- In short: A cryonics company has frozen its first client in Australia in the hope of bringing him back to life in the future.
- The client, a man in his 80s, died in Sydney before being frozen at minus 200 degrees Celsius at a Holbrook facility.
- What’s next? The cryonics facility is expecting higher demand as its membership base ages, although it’s still unknown whether anyone preserved this way can ever be revived.
Even if they could reliably suspend a person and revive them in the future, what would motivate them to do so? Dead people cannot own assets, and so your customer would be a pauper by the time you defrosted them, in addition to being unequipped to cope with life in the future. (Prisoners finishing multi-decade sentences and finding themselves in a world where everything is done with mobile apps have it hard enough; someone walking up in, say, a century or two would have a vastly harder time.) And, given that running a high-spec corpse freezer costs money and has no proven results, and that your business is not preserving living humans for centuries but selling rich narcissists the promise of an afterlife, with the freezers as mere props, all the incentives would be to skimp on the most expensive parts and feign surprise when your customers turn out to have liquefied.
It would be a tremendously bad business move to choose not to revive them. They’d immediately lose all business as people obviously wouldn’t trust their service anymore.
Who would know? Everyone who knew them will be long dead by the time the question comes up.
In the comment I was replying to, we are already in the future, already have the tech to revive them, and the company chooses not to.
Imagine if a private foundation that was effectively an investment fund operated a facility that had been operating since the 1700s, keeping a handful of aristocrats and financiers in suspended animation, nominally at tremendous expense (hey, good alchemists and necromancers aren’t cheap). In reality, they cut a lot of corners and invested the change in building empires and buying yachts. Would anyone know or care? Would some millennial Hohenzollern or Rothschild really want to bring back their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandpa back to show them the wonders of the modern world and ask them for their wisdom? And if it turned out that it wasn’t possible and the company said “please accept our deepest apologies, it looks like there was a failure of the undeath-support protocols some 130 years ago due to a human error. We’d fire the employee involved, but he’s long dead. Anyway, here’s $50,000 by way of apology”, that that wouldn’t settle it?
Maybe it would, but it doesn’t change anything. You asked why would they revive them, they would revive them to prove to potential customers that their service works and get more money. Yes they can just quit making more money like you described, but as I said, that seems like a stupid business decision.
No corporation seems to give a shit about long-term viability when fucking over customers gets them short-term gains.
"I’m not quite dead yet! "