The chosen, frozen few: it's a chilling thought Alex Beam 6 June 1998 Austin American-Statesman A13 Pawing through a magazine profile of Ralph Merkle, a nerdy West Coast scientist, I noticed a curious biographical detail: Mr. Merkle is one of the few people in the world who have paid to have their bodies cryonically suspended -- frozen -- after death. He hopes that scientists will discover a way to revive human life from frozen tissue before the Apocalypse, or before his yearly payments to Arizona-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation run out. OK, it's a bet. But more intriguing, Merkle's Web site provides a link to "quite a few people well known in the fields of computer science, software development and other high-tech areas" who've opted for the deep freeze. There are 26 of them and, not surprisingly, they have some things in common: 1. They are all nerds. 2. Twenty-five of the 26 are men. 3. Most of them, with the exception of Cambridge's own Marvin Minsky, live in California. So here's your first peek at post-Armageddon America: a bunch of cockroaches scurrying around the pant legs of 25 computer and biotech nerds, who are in turn scouring the Santa Cruz Moutains for frozen women to revive and fraternize with. It's a chilling thought. Interest in cryogenics has been heating up, slowly, since the 1964 publication of Robert Ettinger's book "The Prospect of Immortality." Ettinger now runs the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute, which charges a one-time, $28,000 suspension fee for clients who want to be around for the release of Windows 64. On his Web site (www.cryonics.org) Ettinger plays awful music and boasts of his company's "proven track record," whatever that means. Several other outfits will either suspend you or put you in touch with someone who will. The above-mentioned Alcor charges an annual $360 Emergency Response Fee (half price for students!) to fly the dry-ice guys to your bedside just before, or shortly after, you cross the Rainbow Bridge. (That's the term ferret owners use when their smelly, rabidoferous little companions go to the big litter box in the sky. But I digress.) As with everything, it pays to shop around. Wilmington, Del.-based CryoSpan claims to flash-freeze "humans and their companion animals at the lowest possible price," which turns out to be an annual $250 for "neuro" (brain only) or $1,500 for the full monty. The Cryonics Society of Canada does not perform cryonic suspensions, but has done permafrost interments -- prices not available at press time. So who wants to stick around, and why? Minsky, who has several major research proj-ects cooking over at MIT's Media Lab, explains that he could use the extra time: "At the moment, I'd estimate that I'd need about 500 years to complete some of my current projects. To be sure, in its present state, cryonics is very unlikely to help -- but right now, it's the only game in town." Robin Hanson, a 38-year-old health policy scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, explains on his Web site, "For a few hundred dollars a year, I estimate I'm buying a 0.5 percent chance of living for thousands of (subjective) years." His favorite musicians are Vangelis and Enya, so plan on hearing lots of ethereal sounds if you end up spending the Third Millennium with Robin. The only woman who may be available for soulful chats at sunset is Kennita Watson, a Libertarian activist who has run for statewide office several times in California. On the Internet, Watson calls herself "a kinder, gentler Libertarian, because I think that most people are at least trying to do the right thing, and that (this being reality) we can't teleport from here to the promised land of Libertopia; we'll have to trek across the coercion-strewn wastelands to get there." See you in 2175! Is it worth risking freezer burn to see if there really will be 500 channels on TV? I don't think so. But as the cryonicists like to point out, this is one experiment you're already participating in. They're the experimental subjects. You and I are the control group.