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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

If hundreds of millions of people were to do this, what economic, cultural or religious incentive do people have 500 years from now to resurrect anyone? Maybe people who were famous geniuses, sure, but with my view of human nature I get the impression that unless the resurrection process is extremely low cost and easy, nobody will go to the effort to bring back the consciousness of huge numbers of random people. This could change, sure, such as if a major world religion made a profound shift to bringing back your ancestors for ideological reasons. The chance of that happening is slim.

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This is a plot point in Niven's "A World Out of Time". The global state views cryogenically frozen people as expendable commodities and uses them for missions that normal citizens won't be asked to do, or which require their antique perspectives. If they refuse a mission, their host bodies (convicted criminals) are mindwiped and the state starts again.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time

For the same reason that wealthy countries have public health services, basically. You are right that there are economic issues at play, but there are good arguments that the intrinsic cost of revival should be pretty low, and the process of getting there is just waiting however many thousands of years of technical development it takes.

Or you can die with a private key of a Bitcoin address containing a few bitcoins memorized. And a tattoo or something that will says you'll give half to whoever revives you. Hopefully Bitcoin will be here for a long time.

I highly doubt the longevity of bitcoin enough to do that. Anyways what are the odds that your brain wouldn't be scrambled from the years of being frozen or you'll remember your key.

If there is technology to reinstantiate your brain with that memory intact, there is technology to pull just that memory out of your brain without bothering to reinstantiate you.

Furthermore, assuming that one's 'consciousness' could actually be brought back in some kind of form that roughly approximates what it was like when one was alive, what's to prevent one's body/brain from being used in some kind of terrible medical experiment?

For example, what if an evil scientist or organization were to buy up cryogenically preserved bodies on the cheap in 300 years?

Yeah, you could say it's unlikely, but why is it more or less likely than being unfrozen into some paradise?

It's a moot question right now since nothing they're doing could ever conceivably allow for future resurrection. This is purely a way to separate suckers from their money (or, more charitably, perhaps a case of blind optimism outrunning scientific reality).