There are, of course, several downsides. For one thing, cryonics is very
expensive. To become a member of a cryonics facility, one needs to pay an
annual fee in the area of $400 a year. To preserve ones body in cryonic
suspension, one will have to pay up to $150,000. For those wanting cryonic
suspension on a budget, one can have one’s head preserved for just $50,000.
Presumably people choosing this option will wait until the technology exists to
regenerate or in some way construct a new body.
Then there is the fact that so far no one who has undergone cryonic
suspension has ever been revived. There is no guarantee that revival will even
be possible or that, having been accomplished, the person being revived will be
healthy; future cures of the disease that killed them notwithstanding.
Supporters of cryonics point to the new science of nanotechnology as a
possible means to revive human beings in cryonic suspension. Nanotechnology
concerns the use of microscopic machines to perform various tasks. In the case
of reviving people from cryonic suspension, these nanites, as they are called,
would repair any cellular damage that has occurred due to the cryonic process
and even reverse the effects of disease and aging on the molecular level.
There is finally the idea of culture shock, of people from the past suddenly
revived in some distant future time that will seem to them to be at once
wonderful and strange. To get an idea, imagine a person from—say—the 19th
Century, in some kind of suspended animation, suddenly revived in our time.
That person might be fascinated and even awed at the technological wonders that
have been developed since his time. However, he also might be disturbed and
alienated by changes in culture and mores that have occurred in the last
hundred and fifty years or so. If the past is a different country, then surely
the future is even more so. In any case, everyone a person being revived from
cryonic suspension (unless they use the service themselves) will likely be
dead. Such a person will be very alone.