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.'"
You're playing their game (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the assumption that cryogenic revival will be possible, this may work in principle-- but the insurance industry doesn't exactly function on immutable code-like rules that can be hacked for fun and profit.
It's much more a game-- and moreover, the game is owned by the insurance industry. You're just playing it. And if you figure out a particularly good trick to beat the house, they're either going to rationalize why certain technicalities mean they don't need to pay you (and thus 'easy money' becomes 'try to drag deep-pocketed defendants into court'), or they'll simply change the rules before you're revived, and you won't have been able to do anything about it because you were dead.
From a what-do-you-have-to-lose perspective, sure, it's worth a shot. But this simply can't be a dependable part of estate planning.
Re:You're playing their game (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, it appears that investing my cash in these companies in the business of bilking the terminally optimistic of their earnings *could* be a fine way to ensure my comfortable retirement. Thank you stupid wealthy people!
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The whole scheme is being run by the same banks and insurance industries that have served all of us so well?
Pull the other one.
It's got bells.
Why do you want to come back, anyway. You've wasted 20-35 years of your life in vanity and no real effect, so far. What makes you assume this will change after napping on ice for 150 years?
Then you have an eternity of half-finished Lego projects and failed relationships to look forward to - without every really wondering why you exist at all.
Dead don't inherit... (Score:2)
Frozen meat can be cooked after thawing, so somebody in a dystopian future might benefit...
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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If you are indeed dead enough to qualify for a payout, then you are presumably too dead to be considered a survivor.
Kinda like trying to let your unborn child inherit your fortune.
1) Dead and unable to claim inheritance because of not being a survivor
2) Alive and unable to trigger a payout
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If you are indeed dead enough to qualify for a payout, then you are presumably too dead to be considered a survivor.
Kinda like trying to let your unborn child inherit your fortune.
1) Dead and unable to claim inheritance because of not being a survivor
2) Alive and unable to trigger a payout
3) For ethical reasons, your great-great-grandchildren must give permission before you can be thawed out. And reclaim their inheritance.
Re:You're playing their game (Score:5, Insightful)
The easy "out" would be that you weren't dead, and you owe them for unpaid premiums.
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Besides which, if you're dead and you left all your money to yourself, I doubt any of your relatives are going to be particularly interested in fighting the insurance company to get the money for yourself. More likely they would fight to have it for themselves and settle if they have to.
Anyway, if someone is rich, selfish and stupid enough to be cryogenically frozen they sh
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But I want to be frozen and for some odd reason put in a space craft and set adrift for centuries. Then finally picked up by a passing earth space craft and unfrozen by a well meaning android and a meddling doctor. Just in time to act like a complete jerk while they are in the middle of sensitive negations with a violent species of aliens who have a major military power.
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What the problem is, is the beneficiary has to be some legal entity. Obviously the easy way around that is to incorporate yourself and then leave your life insurance to the corporation, but someone must be around to help pay taxes and the like, because otherwise all the money is eventually forfeited to the government.
The easier solution is to do like most sane people; live a good life, marry, have real heirs and leave your wealth to them so that they in turn can do it with their children. Immortality happ
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id sooner expect them to argue that if youre freezing yourself with the intent of thawing out, you arent actually dead and, as such, are not eligible to collect the life insurance monies.
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.
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Also note, the important part of the brain is the structure. As long as it's kept intact, the memories and personality remain intact as well.
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Even a 1% chance to live forever is worth an infinite number of years.
Re: reviving after freezing-impossible (Score:3, Interesting)
Impossible is a big word-- temporize.
"Freezing essentially explodes the cell walls so there's nothing to revive."
Absolutely correct. The damage done in cryogenics happens at the start. It's likely not correctable going down the road with a few hundred years technology. Most substances reduce in volume when frozen/changed to a solid state, Water is a substance which expands on freezing..
The expansion upon freezing comes from the fact that water crystallizes into an open hexagonal form. This hexagonal la
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We freeze cells and keep them at -80C for future use. Most of the cells turn out to be viable and usable after the freeze/thaw cycle. I realize freezing a body is very different then cells, however, I would hesitate to say freezing a body or head is "impossible".
