Cryopreservation (part 4) – who would revive you and why?

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So let’s assume you did decide that getting your body frozen would be a good idea. Maybe you have some disease which is currently incurable and means you die relatively young, like in your 40s, but you hope that in a few more decades a cure will be found. And let’s assume that in say, 50 years, a cure is found. What then? Who is going to decide when to revive you? Obviously it won’t be you, unless you have constructed some sort of legal agreement with a specified end-point for the freezing. Who is going to pay for your treatment? Even if your payment to the cryogenics company covers keeping you in frozen storage and then defrosting you, the treatment you have been waiting for is not likely to be included. In the UK we’re lucky to have the NHS, but that pays for treatment for the living, not the dead. If you have just had your head frozen, who would donate their body so you could be revived whole again? Will your family want you around? If you’ve been frozen for 50 years, your spouse will be elderly or perhaps even dead themselves, your children will be grown up, you might have grandchildren, will they all suddenly want to have you with them again? They have got used to life without you. Will your spouse want a partner 50 years younger? What if they have found someone else in the meantime? Will your children want a parent younger than themselves? And what if it is, perhaps, a couple of hundred years later. Yes sometimes people think it would be interesting to be able to meet people from the past, maybe ancestors, but they just want a chance to meet and talk about what life was like in ‘the old days’, they probably wouldn’t want you living with them permanently! And since we already have a huge overpopulation problem, why would we as a society choose to bring back people who have died? We have more than enough problems of overexploitation of resources already! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2023.