[fipar]

I think even if you ignore the environment, and cost, the argument for cryonics is not very good.

Let's say someone is successfully revived, there's still heart attacks, cancer, crime (and not just "lowly" criminals, crime also happens within families for inheritance, for example), accidents (car, or just slipping in the shower), earthquakes, ... The list is pretty much endless.

Death is unavoidable, IMHO it's best to learn to cope with it, and focus efforts on reducing what most people would consider the worst deaths (infants, long and painful diseases, wars and torture, etc).

That said, as long as not many people try this (the environmental cost would be high), if many people think about this possibility and that helps them cope with their mortality, and that of their loved ones, good for them.

[hyko]

Even though Death is unavoidable, it’s still a good idea to wear a seatbelt.

Edited to add: it’s hard to imagine a civilisation with the technology to successfully re-animate a corpse, but that is unable to treat heart disease & cancer. Not impossible I suppose, but seems highly implausible.

[Smaug123]

Learning to cope with death is not actually mutually exclusive with taking a punt on cryonics! A 1% chance of survival is still a 99% chance of death, so you'd better have made your peace with it either way.

[Juliate]

Yes, if only for the legal status of property/inheritance: if you are to be revided, who owns your wealth? Do you children inherit? And/when you are revived, what resources do you have? Is your family/descendants in charge of you, or you of them?

[Retric]

Cryogenic preservation is treated like mummification, you’re just declared dead. At which point your assets are likely to just get spent.

If you want to be safe, set up a trust that pays to you preferably and if not then to any descendants you have. That’s unlikely to work if you’re somehow revived in several hundred years, but it’s better than hopping random people will hand you money voluntarily.

[srtjstjsj]

You can't have a trust with no trustee. Is your trustee really afraid of getting sued by a corpse with no heirs?

[hyko]

Deposit your savings in the Alan Turing school of investment, AKA buried treasure: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-markets-saft/saft-on-weal...

[biolurker1]

The argument is zero vs non-zero and anything else is noise

[fipar]

zero vs non-zero of what? If you say the argument is dying now vs dying later, sure, I'll agree.

[biolurker1]

Zero chance of living VS non zero chance of living. I thought that was a coders forum.

[fipar]

Which one is that forum you're talking about?

If you meant this one, it should be obvious that it's not exclusively about coders. Even if it was, your argument is quite weak if you don't qualify the non zero part a bit more. Zero chance of living how much longer than you would have otherwise? under what conditions? At what cost?

[biolurker1]

That's precisely why strict logic is required. You are putting more restrains into a very simple condition. Dead or infinitely small non zero chance of not dead. As said previously, anything else is noise

[fipar]

Respectfully, I disagree. I think the condition may be simple if looked at it from, say, a programming logic point of view. But given the costs involved, I think the other constraints are not noise: they're the signal needed to make the right decision.

Specifically, since you brought this up in the context of someone who will die of cancer, the tradeoff calculation must take into account that even if cryonics work (which is already a giant leap of faith right now), this person would also need science to advance enough so that a cancer that is terminal now will be somehow reversible in the future. Additionally, all the people he cares about would have to have survived too for this to matter. Again, this is all context, this is within the context of a dying person that says "Almost immediately I realised I just couldn’t do it. Life for me is about living, not just clocking up the years.". I don't think all of these extra constraints would be seen as noise by someone like him.