Pancake, 47, a wry redhead with a sharp sense of humor that would be right at home on The Daily Show, came to Alcor from a Hollywood job as a props specialist in science fiction movies. Her 14 years in that field attuned her to the ways in which society’s vision of the future is largely shaped by popular sci-fi.

“The future, in movies, has always been very dystopian,” she says, rattling off a list of films – from Woody Allen’s Sleeper to Aliens to even Planet of the Apes – in which cryonics, typically misrepresented as “freezing” a body (they’re actually preserved today in non-freezing liquid nitrogen), fast-forwards its heroes into a dismal future.

“Offhand, I can’t think of any movie or TV show where cryonics delivers the characters to a better place and time,” she says. “Well, maybe Futurama,” she adds with a chuckle, referring to the Simpsons-like TV show.

But now, our collective vision of the future may be brightening in favor of cryogenics, says Richard Leis, an operations specialist for University of Arizona’s HiRISE Mars Orbiter imaging center. He signed up for cryonic suspension at Alcor a little more than a year ago.
 
“That line in Obama’s inaugural speech, about ‘restor(ing) science to its rightful place and wield(ing) technology’s wonders to raise healthcare’s quality,’ was emailed all through the cryonics community,” he says. “But people are already coming around on their own. When you’re seeing the world transformed by emerging technologies, I think people naturally become more optimistic about those technologies actually working to eliminate diseases, and maybe providing a way to slow aging and even death.”

Leis funds his cryopreservation fee with a 20-year term life insurance policy that the 35-year-old says costs him less than $25 per month – a popular route for younger sign-ups. To preserve itself in the long run, Alcor set up the interest-earning Alcor Patient Care Trust in 1997 to supplement the revenue derived from membership fees and donations. The trust puts roughly $65,000 from each registration into the shared fund, which now holds assets of more than $3.5 million.

“It’s all a gamble,” Pancake admits. “Who knows? A giant comet could wipe out the Earth, and then it’s ‘game over’ for everybody.”