My purpose in commenting here is only to address what I see as a creeping fallacy, one that's apparently becoming a prevalent touchstone in the dissemination of cryonics on the internet, ie the thoughtful consideration (rather than thoughtless dismissal) by individuals of the kind who would have an interest in something like Less Wrong, those of whom typically have computer science backgrounds.

This is a fallacy akin to the idea of cryopreserved patients as "messages in a bottle" sent adrift, with fingers-crossed, to be found by our benevolent "Friends in the Future."

The reality is that if any cryopreserved individual actually exists at all by the time of the advent of technology capable of facilitating his or her resuscitation, it means that people are and always have been actively expending energy to care and maintain that individual. The question isn't whether anyone would care to revive someone, it's whether or not anyone would care to prevent that person from becoming organic waste at the bottom of a giant thermos bottle or long ago buried and forgotten.

The fallacy inadvertently perpetuated by people like Ken Hayworth, Randal Koene, Robin Hanson, and others reflects a similar failure of perspective regarding the foreseeable conditions that would actually facilitate the first resuscitation(s) of the cryopreserved.

I would humbly suggest the following:

• The first cryopreserved individual to be resuscitated has not yet been cryopreserved.
• This individual's cryopreservation will be predicated on techniques significantly perfected over those that exist today.
• The time interval between this individual's cryopreservation and resuscitation will be relatively short (not decades but a few years or even far less perhaps).
• This individual's resuscitation will not in any way whatsoever involve destructive scanning; rather, it will rely on more "conventional" technologies the development of which is "actionable" today right now (rather than merely an extant theoretical framework in possibly sufficient fidelity, as is the case with uploading).
• This individual will NOT be resuscitated as a flawlessly healthy Ettingerian superman, but as a severely injured but otherwise stable living person. The state of this person's health, the degree of amnesia, etc is impossible to guess, but the bottom-line is that their resuscitation will be the end-result of a not-unrisky and far-from-perfect experimental process. It will be messy, but he or she will (hopefully) have a prognosis of (indefinite) conscious life.
• The ensuing prospect of the resuscitation other individuals will unfold as each patient's candidacy lies along an evolving gradient dependent on the technology used to cryopreserve them and the continued improvement of the technology used for the first resuscitation.

There is obviously a threshold beyond which some (most?) patients lie. It may be even likely that no person cryopreserved today can be "revived" without some form of "uploading."

But the point is that that will not be the case for the people cryopreserved in the decades to come, and that will certainly not be the case for the first persons to be revived.