bowls of buttery mashed potatoes, desserts of crème brûlée and custardy torte. Their thoughts are absorbed with food. Those as disciplined as a Shugen-dô master end up with gaunt, gawky, pubescent bodies. On occasion, they also end up fatally anorexic. What I find haunting is just how much these shrunken women resemble dessicated mummies.
For some of my generation, however, self-denial at the table and in the gym are only halfway measures. They venture further still, waging war on time and nature with the scalpel and the cosmetic surgeon’s skill. Between 1990 and 1999 alone, the number of liposuctions performed in America skyrocketed by 800 percent. Tummy tucks soared higher still, at 1,280 percent. And these procedures by no means exhaust the austerities that baby boomers are willing to endure. Gritting their teeth, they undergo microabrasion, laser resurfacing, face-lifts, and ultrasound lypolysis. In 1999 alone, nearly 623,588 Americans—a population roughly the size of Milwaukee—submitted to botox treatments, the injection of a paralyzing toxin, botulinum, into facial muscles to temporarily erase furrows and frown lines.
Few cosmetic surgeons like to think of themselves as being in the mummification business. Their promotional materials stress the leading-edge research that they bring to bear on the anti-aging industry. But some enterpreneurs make no secret of what they are about. A few years ago, Christian Fischer, an expert on bog bodies and the director of Norway’s Silkeborg Museum, received a peculiar phone call from an American businessman. He had an unusual question: he wanted to know who owned the bog where the best preserved of all Europe’s ancient bog bodies, Tollund Man, had been discovered. As it turned out, the caller wanted to buy the rights to bottle the essence of this peat for a women’s anti-aging cream. Fischer assumed the inquiry was little more than a prank. A few years later, however, an English colleague mailed him a leaflet she found tucked into a package of skin cream, the Essence of Time. The lotion’s key ingredient was pulverized peat from England’s Lindow bog, home of Lindow Man. The accompanying leaflet described the mummy’s exceptional preservation, noting that the skin of Lindow Man was soft and flexible and his nails neatly manicured. The secret, claimed the copy writers, lay in the natural chemistry of the bog. “This peat contains the unique combination of high organic energy nutrients which were transferred to the skin of this man, keeping it young, soft and resilient for two and one half millennia.”
Moreover, the dream of perfect preservation has led others to contemplate similar measures. During the early 1990s, the American film actress, Isabella Rossellini, the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Italian director Roberto Rossellini, was riding high in her modeling career. She was the official face of the cosmetic firm Lancôme, appearing in all its major magazine, newspaper, and billboard ads. But shortly after celebrating her fortieth birthday, Rossellini received word that she was about to be fired: Lancôme no longer wanted her gracefully aging face to adorn their campaigns. Rossellini was crushed and angered by the news. A few weeks earlier, she had read an article about Sergei Debov, then the head of the Moscow Mausoleumists responsible for Lenin’s body. She picked up her pen and wrote a letter to Lancôme, replying to her dismissal. “Dr. Debov,” she observed archly, “may be of some help to us.”
Rossellini was only trying to score a point, but others did not hesitate to embrace the preservative secrets of the mummies. During the late 1990s, spa enthusiasts in Scottsdale, Arizona, stretched their Visa limits for what one reviewer called “something mummifying” at the Camelback Inn. Once the campaign headquarters for American presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater, the fashionable resort boasted a well-known health spa. In 1998, it featured a ritual that would have sounded eerily familiar to any Egyptologist or mummy expert. Clients were first led into a dark room, where they were asked to disrobe and lie down on a towel-covered bed. A wrapper then appeared. Working slowly and methodically, she slowly draped their bodies in hot sheets of linen. Each piece of cloth was drenched in plant residues and oils: among the favorites were two arborial fragrances, eucalyptus and cloves.
The cumulative effect, reported one reviewer, was a strange, soothing, otherworldly experience. “I fell into what seemed like semiconsciousness,” she recalled later. “I loved it.”
THOSE WHO ARE truly bent on self-preservation do not have to settle for such temporary measures, however. Real mummification is also available for a price in North America. In a pyramid-shaped building in Salt Lake City, Utah, Summum Mummification caters to the eternity-minded by blending ancient Egyptian lore with New Age mysticism and modern organic chemistry. Summum’s founder, a licensed funeral director who goes by the name of Summum Bonum Amon Ra, but who likes to be called Corky, sees mummification as a kind of travel agency for the dead. Death, explains his company’s Web site, is a confusing state for the newly expired. “You look for anything familiar that will help reduce your fears and the body you just left is the most familiar thing to you. Most people are buried or cremated and this places their spirit in less than favorable circumstances, leaving it to fend for itself. In mummification, the preserved body serves as a reference point for your soul, allowing communication of instructions that will help guide you to your new destination.”
