I suspect that the average person I see on the street is not aware that there are active cryonics companies in the United States which will preserve your corpse upon expiration in the hopes that future technology will allow you to be revived so that you can continue existing. Assuming you know about cryonics and have an interest in the idea, you may want to spend some time thinking about the particulars and processes involved. Cyronics is a scientific discipline – an unproven and often maligned and belittled field. Let’s be honest though – if you aren’t putting your hope in a perfect afterlife why not take a shot that you might be able to live again here in this world?
Aschwin de Wolf explores “5 dangerous ideas about cryonics.”
5. I will sign up for cryonics when I need it.
It should be obvious without much reflection why this is a dangerous idea. At the time a person really need cryonics, he may no longer be able to communicate those desires, lack funding to make arrangements, or encounter hostile relatives. A more subtle variant concerns the person who expects that aging will be solved before cryonics will be necessary. This person may or may not be right, but such optimism may not make him more immune to accidents than other people. This mindset is often observed among young “transhumanists” and practicing life extensionists. A related, but rarer, variant is to postpone making cryonics arrangements until the cryonics organization makes a number of changes including, but not limited to, hiring medical professionals, stop wasting money, becoming more transparent, giving members the right to vote, etc. Such issues are important, and need to be addressed, but a safer response would be to join the organization and influence its policies, or, if this will be necessary, combine with others to start a competing cryonics organization without such flaws.
There are not many people who think that it is sensible to make cryonics arrangements, but there are even fewer people who have actually made such arrangements.
As we have seen, some of these dangerous ideas share the same or related assumptions and produce identical effects (a decreased chance of personal survival). An important common theme is that cryonics cannot be treated as one single monolithic technology and that the fate of our survival depends as much on the state of the art in human cryopreservation technologies as on the competence of cryonics providers. Caveat emptor!
Some people are content with the idea that a few decades is enough. I am not. Ad vitam aeternum. Transcend humanity.