My sense from a lot of epidemiologists is that this does not seem inevitable, particularly sans bioterrorism or biowarfare, before technology renders it impossible. The claim is that there will be a plague killing a higher percentage than the Black Death in Europe, despite modern nutrition, sanitation, etc, and an order of magnitude worse than the 1918-1919 flu. H5N1 flu has had case-mortality rates in diagnosed cases that match those numbers, but more people were found with antibodies than were diagnosed, suggesting that the real case-fatality rate is quite a bit lower, and not everyone gets infected in a pandemic.
ETA: Also, fatalities in the 1918-1919 flu were worse in the poor parts of the world, and cryonics facilities are located in prosperous countries. There are also generic reasons to think that there are virulence-infectiousness tradeoffs that would shape the evolution of the virus. However, the recently reported lab-modified H5N1 experiments count as evidence against that (they were justified, despite the danger of revealing a bioterrorism method, as a source of evidence that an H5N1 pandemic would be highly virulent).
ETA2: And the flu experiments actually demonstrating that breeding the virus for airborne transmission reduced its lethality.
My sense from a lot of epidemiologists is that this does not seem inevitable, particularly sans bioterrorism or biowarfare, before technology renders it impossible. The claim is that there will be a plague killing a higher percentage than the Black Death in Europe, despite modern nutrition, sanitation, etc, and an order of magnitude worse than the 1918-1919 flu. H5N1 flu has had case-mortality rates in diagnosed cases that match those numbers, but more people were found with antibodies than were diagnosed, suggesting that the real case-fatality rate is quite a bit lower, and not everyone gets infected in a pandemic.
ETA: Also, fatalities in the 1918-1919 flu were worse in the poor parts of the world, and cryonics facilities are located in prosperous countries. There are also generic reasons to think that there are virulence-infectiousness tradeoffs that would shape the evolution of the virus. However, the recently reported lab-modified H5N1 experiments count as evidence against that (they were justified, despite the danger of revealing a bioterrorism method, as a source of evidence that an H5N1 pandemic would be highly virulent).
ETA2: And the flu experiments actually demonstrating that breeding the virus for airborne transmission reduced its lethality.