The staff at Summum are happy to pass on Ra’s spiritual road map once they mummify your body. For a starting price of $60,000, Summum will fly your cadaver to its human mummification division in Boca Raton, Florida. There, after washing your body with a sacramental wine in a “designated sanctuary,” staff members will take out your viscera and inject your brain with a chemical preservative that will harden it. Then they will immerse your body and internal organs for up to a month in a secret chemical cocktail. When you are ready at last, Ra and his colleagues will haul you out; coat you with polyurethane and a mixture of glycerin, wine, and oils; wrap you in yards of linen gauze; and give you a few preservative coats of polyurethane or latex rubber and a final shellacking with fiberglass. You will then be slid into a cast-metal casket of your choice. One local talk-show host has ordered a coffin in the shape of a man holding a microphone.
If you want companionship, you can always take along a friend. Ra has already mummified his own dog Butch, a Doberman pinscher, and his tabby, Oscar. As he happily points out on his Web site the tradition of mummifying pets is a particularly time-honored one. Among the families of the ancient pharoahs, the young doted on their pets—hunting dogs, cats, gazelles, and monkeys. To preserve them forever, the Egyptian royals entrusted their pets’ dead bodies to the embalmers, who coated the animals in resin and wrapped them in linen. Ra gladly offers to do much the same. For $14,000 and up, he and his colleagues will not only mummify your favorite hound or tabby Summum-style, they will also craft a bronze casket in the likeness of your pet. Obligingly, Ra includes detailed instructions for shipping a dead pet to Summum on his Web page. “Together with your beloved companion,” he rhapsodizes, “Summum will lift you and set you into the hands of timelessness. Our mummification process makes it possible for you and your treasured pet to be together eternally.”
Like many of his clients, Ra plans to be mummified himself; he hates to think of his own physical decay. “I spend a lot of time keeping my body in great shape,” he told one interviewer. “I do aerobics, lift weights, and I’m proud of it.” His wife, a bodybuilder, feels exactly the same way, as do many of their fitness-conscious clientele. But some Summum clients sign up for other reasons. A few Christian customers chose Summum because they wanted to put their best foot forward on Judgment Day, meeting their Maker in sterling condition. Others, the rich and famous mainly, view mummification as a mark of distinction. Ra won’t divulge any names. “We did that a few years ago,” he told me, “and our clients ended up in the tabloids. Their pictures were next to Boris Karloff’s. We almost got sued.” Summum is now trying hard to woo back the celebrities. Its plans call for a mountainside mausoleum that will enable great-great-grandchildren to ogle the sarcophagi of their ancestors through glass viewing windows.
Corky is not the only one willing to make you immortal, however. Engineers in the cryonics industry also have a game plan. They want to freeze your dead body so that it can be thawed and brought back to life—as soon as science figures out how to do it. In many respects, cryonics is an idea that the ancient Egyptians would have happily embraced: their greatest wish was to be preserved in such a way that their souls could once again inhabit their bodies. But exponents of cryonics aren’t much interested in dead religions or the fusty past: their eyes are firmly fixed on the far horizons of the future and the rich possibilities of science. The father of human cryonic suspension, Robert Ettinger, first got the idea of this form of preservation from researchers’ attempts in the 1940s to freeze frog sperm. If medicine could slip sperm into a state of suspended animation, then wake it gently back to life, why not other types of cells? And if that were possible, why not a whole body—a human one at that? Sci-fi writers in the 1960s and 1970s reveled in the idea. They swiftly peopled their novels and short stories with recycled humans.
Since then, cryonics has attracted its largest following from the Silicon Valley crowd, who are accustomed to forward thinking and rapid technological progress. In 1998, just over one-quarter of the more than four hundred signed clients for one of the world’s largest cryonics organizations, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Scottsdale, Arizona, toiled in either the computer or engineering industries. Alcor prides itself on its scientific credentials. One of its founders, Fred Chamberlain, describes himself as a former NASA electro-optical engineer responsible for portions of the unmanned Mariner, Venus-Mercury, and Voyager missions into space.
Alcor takes an upbeat approach. Its staff members don’t like using the word dead when they describe their clients: they prefer talking about “patients” and people who are “potentially alive.” This optimism stems from something they call the “grace period,” the length of time that human cells remain undamaged after the heart stops beating and the bloodstream stops toting oxygen and nutrients to the body’s cells. Some thirty years ago, when physicians first developed cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to push oxygen manually through the lungs and blood through the circulatory system of someone in cardiac arrest, the grace period was about four minutes. Today, with the jump-start of hospital defibrillators, that has grown to about eight. Cooling the body extends the grace period much further: some people, particularly children who have drowned in cold water, have been known to survive virtually undamaged when resuscitated more than sixty minutes after their hearts stopped. These figures give cryonics supporters much hope for the future. “We believe,” it says on the Alcor Web site, “that so long as a person’s brain cells and brain structure are properly preserved, the person is still potentially alive, no matter how much time has passed without heartbeat or respiration. ‘Death’ is not the lack of heartbeat and breathing, even though it is still used in this archaic fashion. ‘Death’ is a state which cannot ever be reversed to restore life.”
