I agree that it's not necessary for genes' survival for individuals to be long-lived. I don't agree that people want to die.
Yet we have had people here advocate jumping off a bridge in front of a trolley if you are fat enough to stop it.
Suppose it could be argued young people create more joy per annum, for themselves and others, than do old people. Suppose (more controversially) that this excess joy over the first thirty years or so of life more than counterbalances the negative joy associated with death (for self and others).
That is, we are assuming that people contribute net positive utility to the world - even when their death after three score and ten is taken into accou...
Within the immortalist community, cryonics is the most pessimistic possible position. Consider the following superoptimistic alternative scenarios:
Cryonics -- perfusion and vitrification at LN2 temperatures under the best conditions possible -- is by far less optimistic than any of these. Of all the possible scenarios where you end up immortal, cryonics is the least optimistic. Cryonics can work even if there is no singularity or reversal tech for thousands of years into the future. It can work under the conditions of the slowest technological growth imaginable. All it assumes is that the organization (or its descendants) can survive long enough, technology doesn't go backwards (on average), and that cryopreservation of a technically sufficient nature can predate reanimation tech.
It doesn't even require the assumption that today's best possible vitrifications are good enough. See, it's entirely plausible that it's 100 years from now when they start being good enough, and 500 years later when they figure out how to reverse them. Perhaps today's population is doomed because of this. We don't know. But the fact that we don't know what exact point is good enough is sufficient to make this a worthwhile endeavor at as early of a point as possible. It doesn't require optimism -- it simply requires deliberate, rational action. The fact is that we are late for the party. In retrospect, we should have started preserving brains hundreds of years ago. Benjamin Franklin should have gone ahead and had himself immersed in alcohol.
There's a difference between having a fear and being immobilized by it. If you have a fear that cryonics won't work -- good for you! That's a perfectly rational fear. But if that fear immobilizes you and discourages you from taking action, you've lost the game. Worse than lost, you never played.
This is something of a response to Charles Platt's recent article on Cryoptimism: Part 1 Part 2