The cryonics organizations themselves are always seeking better methods of suspension, and your contract is with a suspension provider, not with a suspension technology, so the point about technological advance is moot.
There are in general two conceptions of how revival might work. One is through nanotechnological repair of freezing damage to the cells (along with whatever condition originally caused a person’s death). This may be combined with the growth of a new host body if only the brain has been frozen (that’s the economy-class ticket to the post-cryo future). The other method would involve high-resolution imaging of the frozen person, as in the Visible Human Project, but with subcellular resolution of neuronal structure and composition, and then comprehensive simulation of the brain structure thus revealed, perhaps in a robot body or just in a virtual reality (at first), under the assumption that this is equivalent to revival. The issues are then the same as in “mind uploading”—what happens to personhood and identity when you can have multiple copies, slightly inaccurate copies, and so forth. I disagree with the computational philosophy of mind, so I don’t think that constitutes survival, but the details are not exactly clear, and in any case cryonics is the best existing method of physical preservation after death, so it’s the best that we have to work with.
Philosophical issues aside, the two resurrection processes described (reversal of intracellular damage, mapping of intracellular structure) are merely an extrapolation of our existing abilities to image molecules and manipulate them. We have every reason to think they are possible, especially for a material object at very low temperatures. As for timescales, certainly some cryonicists have thought in terms of centuries. But the rising paradigm among the small group of people who follow these matters, is that artificial intelligence is coming, and will boost itself past human intelligence, within decades, not centuries. Those extrapolated molecular capabilities, it is thought, will be achieved very rapidly, as an incidental side-effect of that process. If superhuman artificial intelligence, having become superhuman, is “friendly” towards human beings, then one would expect the Great Unthawing to occur more or less immediately. But as several of the posters above have indicated, human-friendliness is an outcome which will have to be worked for, and which trumps everything else—if we get everything else right, and that wrong, then everything else will count for nothing, and the unfriendly superhuman AI steamrolls the human race in pursuit of whatever imperative does guide its behavior.
So the prognosis is mixed. But if you can afford it, cryonics is a more than reasonable option to take up.
BS—Cost of cryonics: “no less than US$28,000 and rarely more than US$200,000”. One way to fund this is with a life insurance policy.
The cryonics organizations themselves are always seeking better methods of suspension, and your contract is with a suspension provider, not with a suspension technology, so the point about technological advance is moot.
There are in general two conceptions of how revival might work. One is through nanotechnological repair of freezing damage to the cells (along with whatever condition originally caused a person’s death). This may be combined with the growth of a new host body if only the brain has been frozen (that’s the economy-class ticket to the post-cryo future). The other method would involve high-resolution imaging of the frozen person, as in the Visible Human Project, but with subcellular resolution of neuronal structure and composition, and then comprehensive simulation of the brain structure thus revealed, perhaps in a robot body or just in a virtual reality (at first), under the assumption that this is equivalent to revival. The issues are then the same as in “mind uploading”—what happens to personhood and identity when you can have multiple copies, slightly inaccurate copies, and so forth. I disagree with the computational philosophy of mind, so I don’t think that constitutes survival, but the details are not exactly clear, and in any case cryonics is the best existing method of physical preservation after death, so it’s the best that we have to work with.
Philosophical issues aside, the two resurrection processes described (reversal of intracellular damage, mapping of intracellular structure) are merely an extrapolation of our existing abilities to image molecules and manipulate them. We have every reason to think they are possible, especially for a material object at very low temperatures. As for timescales, certainly some cryonicists have thought in terms of centuries. But the rising paradigm among the small group of people who follow these matters, is that artificial intelligence is coming, and will boost itself past human intelligence, within decades, not centuries. Those extrapolated molecular capabilities, it is thought, will be achieved very rapidly, as an incidental side-effect of that process. If superhuman artificial intelligence, having become superhuman, is “friendly” towards human beings, then one would expect the Great Unthawing to occur more or less immediately. But as several of the posters above have indicated, human-friendliness is an outcome which will have to be worked for, and which trumps everything else—if we get everything else right, and that wrong, then everything else will count for nothing, and the unfriendly superhuman AI steamrolls the human race in pursuit of whatever imperative does guide its behavior.
So the prognosis is mixed. But if you can afford it, cryonics is a more than reasonable option to take up.