I thought about saying that I want to see "the future" because Neoreaction might succeed and I would find myself in a high-tech aristocracy right out of 20th Century science fiction. But then I remembered something I saw on TV in what must sound like the before-times to you youngsters. I watched this miniseries about the Holocaust in 1978, during my last semester of high school:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(TV_miniseries)
I remember a scene where one of the characters in a women's concentration camp says she wanted to survive the war because she anticipated that Europe would become Communist, and thus according to her beliefs, she would find herself in more socially equitable environment. It didn't quite work out that way after a few decades, however.
If I had to bet on social trends over the next 300 years, I would favor something like Neoreaction as the social model because the Enlightenment's social model in the bigger pictures deviates from long term norms, while Neoreaction has something like regression to the mean working in its favor. This prospect must put the feminist women who have signed up for cryonics in an interesting predicament: Do they want to survive, only to spend their resumed lives in a conservative, patriarchal society which wouldn't tolerate the behavior they took for granted in the early 21st Century?
I just learned of The Future Library project. In short, famous authors will be asked to write new, original fiction that will not be released until 2114. First one announced was Margaret Atwood, of The Handmaiden's Tale fame.
I learned of this when a friend posted on Facebook that "I'm officially looking into being cryogenically frozen due to The Future Library project. See you all in 2114." She meant it as a joke, but after a couple comments she now knows about CI, and she didn't yesterday.
What's one of the most common complaints we hear from Deathists? The future is unknown and scary and there won't be anything there they'd be interested in anyway. Now there will be, if they're Atwood fans.
What's one of the ways artists who give away most of their work (almost all of them nowadays) try to entice people to pay for their albums/books/games/whatever? Including special content that is only available for people who pay (or who pay more). Now there is special content only available for people who are around post-2113.
Which got me to thinking... could we incentivize seeing the future? I know it sounds kinda silly ("What, escaping utter annihilation isn't incentive enough??"), but it seems possible that we could save lives by compiling original work from popular artists (writers, musicians, etc), sealing it tight somewhere, and promising to release it in 100, 200, maybe 250 years. And of course, providing links to cryo resources with all publicity materials.
Would this be worth pursuing? Are there any obvious downsides, aside from cost & difficulty?