The process of revival is imperfect, and pieces of memories are frequently missing. None of your loved ones remember you, and some of them are in permanent Alzheimers-like states. One person claims to have been close to pre-revival you, but you don't remember them. Having felt the pain of being rejected by your closest friend, you decide to trust them. That turns out to be an elaborate scam, possibly motivated by pure sadism, and you're now alone in a world you don't recognize and where you have to be suspicious of everyone you meet.
Seems not much worse than actual-death, given that in this scenario you could still choose to actually-die if you didn't like your post-cryonics life.
You are one of the first to be revived.
The technique is imperfect, and causes you massive neurological damage (think late stage Alzheimer's), trapping you in a nonverbal yet incredibly painful and horrifying state.
Due to advances in gerontology, you have a nearly infinite lifespan ahead of you, cognizant only of what you have lost.
When neuroscience finally advances to the point where you can be fixed, it's still not yet advanced enough to give you back your memories.
You're effectively a completely different person, and you know that.
Seems not much worse than actual-death, given that in this scenario you (or the person who replaces you) could still choose to actually-die if you didn't like your post-cryonics life.
I've seen people consider the Warren Ellis take plausible. Excerpt:
Looking at her new charity-donated clothes, still bearing the ammonia spoor of the man who wore them last, Mary's shocked brain started to a new understanding.
She wasn't wanted here.
She was Revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. She'd been foisted upon a future already busy enough with its own problems by a past that couldn't have cared less.
She could have told the future what it'd been like to meet Che Guevara in that old Cuban schoolhouse. She could've told them about the last Queen and Albert Einstein and a million other true stories besides.
But the future didn't want to know. It honored the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back (even adjusted the sum in their favor against revaluation and inflation), gave them the Hostels.
Put them away with a new, unspoken contract: Don't bother us. We're not interested.
Seems not much worse than actual-death, given that in this scenario you could still choose to actually-die if you didn't like your post-cryonics life.
The technology would work, but an existential threat wipes out humanity while you are asleep.
This is an example where cryonics fails, and so not the kind of example I'm looking for in this thread. Sorry if that wasn't clear from the OP! I'm leaving this comment to hopefully prevent more such examples from distracting potential posters.
Preservation and revival is possible, but not for the current technology of preservation. Everyone in Alcor's tanks right now is irretrievably dead. The gamble was worth making at the time, but it didn't pay off.
The bodies may be useful for their genetic information, especially from their gut biota.
I remember a poem that appeared in one of the science fiction magazines a long time ago, the gist of which was:
"Here are some diseases you may have forgotten about. I'm sorry I had nothing to wrap them in but the body of this old man. Yours, DEATH."
Hmm, this seems like it's not a cryonics-works-for-you scenario, and I did mean to exclude this type of example, though maybe not super clearly:
OP: There's a separate question of whether the outcome is positive enough to be worth the money, which I'd rather discuss in a different thread.
(2) A rich sadist finds it somehow legally or logistically easier to lay hands on the brains/minds of cryonics patients than of living people, and runs some virtual torture scenarios on me where I'm not allowed to die for thousands of subjective years or more.
(1) A well-meaning but slightly-too-obsessed cryonics scientist wakes up some semblance of me in a semi-conscious virtual delirium for something like 1000 very unpleasant subjective years of tinkering to try recovering me. She eventually quits, and I never wake up again.
Sure, but for example things used to market a charity and effectiveness of charity are distinct.
People worry about "effectiveness." Is that going out the window in this case?
See Nate's comment above:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/n39/why_cfar_the_view_from_2015/cz99
And, FWIW, I would also consider anything that spends less than $100k causing a small number of top-caliber researchers to become full-time AI safety researchers to be extremely "effective".
[This is in fact a surprisingly difficult problem to solve. Aside from personal experience seeing the difficulty of causing people to become safety researchers, I have also been told by some rich, successful AI companies earnestly trying to set up safety research divisions (yay!) that they are unable to hire appropriately skilled people to work full-time on safety.]
Just donated $500 and pledged $6500 more in matching funds (10% of my salary).
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I sign up for cryonics, but I live in Australia or I'm travelling outside of the US and don't manage to transport my body to the US in a reasonable amount of time.
This is a cryonics-fails story, not a cryonics-works-and-is-bad story.