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.
don't hold your breath (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:don't hold your breath (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, they wouldn't outlaw trust funds. They'd regulate and tax trust funds that were essentially scams to take away any advantage from playing dead.
I'd imagine the scenario would work out this way. This scheme catches on, and a few decades from now trillions of dollars are being managed for the benefit of "dead" people. Then some politician comes up with the obvious idea: let's cut the taxes for the living but shifting the burden to the *dead*. You get revived, and discover that you pretty much can recover your principle, but the interest has been used to create a tax-free socialist paradise for the living. That is *if* the laws allow you to be revived. Imagine the debate we're having about retirement demographics, only now it's *revival* demographics. In twenty years a whole bunch of people are going to be decanted and start drawing money out of the system and throwing their antiquated weight around and generally making life less pleasant for the currently living. Let's put it to a vote: shall we revive everyone's great grandpa and create a new class of economic overlords, or should we keep them frozen and continue to tax them?
Unless you can arrange to vote from the cryogenic "grave", you shouldn't count on taking it with you. You *might* evade death, but you *won't* evade taxes.
Yeah right (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh huh, sure. And we'll all have flying cars, and we won't need to work because we will have created new ways produce food. And there'll be no wars, and free ice-cream.
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Why would we need any of those things? We want nice houses because we see nice houses and walk around in nice houses..... Matrix.
We want to buy nice foods because we enjoy the savory and delicious flavors that they let us experience... Matrix.
We want fast cars and sports equipment for excitement and thrills... Matrix.
We want nice clothes and fashionable cars for the way we appear... Matrix.
Augmented reality, or virtual reality will democratize property. You won't need a factory to build a Lamborghini it'
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A lot of what the parent poster was talking about sounded similar to Kurzweil's singularity idea. My understanding is that the processor power to simulate a Lamborghini will be yours in the same way that the power to imagine a Lamborghini is yours now. You will be a collection of advanced processing and simulation equipment and the difference between imagination and simulation will cease to exist.
Key legal obstacle (Score:5, Interesting)
However, in Australia, and other common-law countries such as the UK, Canada and the USA, trusts have a limited life-time. The basic principle is that the dead cannot rule the living. It's called the "rule against perpetuities". If trusts could last forever, more and more of the world's resources would be tied up in trusts with narrow aims and the eventually all the world would be divided between trustees and beneficiaries. So goes the argument, anyhow (this is different from conditional gifts and foundations, by the way, before you start yammering about scholarships and charitable organisations).
The lifetime of a trust is specified at its creation. In the old days you could make it $DEATH_DATE_OF_SOMEONE + 21 years. So you'd have stuff like "For the life of the Prince of Wales and 21 years", the theory being that it's easy to know when the Prince of Wales carks it. More recently, most jurisdictions have introduced legislation allowing an optional ability to simply fix some time period, usually up to 80 years.
And that's the problem. If you go into cryo-storage for 81 years, then on awakening you may find that your trust was dissolved and the benefits distributed to your descendants. And until it's proved that you can really come back from death via cryogenic storage, I'd be amazed if the courts changed their stance. Because too many people would try to break the rule against perpetuities by being "frozen".
Of course, IANAL, this isn't legal advice, YMMV yadda yadda.
Re:Key legal obstacle (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't this same line of logic apply to corporations and copyrights? Because right now, I would say the system is definitely breaking this "rule against perpetuities"...
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.
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The rule against perpetuities is not as ironclad as it used to be in the classic common law times. There are a lot of statutory exceptions and some states have even completely abolished the rule.
I think the bigger problem is to find a way to make your re-created self be the beneficiary. There is absolutely no legal concept of someone dying and then reviving. And usually (although i am not 1oo% sure) if you make yourself the only beneficiary of a trust, the trust will get invalidated as a sham trust.
