bidding to live forever using things like cryogenics and maybe brain-download. These things could work at some point; but what if they don't work perfectly? What if the people of the future can recover some of the information from a frozen brain, but not all of it?

I want to challenge this premise in relation to cryonics. Given that technology will improve, and that you indicate that you don't want to be one of the first ones whose information is recovered, there's a high probability that things will work out pretty well. After all, the kind of future where they choose to unfreez people is one that's resource-rich - otherwise why add more mouths to feed? So any future where you're likely to wake up is likely a good one.