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Comment by arghwhat | Hacker News Reader

What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion.

There is pretty much zero chance that a cryopreserved individual would be revived. They're frozen when dying or dead, the process itself causes significant damage (with every mitigation just trading in a different severe form of damage), and even if future technology could undo all that and somehow make this severely damaged body somewhat operational, why in the world would anyone bother?

The person is forgotten, replaced, and has nothing in their name any more. There is no gain for those reviving them.

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> What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion.

Source? Based on my research, no cryonic institution has failed in this manner to date.

I think op was refferring to the first uhhh, cryonics attempts. They were sad, I recommend giving this podcast a listen: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/354/mistakes-were-made

I'm not sure if any actual official institutions failed in this way.

"... all but one of the documented cryonic preservations prior to 1973 ended in failure, and the thawing out and disposal of the bodies.". There are a decent number of articles and documentaries on the matter.

Even now it's a fringe psuedoscience with little support or even regulation. Expecting a company to be both able and willing to pay the bill to store and freeze your body in perpetuity seems... Naïve. Looking at average company lifetimes might be a useful metric here.

> why in the world would anyone bother

Why do people want to resurrect the woolly mammoth? ;-)

Because it's extinct.

That's actually possible, because you're not resurrecting a specific, dead wooly mammoth, you're growing a new one. Natural reproductive processes are an effective way to create living things, unlike thawing corpses with what are almost certainly irrevocably damaged brains.

Would a dying person be able to set up a trust fund or a bank account/investment that would "live on" when they die. Issue I see here is that the law does not recognize "crypreservation" as continuation of life so all your assets are probably inherited.

I'm sure cryo companies offer this type of safekeeping of money or investment.

it's hard to have faith that such an account could exist long enough to pay for your revival many years in the future. it would be very tempting for the living to raid large funds that are earmarked for reviving dead people. who would stop them?

I know personally, if I had the opportunity, I would gladly spent time bringing someone frozen back to life. I don't gain anything, but I also don't gain anything when I donate to charity either. The simple chance to do something good in the world is all the motivation I need.

I assume the cost to even try would be in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Spend that on the living instead. We're already too many as is anyway, no need to also bring the dead back.

They may get lucky. In Heinlein’s The Door into Summer the protagonist only survives the long sleep because he ends up put into storage with the wrong repository, but that happened to be the one that kept the lights on for 30 years.

Cryonics simply assumes the eventual development of molecular nano-technology per Drexler is able to repair both the freezing damage and any medical problems too. Not at all unlikely in a few decades, and almost certain within a century.

As for who would want you back ... your children, hopefully. And if there's no repair before they die ... hopefully their children would want them back. Etc.

I agree with everything that you've said except this:

> why in the world would anyone bother?

I think that historians in a hundred years would find opportunity to revive Larry King to be priceless.

One solution is to store frozen bodies in a lava tube on the Moon or Mars. Then the company can go bankrupt and that would have no effect.

Not so simple solution.

That's a solution to staying cold, not a solution to avoid getting severely damaged by the freezing process, already being weak/sick/dead at the time of freezing, and there being no realistic outcome other than being reduced to a sad meat popsicle.

Yeah, I know. But at least it addresses one more issue than the current state of the art ^^

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