From Countdown to Immortality, by FM-2030:

TIME REENTRY AND ADAPTATION

How will an individual suspended today adjust to life upon reentry in the future?

Time-reentry adjustment will not be a serious problem for the following reasons:

Anyone suspended in these years will probably not have to wait long for reanimation. In act the time will come when long-term suspension will make no sense. Deathcorrection will be quick and therefore catch-up will not be a problem.

People are living longer and longer. Therefore many of the reanimate’s friends and acquaintances will be around.

More and more people are signing up for cryonic suspension. When they are eventually brought back, they will find other reanimates from their original time zones.

What if you do not find any familiar faces upon reentry? What of it? You will make new friends. Why not start afresh? Isn’t this precisely what tends of millions of people now do when they voluntarily move from one part of the planet to another? In our fluid times many of our friendships and associations are not lifelong and continuous any way.

We humans are remarkably adaptable. In recent decades we have seen entire populations switch eons - from Stone Age to Electronic Age - from the feudal/agrarian world to the industrial and the telespheral. There is no limit to our adaptability.

Entire generations are now born into worlds of real-time acceleration. To them and to all of us rapid realignment is the norm. We are not even aware we are continually desynchronizing.

In the coming decades reanimates may not be the only ones having to readapt. Increasing numbers of people will drop out of our world and start new lives elsewhere in the solar system. Some of these extraterrestrials will come back and may also have to zone in.

In the new century we will learn about Time and Space reentry and devise catch-up skills. For example: rapid updates via onbody computers and audio/visuals - rapid playbacks and overviews via touch-and-enter holospheres - body-attached or brain-implanted decision-assists - automatic information-transfer procedures and so on. We may also have rapid genetic fine-tuning to help returnees improve their concentration - memory - adaptability - learn/unlearn.

Finally in the coming years and decades the world will grow more and more open and friendly. This very day we are outgrowing age-old adversarial barriers: tribalism - racism - classism - sexism - nationalism. The freeflow of people across the planet is speeding up. My projection is that a person suspended in the coming years and reentering decades later will at first have more problems with the relative friendliness and openness of the new century than anything else.

If Simon Baron-Cohen gets his way, a future society could make a certain high level of empathy the norm, with potentially interesting consequences for revived cryonauts.