Who Wants To Live Forever?

A new facility will store tens of thousands of cryogenically frozen people The hope is to one day bring them back to life, but just how realistic are its aims?

- Tom Ireland

For centuries, the world’s physicists, writers and philosophers have argued over whether time travel is possible, with most coming to the conclusion that it’s never going to happen. But on an 800-acre plot of land just outside the small town of Comfort, Texas, a group of architects, engineers and scientists are building a ‘Timeship’ that they say could transport tens of thousands of individuals to a far-distant future.

Their approach does not involve the use of flux capacitors, or zooming at light-speed through black holes. Instead, the Timeship aims to store people at such low temperatures that their bodies are preserved for a future civilisation to reanimate them, a concept known as cryonics. “Just as a spaceship allows people to move through space, Timeship will allow people to travel to another time in the future,” explains Stephen Valentine, who is the director and principal architect of the Timeship project.

Valentine has been given a multimillion dollar budget from anonymous donors to develop a ‘Mecca’ for cryonics and life extension. As well as a fortress-like building that can store frozen people, Timeship plans to store other precious biological samples such as organs, stem cells, embryos, and even the DNA of rare or threatened species. The site will also house the world’s largest life extension research centre, the Stasis Research Park.