The following is an excerpt from the chapter:

We have good reason to be repulsed by the thought of death as nothing ever seems to look as good as it did while someone was living in it, but that doesn’t mean that the tenant hasn’t found a better place to live. The Egyptians were not alone in seeking to preserve the body, fearing its destruction would render the spirit “homeless”. More recently in the book The Prospect of Immortality (1963), Robert Ettinger proposed freezing the clinically dead to cryogenic temperatures (cryonics) on the basis that in future nothing would be beyond the means of mortal man, including the ability to revive frozen meat. At the start of the 3rd millennium only 100 or so people had paid the $100,000 to be placed into this form of mummification. It remains to be seen whether they or future archeologists benefit from their investments. For the rest of us medical science continues to extend our shelf life through application of drugs, genetic engineering, and substitution of organ function, and death remains the definition of what is measurable physically.