When Pandelis (Peter) Tsolakides read the book The Prospect of Immortality in the late ’60s while completing his chemistry degree at RMIT, it made so much sense to him he thought that by the time he retired, it would be a certainty.

This founding text in cryonics by eccentric WWII veteran Robert Ettinger, proposed that freezing people may be a way to advance future medical technology, and that “what appears to be fatal today may be reversible in the future”. This had a bewitching effect on the young Palestinian born Greek Australian. “To me, it seemed reasonable. Let’s be really clear now – there is no guarantee that you will be brought back to life, but there is a really reasonable chance. “And I thought to myself – the reasonable chance sounds better than no chance when you are dead,” Tsolakides told Neos Kosmos.

However, as a young student, Tsolakides wouldn’t have dreamt that by 2009 he would be the co-founder and director of Stasis Systems Australia, a not-for-profit company, and the first one to build Australia’s cryonic storage facility. Cryonics (κρύος – cold) is the preservation of the human body, at cryogenic temperatures at minus 196°C, in the expectation that highly advanced medical technology in future may be able to repair the accumulated damage of aging and/or disease at the molecular level, and restore the cryopreserved people to health. The cryogenic process involves the blood being the drained and replaced with anti-freeze after a person is legally pronounced dead, and the body then stored in liquid nitrogen to preserve it.

Bodies are frozen and kept upside down in cylinders, also known as cryostats. This way, in case of any outflow of liquid nitrogen from the top of the cryostat, the first thing to defrost would be the feet, leaving the brain cold. Cryonics hopes that it will be possible to defrost cryopreserved patients once medicine and technology progress, but still, there are no guarantees. “You can’t tell in how many years, nor if it’s going to be possible or not. We believe it’s going to be possible; the advantage is that you have more time. Some people think it’s 50 years away, other say more; but the patient can be held in those conditions, in liquid nitrogen, for thousands of years if needed – the body will remain invulnerable.”

However, the long period of time that cryopreserved patients will have to be kept frozen, is also a period of great risk. “Once you put the person in the storage, it’s all about keeping them in the liquid nitrogen and making sure that the container is always topped up,” Tsolakides says. In his opinion, as a “conservative person”, it won’t be that long; “it’s probably around 200 years away”. STASIS SYSTEMS AUSTRALIA After reading Ettinger’s book, Tsolakides thought it was such a good idea, that sooner or later it would be a normal service that was available to everybody. Before Stasis Systems Australia, Tsolakides was building a successful career path as manager and strategic planner for the oil company, ExxonMobil, working in Japan, America, Thailand, and the USA. Then, as retired man in his 60s, he was surprised to notice there were only two cryonics’ organisations in the USA, and one smaller one in Russia.

“I became interested and thought – well if no one else is going to do that – I will.” One night, in 2009, he attended a meeting of Cryonics Association of Australasia (CAA). It was here that he got together with now 47-year-old Mark Milton, another cryonics’ believer disappointed with the fact that Australians who wanted to get frozen had to travel – or be shipped after being pronounced dead to the USA. The Cryonics Institute, in Michigan, already has six Australians in cryopreservation, and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, has two. “We talked about it, and all of a sudden we realised we both had the interest, and wanted to do it. We developed the idea of building the first cryonics storage facility in Australia.

We thought we would never get ten investors, each contributing $50,000. In the end, we recruited 11 investors, committed to contributed $50,000,” says Tsolakides. Even though this idea was born in 2009, it wasn’t till early this year, when the investors were found, that Stasis Systems Australia was incorporated as a non profit company, with Peter Tsolakides and Mark Milton, as founders and directors. The money invested by 11 investors will be used for construction of the facility, which is to be completed in next two years. In the meantime, Stasis is getting people together, talking with Government officers and cooperating with “very helpful” NSW Department of Health, and looking for a land suitable to build a facility that is going to stay there for decades or, if everything goes according to plan, even centuries. “At the moment, we are looking for land and we have done the screening of most of the areas in NSW.

