> No, that's not very rational. Cryopreservation may have low chances of success, but it's like a billion billion billion times better than just dying (which has zero chance of success). Nobody is claiming that cryopreservation is very probable, but it's a lot better than nothing.
That's basically Pascal Bet (if there's God you get infinite payoff, if there's no God you get finite negative payoff (wasted time caused by being believer), so to maximize payoff you should believe in God). The problem is - there are very many possible gods, many of them incompatibile with each other. You should consider the bet with ALL gods as possible options, not just some god versus no god.
Same with the cryogenic. You should consider the possibility that freezing you with our poor technology can make you unrecoverable, while some other technology could allow you to be saved eventually.
Also I'm sorry for Mr Banks, I love his books about Culture.
>Same with the cryogenic. You should consider the possibility that freezing you with our poor technology can make you unrecoverable, while some other technology could allow you to be saved eventually.
Yes, and that's rational. If there's another preservation technology that's better than cryopreservation, we should adopt that. There's nothing irrational about that. You just need to first invent such technology, and then provide evidence that it's better than current vitrification tech.
This has happened in the past. A few decades ago the preservation method was changed from freezing to vitrification, after vitrification was shown to be better.
That's basically Pascal Bet (if there's God you get infinite payoff, if there's no God you get finite negative payoff (wasted time caused by being believer), so to maximize payoff you should believe in God). The problem is - there are very many possible gods, many of them incompatibile with each other. You should consider the bet with ALL gods as possible options, not just some god versus no god.
Same with the cryogenic. You should consider the possibility that freezing you with our poor technology can make you unrecoverable, while some other technology could allow you to be saved eventually.
Also I'm sorry for Mr Banks, I love his books about Culture.