The cheapest form of preservation would probably be to have the hospital pathologist remove the brain (carefully) and immerse it in a formaldehyde solution. This would be like donating the organ to research. While you’re at it, you can always donate the rest of your organs to patients in need of them.

Having a huge life insurance policy is not necessary this way, but is still a good idea. You can establish a philanthropic fund to brighten your memory, and thus increase your chances of getting high-quality reanimation services. Or you can send it directly to research on nanotechnology. Or like you said, put it in Kiva-style microloans.

I’m not sure this is as good as cryonics (where there is more enzyme preservation, and lots of cells will actually come back to life) but there are some things about it that are better. No ice crystals and no thermal cracking. You can use epoxy to fix it in a solid state, which would make it easier to handle. Also it is a lot less demanding of complex procedures at an emergency point in time. Plenty of people skilled in organ removal already exist, and there is less social resistance to preserving an organ, versus a whole head or body.

Yes there are certainly some interesting possible implications (interesting in a Sci-Fi kind of way, they might not all be pleasant).

I’m mostly in agreement with you that based on past experience society will most likely progress socially as well as technologically. I don’t think that progress will be linear and no doubt there will be slip-ups and atrocities on the way, but it seems unlikely that we’d slowly descend back into the dark ages. I think a happy healthy prosperous society is more likely to revive cryonics patients than a disease-ridden, oppressive society in the turmoil of war.

Ebonmuse’s moral argument against spending resources on this kind of thing doesn’t quite convince me.

I think, morally speaking, we should concentrate on helping all the people in the present, rather than selfishly sending a few of us into an unknown future.

This argument could be used to cancel all space programs and any technology that doesn’t directly help people suffering in the world today. Perhaps there’s a case for that. Finding out about the history of Mars is interesting, but it’s hard to justify paying for that when we could be improving the quality of life for the world’s poorest people. In any case, ridding the world of poverty would make technological progress much easier as the entire world would be in a position to contribute, potentially… (anyway, back on topic).

Cryonics is expensive, but I don’t think that expense is paid for by the taxpayer – if it was, I’d certainly complain. It’s more often a wealthy (or moderately wealthy with the right insurance) individual who might not otherwise be persuaded to leave their millions to international aid or investment schemes like Kiva anyway. If optimistic rich people want to speculatively fund this kind of technology (and therefore the research that goes with it), that’s fine by me. It might throw up some useful medical breakthrough from which the world can benefit.

Sure we should be cautious, mindful of possible dystopias. That’s part of what drives social progress — and its the reason otherwise optimistic authors take the time to write dystopian novels. When people are aware of what could go wrong, they tend to step in and fix it. If they have the courage and imagination to do so, that is. Do you?

What we really need for this tech to be widely used is for it do become demonstrably reversible. I’m betting this could be done by 2020, if we funded it like the Apollo project. Like a trip to Mars. Except it would have more practical benefits, and actually make the trip to Mars cheaper.

Think for a bit about the possible applications for a conveniently reversible cryostasis machine that really works. There could be household models, so you can work “full-time” even if part-time work is all that is available. Or strategically stasify until the price of gas and food goes down. Sundry stuff like that. I’d bet they would also use them in emergency rooms to reduce doctors’ workloads, and thus increase patient survival rates.

There’ll be controversial, questionable and somewhat negative applications as well — like any technology. Maybe they’ll stasify illegal immigrants instead of shipping them home or giving them green cards. Mentally unstable people could end up frozen indefinitely until their condition is well-understood enough (and manpower is available) to treat them effectively — as might cancer victims. It’s not like it is going to be heaven, but it should be better than today, just as today is better than yesterday.

At least, that seems like a very reasonable assumption to me…

There is an issue of whether you have invested in the right preservation technique. That is perhaps similar to Pascal’s wager. It seems likely that the early cryonics “patients” would likely be a disgusting mush if thawed out. Even if the “first in, last out” policy eventually got around to them when nanoscience is super advanced I doubt there would be much they could do to reanimate them coherently.

Cryonics advocates assume that you’ll wake up in a world immeasurably better than ours – one where we’ve perfected technological immortality, say. But what if you wake up in a world that’s far worse? What if the future is an apocalyptic ruin like in the Terminator movies, or is run by malevolent superintelligences (like Harlan Ellison’s AM) that take pleasure in inflicting as many different kinds of torment on human beings as they can dream up? We simply have no idea whether the future will be better or worse, and to stake your fate on it being the former is, as best as I can see, indistinguishable from any kind of religious faith.

Similarly, Pascal assumed that religious faith was essentially cost-free, but overlooked the many acts of ritual and devotion that most faiths demand of their members. Similarly, we can ask whether investing in cryonics is the best use of our society’s resources, or whether we might not be better using that time and effort to improve the lives of people who exist right now and whom we know are suffering. I think, morally speaking, we should concentrate on helping all the people in the present, rather than selfishly sending a few of us into an unknown future.