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nazgulnarsil comments on On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die - Less Wrong
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"I think that the former quote captures more of what is going on. A community is being created in which cryonics isn't as weird, removing previous barriers without implicating rationality directly."
Very much so. People don't actually believe in the future.
Unfortunately that has an element of truth in it. Cryonics now has a reputation has a paleo-future fad from the 1960's, along with visions of space colonization, the postindustrial leisure society and the like. Many of the articles about Robert Ettinger's recent suspension present that as a subtext in describing his career. For example. the Washington Post obit says:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/from-phyics-teacher-to-founder-of-the-cryonics-movement/2011/07/24/gIQAupuIXI_story.html
With the implication that in our disillusioned era, Ettinger sounds like a crank and a fool.
I'm not sure that the intent was quite that harsh. "a crank and a fool" wasn't in the original obit. To view Ettinger's optimism as more in keeping with the zeitgeist of the 1960s than of the 2010s does not seem wholly unreasonable. Just in stark economic terms, U.S. real median household income peaked back in 1999. The median person in the U.S. has lost quite a lot over the last decade: income, security, access to health care, perhaps social status (as Vlaimir_M pointed out). It isn't unreasonable of them to disbelieve in an improving future.