I find the whole concept hilarious. There's an implicit assumption that someone in the future will be bothered to resurrect a frozen body, then resurrect them from death (since they already died before being popsicle-ified). And even if they could be bothered, the thawed would be a lab experiment, owned by whatever corporation pulled off the magic. And if magically they came out of the ordeal functional and free, there'd be those pesky bureaucrats to deal with (id, taxes, all the fun stuff). Hilarious.
I’m not signed up, but I know many people who are, and none of them assume any of these things. No one “expects” it to work, it’s just that they figure a long shot is better than no shot. The people I’ve talked to about it put their chances of successful revival at significantly less than 1%, and they think that’s worth it.
The LessWrong surveys asking (paraphrased) whether the average human iceblock from today will be reanimated seem to be in the low double digits. That's a lot higher than 1% and a lot higher than I'd put it.
I'm glad there are signups for cryonics, just on the off chance it works and anthropologists hundreds of generations in the future get to talk to a real life human from our time period. If people started freezing themselves en masse I'd have concerns about whether preserving millions of dead bodies is a good use of time and effort.
Yeah I dunno. I mostly don't interact with LW, I mostly interact with people who are part of the in-person core of the community, so maybe the people online just have less realistic hopes than the core does.
Humanity has tended to become more compassionate over time. It would have been unthinkable centuries ago that people donate money, time and effort to help those in distant lands; now it's commonplace. A frozen body from the past would be primitive and foreign to people in the future, but there are all manner of charities devoted to helping those (including helping with "id, taxes, all the fun stuff") who are primitive and foreign to us today.
I bet Barnum and Bailey will make a come back in the future using the cryocrones as a way to get around all the animal rights objections, parading them around like Ludger Sylbaris [1] in the guise of fundraising for these cryorestoration charities. For a little extra, you can feed them using their favorite food, high fructose Jurassic syrup. Sounds very enlightened dystopia.
The fact that you find the way a "primitive and foreign" person was treated a mere century ago so horrific from the perspective of today rather proves my point.
I’m just a cynic with the comedic sense of a Vogon and that was more an attempt at humor than a serious argument :-)
Though I will add that morals and their reach often wax and wane. Chattel slavery is less acceptable today than it has ever been globally but there are more chattel slaves than ever just due to insane population growth
Ha, interesting, a while ago I was thinking about a solution to this very problem. Everyone seems to focusing on the freezing part, but not what happens with the timeframe until you are unfrozen and beyond. Because in addition to nobody wanting to unfreeze you, you also would have no money and would basically be “poor” 500 years from now. On top of that there needs to be a long term storage facility which is somehow paid & maintained to “store” a frozen person over hundred of years until technology is available to unfreeze and revive a person.
As a solution I think there should be a special “bank” like organization which sole purpose it is to survive for hundred of years. It also would need to grow the money to keep up with inflation. In addition this organization needs to be country independent since you can’t guarantee countries to survive that long. This organization would also use some of the investment proceeds to pay for the storage and even transfer frozen people to a different location in case of war or natural disasters.
This is a solved problem. Money goes in a trust in a state that has no law against perpetuities like South Dakota. Then pull it 200 years later as a bajillionaire, and you have an end run around capitalism.
> There's an implicit assumption that someone in the future will be bothered to resurrect a frozen body
I imagine that mad scientists, in general, suffer from a lack of test subjects. I'm pretty sure the future will find something to do with frozen humans who signed up to be resurrected.
If you haven't already, and without too many spoilers further than some (non-comedic) resonance with your comment, Charles Sheffield's Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a worthy read.
