January 23, 2004

Timeship. The world's first comprehensive facility devoted to life extension research and cryopreservation, a six-acre structure that will house research laboratories, animal and plant DNA, and up to 10,000 temporarily dead people.

An interview with Stephen Valentine, the project's architect.

posted by dng 20 years ago
  • there was a long piece in the new yorker about this guy too. fascinating stuff!
  • Here's an extract from the New Yorker piece: Valentine believes that the Timeship must be built in a beautiful landscape, otherwise people won't think of it as an appealing place to spend what might be eternity. He wanted to build the Timeship in Tuscany, but he decided that the United States is more likely than Italy to be politically stable for the next hundred years. He has been looking at sites for two years, and .. he has narrowed his search to four states, but, except to say that all of them are in the lower half of the country, he won't tell which they are. He eliminated the other forty-six by mapping the hazards and threats they contained. His maps took account of earthquakes, snowfall, rock slides, avalanches, tornadoes, hailstorms, flash floods, volcanoes, hurricanes, sinkholes, lightning strikes, rogue glaciers, and showers of meteors. He also made note of weaknesses in the ozone layer, sources of geothermal energy, wind patterns, pockets of radon gas, rising water levels, concentrations of lead and other metal pollutants, groundwater poisons from landfills and industrial dumps, crime, and the possibility of terrorist attacks .. In a nuclear war, the Timeship could run on its own for six months, so long as an atomic bomb falls no closer to it than twenty miles. I find it hard to believe that this project will ever get off the drawing board (and the reporter sounds a bit sceptical too), but perhaps I'm underestimating the number of very rich people who are prepared to invest in the possibility of personal immortality.
  • Afraid I'm giving it a chilly reception.
  • Being of the opinion that life-extension research is a gross misappropriation of our current resources I wait with bated breath when a guy who has lived to be 400yrs old trips over his great-etc etc-grandson's skate fall down a flight of stairs and dies. If the incident occurs on XMas morning, so much the better.