Oh yes,
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That would be unlikely to work, IMO. Remember, trusts come from the *facts* of a situation, not merely from documents. A court could look at this scheme, reasonably conclude that i
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Except, you aren't actually dead. Death is the permanent cessation of life functions, if you have been revived, you aren't dead and you were at no time dead.
hidden treasure then (Score:3, Insightful)
Convert what you can to gold and hide it somewhere, hopefully some place that won't be discovered for the next 1000 years, I guess that would be the difficulty.
I predict that there will be a bank, maybe in Switzerland, maybe some place else, that will provide services helping the folks like that to hide their money, including from the law of other countries, for a percentage of annual interest perhaps.
Gold is worthless... (Score:3, Interesting)
And so are jewels, Confederacy dollars, Reichsmarks and Enron shares and stocks.
Jewels can be replicated today - they are pricey because they are artificially kept pricey.
Gold will probably be attainable from led or even rocks in the future.
Companies and countries cease to exit.
Several things will have (increased) value after a period of time.
One is land.
There is a limited amount of it on the planet. Even if you dry out oceans to make more - "old land" will still have premium value due to being closer to hu
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the theory being that it's easy to know when the Prince of Wales carks it
Of course, in practice, it would be really challenging to know when the Prince of Wales carks it, because periodically the Prince of Wales becomes the King of England, and one of his sons becomes Prince of Wales. There are in fact only 4 Princes of Wales that died while holding that title (Edward the Black Prince, Arthur Tudor, Henry Stuart, Frederick Louis). In other words, those trusts could be around a lot longer than intended, unless they were listed as basing the timing off of when the current Prince o
There's an easier way (Score:5, Funny)
Just leave 93 cents in the bank. After 1000 years accruing interest you'll have 4.3 billion dollars.
I do suggest changing your PIN number though, just in case.
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I'd like a cheese pizza and a large soda, please.
Re:There's an easier way (Score:4, Insightful)
...and with the way inflation works, your 4.3 billion dollars will buy you half a slice of bread once you've been thawed.
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Historically, real interest rates (the nominal interest rate - inflation) have been about 2%. So in 1000 years, that 93 cents will be worth about 370 million in inflation adjusted terms. A respectable sum.
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Depending on inflation. Has there yet been a bank or currency which has lasted that long?
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Depending on inflation. Has there yet been a bank or currency which has lasted that long?
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena was founded in 1472. So halfway there.
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Has there yet been a bank or currency which has lasted that long?
Gold. Plus, if you get gold coins rather than bullion there's a chance that that they will acquire rarity value over 1000 years (due to the milling, engraving etc) over and above the value of the base metal itself and so enhance your rate of return. Ancient coins still have a high value attached to them despite the empires to which they belonged being long-dead.
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Historically, real interest rates (the nominal interest rate - inflation) have been about 2%. So in 1000 years, that 93 cents will be worth about 370 million in inflation adjusted terms. A respectable sum. Depending on inflation. Has there yet been a bank or currency which has lasted that long?
The modern banking started during the Renaissance in the 14th–16th centuries.
And in the final sum you have to calculate also the account expenses the banks charges. It's possible, if the sum is not high enough, to own money to the bank after 1000 year.
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I had $25 left in a bank account for a couple of years. The bank ate it all up with service charges until the balance went negative and then when I didn't pay the bill they closed out the account and said I was lucky they didn't come after me.
Fuck the banks. I can't wait for the economy to totally crash and for all the monkey men and monkey women in suits to flip out and destroy themselves. Sure, I'll probably die myself, but I'm going to go laughing while pointing out that I told them so.
(Nah. I'll pro
Re:There's an easier way (Score:4, Interesting)
one slight problem with that
http://www.unclaimedfinances.co.uk/facts-dormant-bank-accounts-government-act.html [unclaimedfinances.co.uk]
In November 2008 the government passed the Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Act. One of the major principles of the act is to reinvest unclaimed money back into the community. So what exactly does this mean for those who are looking to reclaim their lost money?
Dormant Bank Accounts and Unclaimed Assets
In banking terms a bank account is dormant if there has been no customer activity within a set time period; usually between three and 15 years. Most banks will write to customers asking if they wish the account to remain active. However, in a number of cases banks will not be able to reach customers due to reasons such as moving home or name changes. Customers can still reclaim money in dormant bank accounts even if the money has been redistributed under the Dormant Bank Account Act.
