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mattnewport comments on This Didn't Have To Happen - Less Wrong
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I'm not signed up for cryonics. Partly, this is because I'm poor. Partly, it's because I'm extremely risk-averse and I can imagine really really horrible outcomes of being frozen just as easily as I can imagine really really great outcomes - in the absence of people walking around who were frozen and awakened later, my imaginings are all the data I have.
I'm sorry for your loss and that of your girlfriend, and I wish her grandfather had not died. While I'm at it, I'll wish he'd been immortal. But there are two mistaken responses to the fact that human beings die: one is to tout death as a natural and possibly even positive part of the human condition, and one is to find excuses not to deal with it when it happens. Theism with an afterlife is the first thing; freezing the dead person is the second.
In all likelihood, if and when I stop being poor, my bet and the money behind it is going to be on medicine, and maybe uploads of living people if there are very promising projects going on by then.
I'm curious what the really horrible outcomes you can imagine are? That's not something that had ever occurred to me, I can't imagine a worse outcome than not being revived which seems to be equivalent to just being normally dead.
This is probably symptomatic of reading too much science fiction, but I could be revived by evil aliens, or awakened into a dystopian society that didn't have enough raw materials to make robots and wanted frozen people for cannon fodder, or I could be uploaded instead of outright defrosted and then suffer a glitch that would cause eternal torment/boredom/arithmetic problems, or some form of soul theory could turn out to be right and there could be grandiose metaphysical consequences... I have a very fertile imagination.
Perhaps you have read too much science fiction and not enough history - I worry far more about what is likely to happen between now and when I can expect to die in 30-50 years based on recent history than I do about the essentially unknowable far future.