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Comment by banga | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Yep, that's exactly the stance I've heard from people who are interested in this sort of thing.

And to be honest, <1% odds seem a lot better than 0% odds for normal death. (Sans religious aftermaths)

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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludger_Sylbaris

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

> It would have been unthinkable centuries ago that people donate money, time and effort to help those in distant lands

In 1847 the Choctaw nation sent money to Ireland to help with the famine.

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.

Also Benjamin Franklin pulled of something like this from 1790-1990 "2,000 be divided equally between Boston and Philadelphia for use as loans for young apprentices" https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/21/us/from-ben-franklin-a-gi...

People spend millions on the lottery. Old rich people spending their money on a revival ticket with similar chances doesn't seem that bad to me.

Reminds me of an old movie called "The Asphyx"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asphyx

Since everyone is sharing related films, might I recommend Dennis Potter’s "Karaoke" and "Cold Lazarus", which deals directly with this theme?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaoke_(TV_series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Lazarus

>”there'd be those pesky bureaucrats to deal with (id, taxes, all the fun stuff). Hilarious.”

Turns out, death can be cheated but the taxman cannot.

> 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.

Yes. They will defrost and bury them.

Unless things have gotten really bad, in which case they'll defrost and eat them.

One thing they won't bother to do, is defrost and re-animate them, because why?

Wouldn’t we if we had some prehistoric people in ice and had the technology? The whole world would want to watch.

> One thing they won't bother to do, is defrost and re-animate them, because why?

Maybe as like a really morbid party gag. Or to progress mad science?

Robots will do it as a hobby. It will show to an enslaved humanity, that even death won't be an escape.

The not-so-nice version of the Culture Minds working with people because they're interesting in a kind of goofy way?

> And even if they could be bothered, the thawed would be a lab experiment, owned by whatever corporation pulled off the magic.

Which is the plot of several sci-fi books. The most recent I'm aware of being the fun and light "We Are Legion (We Are Bob)"

Implicit in your assumption is that nobody in the future will ever have the means and eccentric interest to want to revive these people.

If we could revive an iceman today, we absolutely would have, if not for science than for profit.

On that note, I'm disappointed by how often the future is assumed to have progressed no farther than today's form of capitalism.

That and TFA both speak to the same problem: the unimaginative belief that now is what was, is, and ever shall be.

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.

that was great to read

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