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Remember what happened to Fry (Score:5, Funny)
Just be prepared for what is bound to happen. Your bike will likely get stolen.
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The ending of that episode with Fry's dog in front of the pizza place was actually a tearjerker... dog ages, lays down, closes eyes, The End. How sad!
hah.. (Score:5, Interesting)
But worry not, your fortunes would have been confiscated by the corrupt state, and were you to be revived, you would owe a small fortune for the "maintenance" of your rotted corpse, despite the fact that your machine has too been cannibalized for it's parts and scrap.
Had you awoken in the future, you'd have felt you left a virtual paradise, for a poisoned and hellish war zone, your debilitated body and mind only barely aware that the band of rogues that revived you only did so for profit, and are holding you hostage, with yourself as the source of ransom. When it's found you are without value, your decayed body will be allowed to die it's second and final death.
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What? No talking apes? I paid for talking apes living in mud huts with rifles they have no industry capable of providing ammunition for!
Damn YOU! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
-FL
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A bunch of stupid apes running around using tools they barely understand.
Dude, you just described 95% of America, including yourself.
-FL
Ted Williams (Score:2)
The Future Will be a Beautiful Place (Score:2)
Money rusts (Score:2)
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That's not actually true. First, money that is -invested- is generally used to buy something of value, typically something like land, commodities or fractions of companies (i.e. stock)
Second, wise investment means diversification. Certainly, some of the things you buy, will become worthless, but that's acceptable if you invest in a wide selection of different things.
A diversified portfolio only becomes worth zero if EVERY one of the items invested in, simultaneously drop to zero value.
I can't see that happ
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Yeah, but you'd have to be several degrees above "Carbonite" in order to properly manage your portfolio.
-FL
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If you have your drachma in notes, they're still worth 1/340.75 of a euro, at least until the 1st of March 2012 [bankofgreece.gr], because the Bank of Greece will still exchange them based on the face value.
If your drachma were sitting in a bank account then they were probably converted automatically to euros.
Hah. As if. (Score:2)
Before you decide to put yourself on ice, listen to the "This American Life" podcast.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1291 [thisamericanlife.org]
Right.
Let me decompose into wormfood quietly, please.
The Door into Summer (Score:2)
Time to buy some more Hired Girl stock!
Niven (Score:3, Informative)
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Larry Niven short story about Gil the ARM and the organleggers.
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The Heinlein story Door into Summer [wikipedia.org] is even more appropriate. The summary was basically the premise of the book.
one thing (Score:2)
Let's say you're cryogenically frozen, and that cryogenic freezing is lethal as seems to be the case.
Either:
1) You are already dead, and thus revival is already a moot point
2) The freeze kills you, revival is impossible, and the cryoplant is now on the hook for murder.
Given the current evidence against revival, anyone that places you in cryostasis while you are still alive is guilty of murder since they ought to know damn well you won't be coming back.
And if you're already dead, well, even if cryostasis d
Cryo has got to be the most brilliant scam ever (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course it is a bad scam preying on old people. But there are many such scams. The brilliant thing about cryogenics or whatever they call it is that the scammers can never be discovered. Let's face it it will not be possible to revive those poor dead people for a long time and probably forever. Even if micro biology advances it will not be possible because freezing tissue destroys all the cells and turns everything into mush. They need more than micro biology they need someone to reverse entropy, and good luck with that.
But anyways, let's imagine, for the sake of argument that it does become possible to revive those ppl. Even if that happens it will be far far in the future. And then of course when the people discover that everything has been stolen and there is no money in those funds, the perpetrators will be looong gone. Of course it is likely that by that time someone will have stopped paying the bills, the freezers would be switched off and some unlucky municipal government will have a hundred thousand rapidly thawing severed human heads to deal with.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who modded this insightful? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Even if micro biology advances it will not be possible because freezing tissue destroys all the cells and turns everything into mush.
This is an honest question... why do people keep saying this? Frozen meat is still meat when it's thawed, it hasn't lost anything except "life" as we understand it. It still has the same texture, it still has the same consistency, and, if you pass a current through it, the muscle will still contract in some cases.
