I've always felt, in a very non-disparaging way, that cryonics filled the need for secular humanists to believe in an afterlife.<p>An interesting point was brought up in the comments too, which is if we had a bunch of frozen folks from the 1600's and we could unfreeze them and bring them back to life, would that be the <i>right</i> choice?<p>That is the moral 'nub' which I find fascinating about this stuff (and yes it has been chewed fruitfully by writers before).<p>So imagine you could bring someone back from the 60's. What would they do today? The most brilliant computer designer would probably de-thaw believing that the IBM 360 with its channel architecture was the coolest thing. Show them the multi-issue pipeline of a modern microprocessor with register coloring, branch prediction, and early instruction retirement and their brain would explode.<p>When you are young the wonder of a new thing gives you the energy to read about how it works, when you're older (or just in a hurry) having to spend time reading the manual or 'fiddling with' a tool to understand it enough to use it is bothersome. Can you imagine waking up and everything you know is expected to be known by teens ? All your hard earned wisdom is worthless?<p>Since we're speculating there are things we can't really know but we can wonder about.<p>So what will be the economic status of these people once thawed? It could be 'good' in a post singularity world where anything can be made for 'free', or it could be 'bad' where thawed people are treated like the property of the person who paid to thaw them.<p>I would hate to find myself waking up, fuzzily, and have an insistent voice saying, "you've been reanimated by xyzcorp, click 'yes' to agree to their terms for paying off your debt to them, or 'no thankyou' to be re-frozen."