Want to travel to the distant future, to a distant world, be able to live to see what happens to the great-grandchildren of your great-grandchildren's great grandchildren? Would you like to be ageless, to take advantage of all the medical knowledge of the future, and perhaps even age backwards? Heck, I know I would! But everlasting life is not for the faint of heart- there's no going back, and there's no guarantee that where (and when) you're going to will be any better than here.

But it's worth a shot, right?

This is the realm of cryonics, or as it's more widely known, cryogenics; freezing something (organic or otherwise,) to put it into what essentially is a state of suspended animation. For most of us, Cryogenics sounds like something out of science fiction, something relegated to 20th Century Fox's "Aliens" series, or something so obviously ludicrous (at this point in time, anyway,) that it's nothing more than a money-trap for the rich and gullible. Yellow journalism as well as the cartoons of such famous artists as Gary Larson have given cryogenics a bad name- not that some of that reputation isn't deserved. In 1987, only three of the several dozen pioneers, (cryogenic guinea pigs, if you will,) including the original "cryonaut" James Bedford, were still frozen- the rest had thawed, unlucky men and women whose cryogenic companies had folded or whose relatives had refused or been unable to pay for the storage of their dead forebears. But, times change, as they always do, and cryogenics has become a very real, very safe scientific reality- though with one catch; We're not too sure about the unfreezing process yet. No one has been successfully "thawed" yet, but that's not to say there were failures- quite the opposite, actually; while no cryogenically frozen human beings have been awakened from their icy slumbers, test results on Animals (though no mature, multicellular adult organisms have actually been deep frozen for a long period and thawed directly, per se,) are promising. But don't let that dash your hopes- cryonists agree that it can be done, but has not for one simple reason; all their patients are dead.