There is an alternate solution I can’t talk about ‘cause it’s secret. But it will provide you with a guaranteed functioning and disease-free body by about AD 2340, provided you didn’t die of leprosy or drowning. It costs $2,800 per person, but the signup period will permanently close sometime in mid-April, for reasons we cannot disclose.
I know the above may sound sketchy, given the lack of details on how exactly this works. But look at it this way, given the alternative of permanent death - can you really afford not to pay the 2800 bucks for even the smallest chance we’re right?
The only meaningful difference between this scenario and frozen heads is the significantly more reasonable pricing of the former.
Well, if it could actually be done, it could be used to transport colonists to planets around other stars. Given the fact that it takes thousands of years to make a trip to even the closest stars with our current propulsion technology, it might be viewed as a methodology worth trying.
On the other hand, if you look at how our technology has exploded over the last quarter of a century, the revived colonists might find that the planet they were supposed to colonize had already been colonized because, during their trip, the propulsion technology developed to the point where the trip could be made in a handful of years instead of thousands of years.
Whenever someone asks, “What’s the worst that can happen?”, I always think, These people don’t have much imagination.
How about this. You wake up in a dystopian future where you and forty other corpsicles have been reanimated for a gladiator fight to the death with gruesome nasty weapons, and an electrode buried in the pain center of your brain which slowly ramps up from zero to OMG as the fight progresses and you pray for the sweet release of death. And that’s not even “the worst that can happen”. That’s just the worst that I thought of in less than a minute.
I’d be willing to contribute to a GoFundMe if you make any progress convincing SamueLA of the manifest flaws with his proposal. We haven’t even gotten to the parts where we just kill off the ill now, because cures later. Don’t want to waste all of those brain cells that might get damaged by disease!
Sure, but the cryogenics model doesn’t give that option. You don’t get to choose whoever you want from the past to revive, you only get to choose among the people available who froze themselves.
If we (somehow) found a magic cryopod from Egyptian times with directions for revival, we don’t get to choose who’s inside it. We either get to revive them or not. I’m betting on “we’d do it”.
If cryogenics becomes cheap and common, then I agree that the average person isn’t going to get a lot of value out of it. The future will have many frozen people to choose from, and why would they choose you?
But if the future wants to talk to someone who was alive in the 1960s? Well, there are only a few hundred to choose from (I think?). If the technology exists, I bet whichever randos got in on the ground floor are going to be revived. Sure, they might like to revive Kennedy or Neil Armstrong or whoever, but they don’t get to.
In this model, cryogenics is basically just “very expensive healthcare”. We don’t need to hypothesize about this. We already have really expensive healthcare for certain conditions, and lots of people die for lack of access to it.
In some places/cases, it’s the ones who don’t have good insurance/massive wealth. In others, it’s the ones where the expected cost per outcome is higher than the tables the bureaucrats have set. In others (say, organ donation) it’s a hodgepodge of the above and a waitlist and geographic constraints.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “affordable by your country”. Large countries’ GDPs can cover very expensive things. But they can’t cover very expensive things for every person.
Ok, I’ve learned something from this thread: Along with the “Do Not Resuscitate” clause in my living will, I’m going to write a “Do Not Resurrect” clause into my actual will.
By the way, didn’t Ted Williams get his head frozen? Quick show of hands of everyone who feels we should spend whatever resources and costs it takes to thaw him out?
Actually, I Thawed Ted’s Head might make a good “Horrors of Future Science” Movie, especially done MST3K-style.