The land has to meet some criteria; we are looking for low bushfires area, low earthquake area, low possibility of flooding, area that is close to local hospitals that we may use, somewhere reasonably close to liquid nitrogen supplies as well. We have already shortlisted a few of them. It will be in some major rural town, not in Sydney,” Tsolakides explains. The main thing he says about this life-expectance expanding technique is that suspension starts after someone has been legally declared dead. “We are not suspending someone while they are still alive. But as we are dealing with human remains, there is a whole lot of legal requirements that you have to meet. We are just making sure we meet all the criteria that the NSW Health Department has told us about.” Once it’s built, the facility itself will have roughly 60 places available, but according to Tsolakides, it’s a scalable facility, that will be situated on the fairly large block of land; in case there is a need for further expansions.

Cryonics patients are stored in cylinders – either in cryostats (as in Cryonics Institute, Michigan) or dewars (Alcor, Arizona), that can hold about six people and can easily be added. Presently, there are about 200 patients worldwide who have undergone cryonic suspension: around 100, roughly split, in each big facility in USA, and about 15 in KrioRus in Russia. Worldwide, the cryonics community is constituted of about 2,500 people interested in putting their name on the list to be suspended in the hope of immortality. SCIENCE AND RELIGION VERSUS IMMORTALITY “Nothing is guaranteed,” Peter insists, “but there is a good science behind it,” he says. Cryonics organisations use cryoprotectants to reduce the damage that may occur due to the formation of ice crystals within the cells, that is often one of the reference points for those who criticise them.

Cryonicists are now using ‘vitrification’, the leading method for suspension where cryoprotectants are used in high concentrations, in order to prevent the formation of ice crystals. But it’s not the science part that holds people back, as Tsolakides says, “it’s other factors.” “There is a lot of basis on which scientists criticise us -and they should- but a lot of them also support cryonics,” he says, referring to an open letter of support to cryonics, that responds to skepticism from scientists. The letter is written and signed by 62 scientists. “I think they make one mistake; they tend to mix two things together. One thing is freezing somebody, which is possible these days, but there are some issues with freezing. And another issue is bringing patients back again. I think they put both together. “We know that you can’t bring anyone back, at this point in time, but freezing someone is reasonable. Bringing someone back is not a matter of research for scientists now, but it may be 200 years in future. 200 years ago, scientists wouldn’t believe there will be cars, computers, and iPods today.

It’s hard to project what will be possible 200 years in the future,” he says, adding that when it comes to cryonics, Australians are open-minded. Generally speaking, cryonic suspension is mainly of interest for men, with around 80 per cent of cryonicists globally being men. The main demographic for those that cryonics tends to attract, (based on a internet survey over ten years) shows that it’s usually male, reasonably well-educated, particularly in science or related areas, agnostic or atheist in belief, between the ages of 35 and 65. “The survey may be dated, but from my own observations it does not seem too far off,” says Peter, whose wife Soula, even though supportive and open to cryonics, hasn’t put her name on the list yet. “I’m still trying to convince her,” Peter says. Assuming that he was born and brought up in Greek Orthodox family, I ask him how religion looks at cryonic suspension? As a non-religious person, Peter is certain there is no conflict with religion here; there is a big number of cryonicists that are “very religious”, including the co-founder Mark Milton. “We are talking about extending people’s life here. We are not looking at living forever; we are looking into living as long as we want to live.

The extra 20 years we live now in comparison to our grandparents, is due to science. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s against religion. My mum does support me, but she doesn’t necessarily agree with it. If you believe in heaven, it’s irrelevant if you go to heaven now or in 500 years’ time,” Peter says. “I’m not saying we want to live forever; we’re just saying that we want to choose when we go.” Australians, who want to put their name on the list for cryonic suspension, can join Stasis Systems Australia as investors. A group of founding members – who will help finance the building of the facility, have their suspension pre-paid at a discount of $50, 000 once the facility is built. After the facility is ongoing, the pricing will be about $75 000. Around $20,000 is the cost of actually suspending somebody, and the share of buying one of cryostats; with around $1,000 a year needed to maintain a patient, and for the share of an employee.

For Peter Tsolakides, there is a long list of things that he wants to do, but one lifetime is just – not long enough. His personal reason for being involved in cryonics spread from seeing what happens in science and travelling, to attending the 500th Olympiad in year 3892, playing Spanish guitar and writing books. “I have a very active mind, I would love to do those things that I didn’t have time to do. I actually think I could go quite a few life times and not get bored. “I could easily fill a 1,000 more years without a problem.”