Still, not all the big money is put off by the B-movie, sci-fi aspect of cryonics. Edward Thorp, the 75-year-old founder of Edward O. Thorp & Associates, a Newport Beach, California, hedge fund, has lined up a cryonic-suspension team from Alcor to freeze him in a thermos filled with liquid nitrogen. Thorp is explaining this on a mercilessly sunny day during a conversation in his roomy office overlooking the Newport Beach Fashion Island Mall. He insists there’s nothing particularly strange about wanting to hedge his bets in terms of death. He doesn’t consider himself a kook; he runs an investment fund that he says has averaged a 20 percent return (after fees) during the past 30 years and made a lot of his clients rich. He’s a fitness buff. Indeed, with his tan, smooth skin, firm grip, and youthful demeanor, he could pass for a guy 10 years younger. Antioxidants and anti-inflammatory drugs are both part of his life-extension gospel, and he practices what he preaches.

“Want to try one?” he asks, pointing to a pile of large pills he has spilled out on his desk alongside a pile of small white ones. The pills form a cocktail he’s ordered from a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, company called the Life Extension Foundation, one of a growing number of firms cashing in on the longevity business. On his windowsill are the company’s order forms, brochures, and its most recent newsletter, all of which he is eager to share. The newsletter describes recent studies about the longevity benefits of typical supplements like omega-3, resveratrol (found in red wine), and grape-seed extract—and some not-so-typical supplements, like velvet deer antler and optimized cat’s claw. Tucked deep inside is an advertisement for the inaugural Life Extension Cruise, which sets sail from Miami aboard the Norwegian Sun. In theory, having fun while extending your life doesn’t seem like a bad idea, though the cruise, as the ad describes it, seems heavy on lectures about the latest longevity theories.

Thorp says he first became interested in cryonics after reading The Prospect of Immortality, a 1960s nonfiction book by sci-fi writer Robert Ettinger, who posited the basic scientific premise of cryopreservation. (Ettinger has gone on to start his own cryonics business, the Cryonics Institute, in Clinton, Michigan.) “It all made sense to me as a possibility,” Thorp says. So he began shopping around. Besides Ettinger’s firm and Alcor, he had a third choice: Trans Time, in San Leandro, California. (Alcor also has representatives in numerous countries around the world.) Ettinger’s firm had the lowest price—$28,000 for “vitrifying” Thorp’s head only—but Thorp settled on Alcor, the largest and best endowed of all the businesses. It will cost him $120,000 to cryonically preserve his entire body, but, Thorp says, “there’s more memory in your whole body than your brain. It would be weird to adjust to a new body.” (Those going for the head-only option are betting that they’ll be able to have a new body cloned from their DNA.)

Thorp was impressed with Alcor’s sales pitch: Alcor claims to have state-of-the-art technology, 77 “cryo-patients” in suspension, and more than 800 living clients. To Thorp, the company’s extensive client list means it is “an institution that will be around for a while’’—which is important, since he thinks it may be 300 years before science perfects the art of bringing people back to life. When the time comes for his revivification, Thorp probably won’t have to worry about money: He has set up a trust—reported to be as much as $50 million—that can be used to pay medical bills for revivifying him and rebuilding or regenerating any nonworking body parts.

Alcor provides detailed instructions to clients like Thorp. Its approach rests on the premise that the body is revivable after legal death. In the first 10 minutes after cardiac arrest, the brain is still viable, and there is little damage to bodily organs. So once Thorp or his designee notifies Alcor of his impending death (the company recommends that clients in their final days relocate to a hospice near its Scottsdale facility or find a cryopreservation-friendly hospital), the company’s teams will hover nearby on a round-the-clock watch. When Thorp’s heart stops and he is declared legally dead, they’ll rush in and put him in an ice-water bath before restoring his circulation and breathing artificially with either a heart-lung resuscitator known as a Lucas chest compression device or an implement known as a cardiopulmonary support Thumper.