Please explain what it means to "turn everything into mush" be
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freezing tissue destroys all the cells and turns everything into mush
Right, that's why if you freeze an embryo, you can't revive it and implant it and expect it to develop into a fetus and later a baby. It's just dead, because it was destroyed in the freezing process.
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To all those who say it is impossible (Score:2)
It was PROVEN that were you to emerge from a tunnel at a speed of greater then 30 miles an hour, the air blast would kill you. How hard do you drive?
Lots of things were impossible, before someone did them.
No, I don't see how someone's frozen head could be revived but think this. HOW many of you think it is possible to create an animal from a cell?
Yet the idea in Jurassic Park is not nearly as far fetched anymore is it? Used to be that dinosaurs came back in movie land because someone found some eggs that
Welcome to the world of tomorrow! (Score:2)
Shutup Terry
Plastic Minds, Electronic Souls, Metal bodies (Score:2)
Forget cryogenic temperatures. After I die I want my brain to preserved by injecting it with a polymer that can preserve the positions of all of my neurons. Forget saving my DNA and cells, my DNA is already a mess. Just preserve my neural patterns and do it so my brain can survive at room temperatures for thousands of years. Think of an insect trapped in amber. You can never revive it, but you can take scans of it in a computer to make a "virtual" copy of it in computer memory. That way your "co
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Android Body with enough computation power
Not to mention enough electrical power to keep your android body moving for some useful length of time. Assuming you have a life-size humanoid body I would think that that's going to require a lot of power.
Thank you (Score:2)
But I discovered a cheaper way to achieve similar if not better results, there is a thing called sex.
My heir currently fills his diapers.
welcome.. (Score:2)
..to the world of tomorrow!
Yeah, you are a head in a jar, your money got ripped off 30 minutes after you were frozen and you owe the government $100 squillion in cryo-tax and you will be kept in this cupboard till you pay up.
Insurance co. says "YES PLEASE!" (Score:5, Interesting)
So say I run an insurance company. Someone comes to me and says they'll give me a pile of money on the condition I give them a huge payout after they return from the dead. I know that the odds that they'll be back someday are essentially nil. So basically, they want to give me free money. YES PLEASE!
As a general rule, you shouldn't be surprised that insurance companies will insure you against X, if X is impossible.
The ultimate pyramid scheme (Score:3, Funny)
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.'"
Copsic (Score:2)
These guys should go read Larry Niven's novel A World Out of Time [wikipedia.org] and decide if they still think being cryogenically frozen is a good idea.
And how to prove you're "you" (Score:2)
The cashier says "certainly sir, I just need you to provide some identification." And that's where it all falls apart. How does a person (who's officially dead) prove that they're not dead. Especially when all their money is being held by the bank who won't release it until the proof come s through
Dangerous gamble (Score:2)
You may also wake up in the future just to find out that revolution has swept away all laws that made self-inheritance possible. So now you're broke, don't speak the language or understand society, and the only work you're apt for is the okral mines on Neptune. So you have to either slave away there to earn your existence or face the molecular disintegrator.
Not gonna work (Score:2)
When the machine AIs destroy the Earth, we won't be able to cash in though. But we can become famous and rich by writing about life in the 21st century!
For those that don't get it, read Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos, learn about Martin Silenus, and refer to my signature.
Money will always have meaning (Score:2)
There will always be meaning for money, though it changes over the generations. People like having a way to distinguish themselves and money is the easiest of these to flash around. Money will always have a place in society, even if we get to some highly enlightened place as a species (which is unlikely in the next few millennia.) We are a caste based species, whether we want to admit it or not, and money is the "new" deciding factor. It won't go away any time soon.
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Re:eternal life: "can" does not mean "should" (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, people in their 20s often pick up and go somewhere they know nobody, where the culture is very different and they have to pick up a whole new set of assumptions. It's called "college".
I think people in general are far more resilient than you give credit for, especially with the benefit of what would likely be advanced counselling methods.
