How, precisely, would this happen? We aren't writing sci-fi here. There's dozens of countries on this planet with world class R&D occurring each and every day. The key technology needed to revive frozen brains is the development of nanoscale machine tools that are versatile enough to aid in manufacturing more copies of themselves. This sort of technology would change many industries, and in the short term would give the developers of the tech (assuming they had some means of keeping control of it) enormous economic and military advantages.
a. Economic - these tools would be cheap in mass quantities because they can be used to make themselves. Nearly any manufactured good made today could probably be duplicated, and it would not require the elaborate and complex manufacturing chains that it takes today. Also, the products would be very close to atomically perfect, so there would be little need for quality control. b. Military - high end weapons are some of the most expensive to manufacture products available, for a myriad of reasons. (I mean jets, drones, tanks, etc). Nanoscale printers would drop the price to rock bottom for each additional copy of a weapon.
A civilization armed with these tools of course would not be worried about resources or environmental damage.
a. There are a lot of resources not feasible today because we can't manufacture mining robots at rock bottom prices and send them to go after these low yield resources.
b. We suffer from a lack of energy because solar panels and high end batteries have high manufacturing costs. (the raw materials are mostly very cheap). Same goes for nuclear reactors.
c. We cannot reverse environmental damage because we cannot afford to manufacture square miles worth of machinery to reverse the damage. (mostly C02 and other greenhouse gas capturing plants, but also robots to clean up various messes)
I say we revive people as soon as possible as computer simulations to give us a form of friendly AI that we can more or less trust. These people could be emulated at high speed and duplicated many times and used to counter the other risks.
I agree with you entirely on the irreversible brain damage. I think this problem can be fixed with systematic efforts to solve it (and a legal work around or a change to the laws) but this requires resources that Alcor and CI lack at the moment.
"Horn 1" of the dilemma is a Limits to Growth style crisis. It's perfectly possible that such a limits-crisis arrives before the technology needed to expand the limits shows up to save us. (The early signs would be a major recession which never seems to end, and funding for speculative ideas like nano-machines doesn't last.) Or another analogy would be crossing a desert with a small, leaky bottle of water and an ever-growing thirst. On the edge of the desert there is a huge lake, and the traveller reaching it will never be thirsty again. But it's...
I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo. In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo). Now I'm open to being persuaded.
My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody. It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women? If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult. There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.
So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest. I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future. Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?
So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.
I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization. Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders.
Well, have fun getting inside my head.