Looking at her new charity-donated clothes, still bearing the ammonia spoor of the man who wore them last, Mary’s shocked brain started to a new understanding.
She wasn’t wanted here.
She was Revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. She’d been foisted upon a future already busy enough with its own problems by a past that couldn’t have cared less.
She could have told the future what it’d been like to meet Che Guevara in that old Cuban schoolhouse. She could’ve told them about the last Queen and Albert Einstein and a million other true stories besides.
But the future didn’t want to know. It honored the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back (even adjusted the sum in their favor against revaluation and inflation), gave them the Hostels.
Put them away with a new, unspoken contract: Don’t bother us. We’re not interested.
That scenario still sounds awesome, as long as I’m comparing it to “no cryonics” instead of “best-case cryonics scenarios”. I get to be dropped into a completely unfamiliar world with just my mind, a small sum of money, and a young healthy body? Sounds like a fun challenge, I mean I died once what have I got to lose?
You’re assuming that people who find life a net negative could simply choose to commit suicide. I don’t think that this is a realistic assumption for most people. For many people, actively taking your own life is something that only becomes an option once it gets really, really shitty—and not necessarily even then.
If someone falls into this class and puts high chance on their post-cryonics life being one of misery, but still not enough misery that they’d be ready to kill themselves, then cryonics may reasonably seem like negative expected value. (Especially if they assume that societies will maintain the trend of trying to prevent people from killing themselves when possible, and that a future society might be much better at this than ours, making suicide much harder to accomplish.)
I’ve seen people consider the Warren Ellis take plausible. Excerpt:
That scenario still sounds awesome, as long as I’m comparing it to “no cryonics” instead of “best-case cryonics scenarios”. I get to be dropped into a completely unfamiliar world with just my mind, a small sum of money, and a young healthy body? Sounds like a fun challenge, I mean I died once what have I got to lose?
Seems not much worse than actual-death, given that in this scenario you could still choose to actually-die if you didn’t like your post-cryonics life.
You’re assuming that people who find life a net negative could simply choose to commit suicide. I don’t think that this is a realistic assumption for most people. For many people, actively taking your own life is something that only becomes an option once it gets really, really shitty—and not necessarily even then.
If someone falls into this class and puts high chance on their post-cryonics life being one of misery, but still not enough misery that they’d be ready to kill themselves, then cryonics may reasonably seem like negative expected value. (Especially if they assume that societies will maintain the trend of trying to prevent people from killing themselves when possible, and that a future society might be much better at this than ours, making suicide much harder to accomplish.)