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Alsadius comments on Open thread for December 24-31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Convincing them to get frozen is hard enough as it is...I'm up against belief-in-reincarnation for at least 40% of them.
Also, I myself doubt that completely uprooting the life you do certainly have, in exchange for a shot at immortality which has a high likelihood of not actually working, is worth it. There are established business in place, and losing proximity to extended family together is a huge deterrent, even for most of the younger generation.
At best, it would be worth it for the very oldest relatives who are nearing the end of their lives...but those are both the hardest to convince ideologically and the ones who are most attached to the family infrastructure to survive and the ones for whom the nifty life-insurance trick doesn't work.
I'd still try to convince them, but the likelihood of me succeeding is reduced with each additional deterrent. I'm looking for a way to remove at least some of these deterrents before making my sales pitch.
You'd think that moving to the first world would be the sort of thing that sells itself to at least some of them.
By some metrics, my relatives actually have a higher quality of life in India than my own family does in America. The absolute income is lower, but the purchasing power for common goods and services is higher. It's harder for them to buy a computer, for example...but much easier to buy housekeeping services (though this is quickly changing as income disparity decreases).
Practically speaking, this translates to a better diet and much more free time.
If more people in the 1st world countries understood what sort of purchasing power they could have in the 3rd world, I'd suspect that many of them would move - though maybe not to India, which is accelerating fairly rapidly as of late.
What would it take for there to be cryonics facilities in India?
I would presume that the demand for it is roughly similar to Western cryonics. The population is so large enough that the population of people who can afford it is also reasonably large, as is the number of people within that population who would consider it, maybe.
Biggest hurdle would probably be the difficulty of doing business in India in general - corruption, power outages, frequent strikes, etc. Things just don't run very smoothly over there - you can't depend on local infrastructure for anything. I don't suppose you can keep things frozen easily under those conditions.
The argument that it's selfish would probably carry much more weight in India, as global poverty is more visible in that region and anti-wealth sentiments are stronger. On the other hand, I think the self-identified Hindu's belief in re-incarnation is much less firmly established than the self-identified Christian's belief in Heaven, which probably moves things in cryonic's favor.
But my opinion on this matter doesn't carry any more weight than the opinion of the average globally aware person.