Every so often, I see a blog post about death, usually remarking on the death of someone the writer knew, and it often includes sentiments about "everyone is going to die, and that's terrible, but we can't do anything about it have so we have to accept it."
It's one of those sentiments that people find profound and is often considered Deep Wisdom. There's just one problem with it. It isn't true. If you think cryonics can work, as many people here do, then you believe that people don't really have to die, and we don't need to accept that we've only got at most about a hundred years and then that's it.
And I want to tell them this, as though I was a religious missionary out to spread the Good Word that you can save your soul and get into Christian Heaven as long as you sign up with Our Church. (Which I would actually do, if I believed that Christianity was correct.)
But it's not easy to broach the issue in a blog comment, and I'm not a good salesman. (One of the last times I tried, my posts kept getting deleted by the moderators.) It would be a lot better if I could simply link them to a better sales pitch; the kind of people I'm talking to are the kinds of people who read things on the Internet. Unfortunately, not one of the pro-cryonics posts listed on the LessWrong wiki can serve this purpose. Not "Normal Cryonics", not "You Only Live Twice", not "We Agree: Get Froze", not one! Why isn't there one? Heck, I'd pay money to get it written. I'd even pay Eliezer Yudkowsky a bunch of money to talk to my father on the telephone about cryonics, with a substantial bonus on offer if my father agrees to sign up. (We can discuss actual dollar amounts in the comments or over private messages.)
Please, someone get to work on this!
I'm not convinced that revival of most cryopreserved people will ever be possible in any reasonable sense, even if we have strong AI. Brain damage sets in quickly, so to me you have to take it on faith that being preserved when they can is adequate. Add on a host of other things which you have to take on faith about the entire process, and it seems closer to a scam than the fountain of youth to me. The entire scheme seems to be wishful thinking. I find it hard to estimate the probabilities involved with this because it's so speculative. With that being said, I gave about a 2% chance of a cryopreserved human being revived before 2040, mostly because I don't know what the future holds. (Note that this prediction is fairly weak. This is a 2% probability that at least 1 human will be revived. If there are 100 attempts and 1 is a success then that's enough, but the track record would be pretty bad. I don't anticipate there will be many attempts by that date, though.)
Assuming I would be revived if preserved, I don't see any reason to believe I'll come out unscathed. I would rather be not revived at all than to be revived severely mentally retarded, for example.
With that being said, I'm not opposed to the idea and give it serious consideration, but I believe maximizing my own QALYs in more established ways like physical fitness is much more important. Also, it's worth noting that I don't believe immortality is necessarily a good goal in isolation. If I were immortal, I'd want my memory erased every couple hundred years or so just to keep things interesting (I assume if cryonics works then this is likely possible with no ill effects. Might also be possible to reverse wiping someone's memory if they store it somewhere.).
I recently had the realization that cryo might actually have some unintended consequences. I can think of one which would need to be addressed before I'd sign up: risk compensation. That is, because one has signed up for cryo they might feel less risk and do more dangerous things. A few quick Google searches suggests cryo people might not be aware of this issue, so I don't know what their response might be.
Maybe cryo believers are paranoid enough about dying that they are unaffected or less affected by risk compensation. This is possible, but I see being unaffected as unlikely given that irrationality affects us all. To give an example of how this might manifest, people signed up for cryo might be more likely to be out of shape than similar people who are not signed up for cryo. There's no clear evidence either way, but I'd be interested in seeing where the truth lies before considering signing up.
The best "death" for cryo members is one where you have time to notify your provider before hand. You have an incentive to take extra care against accidents where this wouldn't happen. My being a member of Alcor in part motivated this post.