I'm curious--in these cryopreservation arrangements, what is done to incentivize future people to resurrect you? Anyone know?
I think if technology advances sufficiently that it is "easy" and "cheap" enough, people will resurrect cryo-preserved patients just because it suits them to do so.
If I had a button I could push that would bring someone who died in 1800 back to life, I would push it.
I believe I'm not the only person who feels this way, either.
People spend ages carefully preserving forks and other trinkets from the 1700s. Surely an entire person would be worth equal care, and a group of people more so.
Trinkets from a bygone era don't require medical care, housing, and feeding. Note, too, that historical preservation goes only so far - there's plenty of places where old buildings are torn down to make way for new ones. I have trouble seeing where frozen corpses are markedly more attractive to refurbish.
Trying another way, let's say the technology is created to bring Finney back, but it would only keep him alive for 4 hours, and after that there would be no chance of him ever returning. Would it be violating his beliefs for future-folk to bring him back for those 4 hours just because they want to hear what he has to say?
Otherwise, I think the proper response is "keep working on this technology until we've gotten that 4 hour window up to something useful."
Funny enough, he worked on Bitcoin, which may pave ways to Autonomous Corporations. In some time perhaps you could set a an autonomous corporation managing some funds in low-risk while delegating the surplus to payments conditioned on a "proof of conservation" of the body.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ted-williams-frozen...
http://www.alcor.org/press/response.html
(Unless your point was that Larry Johnson isn't a believer, in which case touche. But he parted with Alcor a long, long time ago.)
The first method (contracts) is dependent upon people. The second method (money) is dependent upon your currency remaining relevant as well as finding some way of managing the fund. People and money are both fallible, but I included them for completeness. I personally think that the last two reasons are much more likely if we're talking about hundreds (or thousands) of years. At those intervals though, a more relevant question might be, "who would store and maintain the bodies?"
There is no electricity involved.
It's a big leap of faith to think we'll ever be able to revive frozen dead people. Early applications of cryonics didn't take the tissue destruction of freezing into account. What other problems are being completely missed in the process?
And that's to say nothing of the problems related to reviving a dead person and fixing the causes of their death in a timely manner. Even granting a relatively uninterrupted progress of technology, it's a big assumption that such things are possible.
Literally everyone knows about ice formation. Robert Ettinger wrote about it in his cryonics book before it ever happened. Cryoprotectants have been used since the first real (ie non-cosmetic) cryopreservations.
>reviving a dead person and fixing the causes of their death
Cancer (for example) is nothing compared to reviving a vitrified human. Absolutely nothing. By the time you have the biological machinery to repair the kind of damage that thermal stress fractures, residual ice and cryoprotectant toxicity causes, cancer will be a curiosity in the bookshelves of history.
If the person died due to some kind of brain aneurysm, then sure, you probably can't fix that, but then again you're talking about a situation where there's really no structure to preserve in the first place.
Note that the vitrification process didn't exist before the 90s, and so it's a bit of a stretch to think that it's been handled adequately. And even then, there's the fracturing problem, which despite Alcor's handwaving, is a serious problem.
> By the time you have the biological machinery to repair the kind of damage that thermal stress fractures, residual ice and cryoprotectant toxicity causes, cancer will be a curiosity in the bookshelves of history.
It's a very big assumption that we'll ever have the machinery to repair the damage caused by the freezing process. But apart from that, there's real and rapid decay of tissue in the brain when a person dies. Loss of even a small percentage of brain tissue has seriously traumatic effects on otherwise healthy people who haven't been frozen.
It's probably not gonna work.
In order for people to continue buying cryogenic services, the company would have to be able to demonstrate that it's actually doing what it claims to do (keep the bodies frozen and stable). As soon as that stops, nobody would ever trust them with any business, ever. And as soon as revival is possible, it becomes the cheapest option, versus incurring the ongoing costs of preservation.
...unless defeating death leads to a huge overpopulation problem and severe restrictions on producing new children. Then there will likely be a lot of popular opposition to reviving them.
A revived frozen person first will need to have the condition that killed them dealt with. Then they will need training to be able to function at a basic level in society [1]. If we haven't got to a guaranteed basic income system or some other system that gets rid of the need for people to have jobs or live off welfare, there will probably be very few jobs that the revived person can be trained for.
Other than exceptional circumstances, such as reviving someone who would have knowledge of historical interest, it is hard to see how reviving a frozen person would be better for the future people than letting someone have a child.
I think Larry Niven's stories have it right--a given frozen person is far more likely to be broken up for transplant material than be revived whole in most potential future societies.
[1] I'm assuming it will take us a fairly long time to get to the defeated death stage, and so it will be a very different world that the person is revived into.