Become Your Own Heir After Being Frozen 375
destinyland writes "A science writer discovered it's possible to finance your cryogenic preservation using life insurance — and then leave a huge death benefit to your future thawed self. From the article, 'Most in the middle class, if they seriously want it, can afford it now. So by taking the right steps, you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money!' There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"
Completely impossible, reviving after freezing (Score:3, Informative)
There are few things I consider impossible but reviving people after simple freezing is one of them. There's massive damage and it's still not cold enough to arrest decay. Even if you could freeze a body without damage you'd still need to be near absolute zero to arrest most of the breakdown. Freezing essentially explodes the cell walls so there's nothing to revive. Cloning is pointless because it's a middle aged twin at best with none of your memories and no you can't just program them in like a computer the memories are actual structures in the brain that involve growth. I'm not saying there won't be a way to place a body in stasis I'm saying current freezing technologies are at best a joke and at worst a scam.
Niven (Score:3, Informative)
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Larry Niven short story about Gil the ARM and the organleggers.
Re:Key legal obstacle (Score:1, Informative)
No. The law against perpetuities applies to conveyances of property from a grantor to a grantee. *Usually* this is in the context of a transfer via a will or through an estate.
Corporations are considered legal entities. Modern law does not require them to have a lifespan. Thus because an existing corporation is technically a "living person", there is no conveyance thus the rule against perpetuities doesn't apply.
Re:Completely impossible, reviving after freezing (Score:1, Informative)
Mod parent up. (Score:5, Informative)
This is not about putting you in ice and letting you freeze to death. It's cryogenics: dumping enough LN2 fast enough to freeze the cells without exploding their walls (as ice water doesn't get to form macroscopic ice crystal structure), and essentially stopping your organism cold in its tracks. AFAIK there are no decay processes at LN2 temperatures, and the little amount of chemical reactions that still occur should not affect the outcome.
Theoretically, recovering the organism to its standard 36.6C should suffice to restore it; it is done with single-cell organisms successfully. But we don't have a technology to heat up a body of human volume fast enough and uniformly enough to achieve that. With freezing, it doesn't matter if one part of the body goes to 80K and another to 110K in 3 seconds. It does matter if your brain goes to 30C on the edges or to 50C in the center though. There's also a bunch of other unknowns but as long as we can't bring a mass of 70 or so kg of mostly water in irregular shape from 70K to 310K in 0.1s with precision of +-3K throughout the whole volume, they are moot.
There's also the other approach, neatly described in Transmetropolitan: far-future freezing.
First off, you don't freeze the whole body, just the head. The body is buried.
Second, you keep it long enough that nanotechnology gets developed that can rebuild an organism from scratch. A thousand years is not out of question.
Next, the freezing damage gets repaired by nanobots, any damage so heavy that can't be rebuilt from existing tissue structure or DNA, gets rebuilt using "generic" data for "that genotype of a human". The rest of the body is rebuilt or regrown as a clone.
Next you wake up and promptly die from culture shock. After which you are revived again and remain alienated from the society forever.
Oh, and all your fortune and savings were lost in the Great Depression and following Revolution of 2642.
Re:Money in the future (Score:1, Informative)
Your theory is shot down by the evidence. There are male sex robots for women: they are called "vibrators", and they massively outsell female sex robots for men (blow-up dolls).
There are oh so many things you're not taking into account, the first and foremost being that reasonably priced dolls are bloody hideous.
Re:Key legal obstacle (Score:4, Informative)
There was no way to break these, and so over the course of centuries, the land holdings would become impossibly and uneconomically fragmented. Even if circumstances had radically changed, it could mean that the wishes of your great-great-great-grandfather was basically making you destitute.
Basically that's how the rule against perpetuities came about. Remember, that while a corporation has an indefinite lifetime, it is definitely *alive*. It reacts dynamically to changing circumstances. It continues to exchange title to goods, purchase or provide services etc. Companies "die" during windups or bankruptcies.
Imagine if companies that went bankrupt in 1650 had perpetual trusts on their assets. Whole parts of the world would be unusable because they were "only" to be used for growing cotton or whathaveyou. That's the kind of situation the old "uses" led to.