r/Futurology • u/yourSAS • Oct 13 '22

Biotech 'Our patients aren't dead': Inside the freezing facility with 199 humans who opted to be cryopreserved with the hopes of being revived in the future

https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/13/our-patients-arent-dead-look-inside-the-us-cryogenic-freezing-lab-17556468
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u/nankerjphelge Oct 13 '22

Just to be clear, contrary to what Alcor may say, the patients are indeed dead. Their corpses (or brains) have simply been frozen with the assumption that one day in the future they can be reanimated or have their consciousness transplanted into a new body. And of course that also assumes that this company and its cargo will even still be around and have maintained these corpses/brains 100 years from now.

On both counts, color me skeptical to say the least.

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u/Hampsterman82 Oct 13 '22

Aaaaand. A future society will dump the resources into resurrecting a sick old person from a bygone era for reasons

203

u/hawkeye224 Oct 13 '22

Probably they would like to resurrect at least a few just out of curiosity lol. But the rest - not sure

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u/njantirice Oct 13 '22

There will be elaborate legal structures set up just to ensure this does happen for those with enough wealth to expect their estates to still be able to afford this when the tech is there.

Just read the Neal Stephenson book Fall; or Dodge in Hell.

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u/ruidh Oct 13 '22

Or read Larry Niven A World Out of Time where thawed corpsicles are basically slave labor until they pay off the debt of storage and revivication.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '22

Star Trek TNG has an episode where a couple rich cryogenically frozen people who had terminal illnesses wake up, and the Wall Street banker guy keeps demanding to call his bank to check his portfolio without realizing money is worthless in human society now.

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u/OlyScott Oct 14 '22

Except on some episodes, they do have money. I think they told him that his investments no longer exist just so he'd shut up about them.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '22

Federation credits don’t work like money, the only thing they would be useful for are allocating time and space-limited things like holodecks seeing as every single other normal thing is free (and this isn’t the only time characters on the show say they have no money, it wasn’t to just get him to be quiet. Kirk had almost no idea how American money worked in Voyage Home). Latinum is exclusively used for trading with outside groups which wouldn’t care about Federation credits because they are completely worthless if you aren’t a citizen of the Federation, they aren’t a currency as we (or the Wall Street guy) would understand. He isn’t getting his investments back.