alt Hacker NewsWhen it comes to cryopreservation the thing I find infeasible is the idea a provider would bother with the preservation, under the incentives of capitalism.
If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead can't sue.
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With enough money, at least here in the UK, it is possible to set up structures that endure for one sole purpose for many generations.
It was quite common for rich Victorians to donate their grounds/houses to be used for the public good and still today they are owned by the original trust and money from the trust can only be used in a certain way etc... we have many parks because of this (that otherwise could have been developed to extract money).
Obviously the longer the technology takes to develop, the higher the chance something goes wrong; though the concepts of trusts have existed for some 800 years so if it takes only 200 years, I think your chances are good!
The way I think you'd set this up is you'd create a trust with the millions and then the trustees would pay the company its monthly fee from the trust's funds.
With enough funds, the trust should be able to both pay for your preservation and grow its balance. You'd even be able to inherit the remaining funds when revived.
Of course in practice there is still the possibility of the trustees being corrupt.
The novel When the Sleeper Wakes is based on a situation where a tax loophole meant that one particular suspended-animation quasi-corpse inherited (eventually) over half the property on Earth. His trust becomes a de facto world government, and his body, fully cured of its fatal flaw, lies in state in a sort of mausoleum/temple/seat of government.
And one day he just wakes up.
These aren’t companies doing the patient storage. It is non profits setup and run by people who are signed up themselves.
Yeah, even the living can't collect much from a bankrupt corporation.
That's a good point, but the funds could be automatically released over time instead of a lump sum payment
There's a news story about such a company where they basically throw the bodies in a chest freezer, or stuffed many of them together in one unit, etc. Nightmare fuel...
I have doubts that such a company could keep the power on for the next 200 years, with an increasingly unstable planet (climatically and politically).
Maybe sending your body in a lead coffin into the coldness of space is a better preservation method, maybe that's why the loser billionaires are so interested in going to space..
One way to mitigate that would be to put the money in a trust which pays the preservation company a monthly dividend. If the trust stops paying, the company can sue it. If the company goes out of business despite its ongoing revenue, the trust can try to find someone else to take over the storage. We already have trusts that manage wealth for multiple generations.