The only hitch is that science is not even close to finding a way to restore life Lazarus-like to a long-frozen human being. The problem is this: the human body consists of some 53 trillion microscopic cells; when these are frozen, the water within each begins to leak out. The minute droplets then freeze into jagged ice crystals that rip the delicate walls of neighboring cells like needles in a sea of balloons. Science currently has no way to mend 53 trillion cells. Cryonics supporters, however, seem unperturbed by this. They are fond of talking about the theories of Eric Drexler, the California guru of nanotechnology. Drexler envisions a world of bacteria-sized machines created by enzymelike assemblers, the engines of creation. By injecting huge armies of these invisible repair machines into a frozen body, Drexler and others hope to repair the trillions of rips and tears in the body’s fabric.
All this optimism doesn’t come cheap. To finance their own immortality, many clients take out special life insurance policies that pay out to the cryonics company of their choice. As with embalmers of every age, there is first-class cryonics, and then there is economy. At Alcor, some $120,000 to $130,000 will buy preservation of the entire body and all the trimmings; $50,000 will pay for conserving and storing the head only. People who take the budget route have to hope like hell that some medical researcher will not only happen upon a way to resuscitate the frozen dead but also devise methods for growing a new body from spare cells and gracefully grafting it onto the resuscitated cranium and brain. They also have to hope that Alcor outlives its founders by centuries, if not millennia, and that their insurance policies will be sufficient to pay for their long-term maintenance. A sense of humor certainly helps—animators for The Simpsons are fond of portraying clutters of bodyless heads in scenes of the future.
Alcor’s clients also have to be prepared for some fairly drastic postmortem surgery. Upon receiving word of a client’s impending death, the folks at Alcor promise to dispatch a CryoTransport team immediately to the scene. Once you are deemed clinically dead, they will begin administering drugs, packing you in ice, applying the automated equivalent of CPR, pumping out your blood, and injecting you with intravenous drugs designed to halt the process of cellular decay. Then you will be shipped off for major surgery in the Alcor headquarters in Scottsdale. Among other things, your head and chest will be shaved and your skull drilled with little holes to check for signs of swelling. Staff members will cut open your chest and saw your ribs apart. They will pump out all remaining blood with a bypass machine and replace it with chemicals designed to minimize damage to your tissues.
Clients who signed up for full-body preservation will then be enshrined in something that looks much like a giant stainless-steel Starbucks thermos. Instead of steaming java, it contains liquid nitrogen. People taking the budget route will have their heads placed in smaller canisters. In either case, their flesh will be chilled to minus 310 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point molecular motion reportedly dies almost to a standstill. According to the calculations of one science writer, decomposition requiring one second at body temperature will span thirty trillion years in that big chill.
If nothing else, such state-of-the-art medical technology promises to churn out hundreds of wondrously preserved mummies in the future. I confess I rather enjoy the image of entire warehouses stacked full of frozen Napster hackers, Yahoo programmers, and Apple engineers, complete almost down to their last DNA base pairs. But does Alcor’s glorious vision of the future really mean that all these dot-com millionaires will be guaranteed their shots at eternity? It seems unlikely, for if the strange history of mummies shows us nothing else, it reveals just how much can go wrong when the dead are unable to lift a finger to defend themselves. Even the world’s most devout mummifiers, the Egyptians, were prone to horrible foul-ups. They switched bodies, took out all the wrong organs, slapped on too much boiling resin, and slipped bodies into too little natron. They tied together already rotting limbs with the Egyptian equivalent of duct tape, then concealed their mistakes under yards of linen. Then the most unscrupulous spent their evenings plundering those they had embalmed just a few months earlier.
Eternity, moreover, lies at the whim of future generations, and who knows what they will make of all these twenty-first-century mummies? Five thousand years from now, when nameless treasure-seekers crawl down into the eerie darkness of a long-buried warehouse and stumble blindly like moles into rows of giant stainless-steel thermoses, now rusty and bent and toppled, who knows what will happen? Will these fearless adventurers pry off the lids and see long rows of ancient saints with delicate perfect hands and rosy cheeks? Will they, after offering up silent prayers, begin cutting out their hearts as sacred relics? Or will they size up this trove of ancient human flesh for its commercial potential and auction off its primeval DNA and untainted blood cells on some future version of eBay? Will they view these strange corpses as some quaint curiosity of ancient earth technology and cart them back as trophies to molder in their own galactic museums? Or will they disdain all this fleshy debris as just selfish clutter, yards of human bubble paper that should have been recycled long ago? And will they consign it to the nearest recycling bin?
Whatever they decide, there seems precious little chance that these rosy elders will sleep dreamless and undisturbed through the millennia. Mummies have always spoken to us on some deep primal level, and we are simply unable to leave them alone. We love them and we fear them, we aspire to be them and we dread that fate. But one thing is certain: we are powerless to resist their potent appeal. As long as humanity yearns for eternity, we will surely try to destroy our only material chance at it.