Perhaps it's not to your liking, that's fine. Some people are more embedded in their world than others. I think I would manage fine, a whole new world to learn would be fascinating! Besides, you could likely still make the decision at that time that you didn't want to continue, no need to make it *now*!
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DNF (Score:2)
By then, we'd be playing DNF on ReactOS or Hurd 3.0, running on our mega-core phones.
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Dunno... it would still be fun.
Besides, if nothing else I could have a blast screwing with the heads of future historians.
("...of course, the fourth Nazi regime of Central California did try to establish a state religion. The dogma was a bit strange, but it went a bit like this..." [then I'd insert some real wild-assed stuff straight out of alt.slack's glory days] )
Re:eternal life: "can" does not mean "should" (Score:5, Insightful)
Life without meaning? A new world with a new culture and new politics and new sciences and new games to learn?! Are you kidding! That would be the greatest thing ever.
Make new friends. Form a new family. Only this time if they can resuscitate a head then I'm probably nearly immortal so I have at least 10k years before I'm statistically killed in an accident. That's more than enough time to learn a few hundred lifetimes of insights.
So what you're saying is that if your family and friends all died in an accident you would want to die with them and no live your life? If you were orphaned and adopted by a foreign family you think life wouldn't be worth living or have meaning?
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Well, that's your choice.
I'm not particularly afraid of dying, but I'm also not afraid of living and experiencing new things.
As long as I'm reasonably healthy, I would like to go on. When I am seriously injured or sick, just let me die quickly.
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... All your friends are dead ...
Hey ... this is still slashdot isn't it?
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It would be more tolerable if you could erase your memories and start fresh each time, much like reinstalling Windows from scratch to clear the crud out. I'd quite like the option of knowing that, although my current life may end for all practical purposes, I won't be consigned to oblivion.
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...he could change his mind, then have that lawn frozen with him.
Re:Money in the future (Score:5, Interesting)
One word: Fembot.
Once a reasonable facsimile of a real woman happens (nowhere near there yet), the tables will likely be turned, and in a big way. And no this isn't some sort of weird geek fantasy talking.
Thing is, men and women behave differently. A male human being has to mature a whole hell of a lot before he begins to sexually appreciate a woman as more than a collection of pretty smells, nice curves, and a warm vagina. We guys (not universally, but on average) are driven sexually by our five senses (esp. vision) more than anything else. Women OTOH are driven by far more factors, and look for these factors far sooner than guys do. This is why a male sex robot is fairly useless (unless someone pops the Turing route a whole lot sooner than anyone expect, that is), while a fairly dumb female sex robot would happily be useful to an unfortunate majority of the male population.
Objectively, it would have a cheaper ROI, you can treat 'em like objects (guys have a history of that with real women anyway), and when you get bored with one, you can get another. There are faults with the theory, though. If you're turned on by, say, a woman's intelligence, you're going to be like most of the women out there - sorely disappointed. Besides, my missus wouldn't let me get one anyway. :)
Back to TFM's topic? Why take the risks of sending your wealth to your (probable) unrevivable corpse? Just have some of your stem cells frozen, then let 'em make a close of you, and give the money to the copy of you (it won't be you, but hey - at least your DNA can still have some fun with the dough). It's cheaper (way the hell cheaper), far more certain with today's technology than necro-cryogenics, and a handful of cells would take a lot less space than a whole frickin' corpsicle.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dated_a_Robot [wikipedia.org]
Fry and the Lucy Liu robot begin dating, aided by her being programmed to like Fry. The other Planet Express employees, concerned about his relationship, show him the standard middle-school film (similar to Boys Beware) that predicts the destruction of civilization if humans date robots. Unfortunately, Fry ignores the movie and keeps making out with his Lucy Liubot.
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My money is on Menbots. Men-bots are already here and already selling like hot cakes. They're big vibrators attached to plastic torsos. When you think about it, that's all a woman really needs (her imagination and her female friends can provide the rest). For men, just give us bigger LCD screens. T
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A) You make the classic geek mistake of overstating the difference between men and women.
B) You have completely ignored the history of the sex toy industry, and who its primary customers are.
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