[porejide]

Alcor and Oregon Cryonics have patient care trusts that are designed to build capital to pay for revival: https://alcor.org/AboutAlcor/patientcaretrustfund.html

"It doesn’t do any good to use the most advanced techniques to get our members into cryopreservation unless we can keep them there, as well as build capital to eventually fund revival and reintegration."

Also, if the technology to do revival develops in the future, it is likely to be relatively cheap.

Analogy: in the 1910-1920s, people were interested in life extension via hormone replacement therapy (mostly misguided, but that's a separate topic). They were understandably worried that this would only be available to the rich, as it was relatively expensive to do at the time. One hundred years later, hormone replacement therapy is relatively cheap and widely available, at least in countries like the US.

There are many many problems with cryonics, but IMO this is not a major one.

[richk449]

Not sure how that helps. What is alcor’s incentive to bring me to life in the future? Remember, I’m dead, so I can’t post nasty comments on twitter when they leave me in the vat.

More generally, why would I trust a private company to bring me back to life? It is extremely rare for any company to last for hundreds of years. And pretty much inconceivable for one to last that long without going through periods of very short term thinking.

[porejide]

So if your point is a separate one, that Alcor et al might have to close, eg as a result of war or global financial collapse, then that is a very reasonable point and absolutely a potential cause of failure.

It is one of the things that Tim brings up as well: "The cryonics company goes bankrupt and doesn’t have the means, the will, or the organization to create a plan that will save the patients. I mentioned that this happened a few times with some of the earlier companies. The major companies today claim to have secure backup plans in place in case of the worst case scenario, and this security blanket is the main purpose of Alcor’s sizable trust."

[richk449]

No, I was just supporting my original point. I think that for the most part, people do things because they are incentivized to do them. What is Alcor's incentive to wake me up 500 years in the future?

Contractual obligation? I find it very unlikely that legal systems and national organizations will still be around 500 years from now to make it necessary for Alcor to honor it's agreement with me.

Market forces? I doubt it. Say Alcor is still in business - their business model will have to be very different, given the change in technology we can expect in 500 years. Since they will be selling something very different, will anyone care that they dumped those 500 year old bodies? Probably not. They will just announce on a Friday before labor day weekend that they had an anomaly and lost cooling, and by Monday everyone will have forgotten.

Familial connections? Why would my ancestors want to bring me back to life? Would you want to bring your 80 year old great great great great great aunt back to life right now, and give her antibiotics for the pneumonia she died of, and then care for her? Remember, she has never seen a telephone or a computer or a tanning salon, so it is going to take a lot of work on your part just to get her comfortable with living in the modern world. If you want to bring more people into the world, why not make or adopt a baby? Why pick an old person to bring into the world?

Moral obligation? Ha.

I just don't see any reason for me to be brought back to life. The only way I see it working is if I somehow created a financial reward for whoever brought me back to life. That seems almost impossible to pull off though.

[D-Coder]

So... you'll be dead.

How is that worse than your original state, other than the money that you could have given to someone else when you died?

[richk449]

It's no worse.

I can think of infinite things to spend money on which would likely leave me no-worse off. Why should I dump my money into this one?