Well, if you're going to mod me down as flamebait, you might as well do the same for the parent post instead of giving modding that idiot "insightful".
Science doesn't run on petitions. It runs on data. I don't care how many MDs and PhDs in unspecified fields sign some idiot petition. How many of them have actually published papers on climatology in peer-reviewed scientific journals?
Oh, I forgot, every peer-reviewed scientific journal is part of this vast conspiracy to brainwash the public (probably for the same reasons they're conspiring to suppress zero point energy, biogenic petroleum, the evils of fluoridation, and the reverse-engineered UFO the government is hiding). The only remaining outlet for The Real Story is some crackpot website.
Your approach is identical to that of creationists trotting out random PhDs to vouch for their fraudulent pseudo-science of intelligent design. PhDs in just about every discipline other than biology. It doesn't matter if you bribe every unemployed professor on the planet to shill for you. It won't change reality, only delay acceptance of it. To the detriment of the economy and of our respective nations.
You idiot, nearly every single climate researcher believes that global warming is accelerating at a rate unprecedented in the history of our species. Are you saying that every single one of them is lying? To me the simpler explanation is that politicians and pundits who don't know crap about science and their shills have made up their minds to dismiss global warming as "liberal propoganda" because it might be expensive and all that pleasant to prepare for the now inevitable consequences of global warming.
This guy had to fake data to get grants, which I assume means he had to make his data look like what the grantors expected.
Not really (well, except politically charged areas of research like recreational drug use, environment, and the heredity of human intelligence). Other things being equal (researcher's reputation, clinical relevance, novelty) what granting agencies look for are results that tell some kind of self-consistant story, whether it extends the prevailing consensus or overturns it. If it overturns the prevailing consensus, the more persuasive data will be expected, but in both cases the data itself is judged by its coherence.
So if you write that drug foo makes protein bar get upregulated in liver but downregulated in lungs and stay the same in kidneys in young mice and the difference disappears with age except in the brain, where there now is a difference, and on top of that, the measures of protein bar activity don't always agree with protein bar levels, you have a very messy story that is going to be hard to publish, let alone fund, unless there are other studies published that put it into some kind of interpretable context. It just sounds like you're chasing random noise.
If you write that drug foo makes protein baz get upregulated in every organ system studied, at several different ages, and several independent tests (mRNA level, protein level, protein activity) are all in perfect agreement, you have yourself a paper in a nice journal and convincing data to back your next grant application.
The problem is that in real life, almost all data looks like the first protein instead of the second one. So you pretty much have to use your own experience (and sometimes intuition) in figuring out which experiments to repeat or expand on, and which ones really are likely to be random noise.
So if you're an honest scientist you spend more of your grant money, buy more mice, repeat the experiments using more precise measurements and larger sample sizes. You pore over the literature and come up with elaborate theories that tie these disparate results together. You publish your paper in a lower quality journal. You risk getting passed over for tenure or getting your next grant application rejected.
If you take the easy way out, you just say "I know what the data is really supposed to be, we just screwed up the experiment, I'll just drop a few data points here, and make up a few over here, and now it all makes sense".
The scary thing is, if you have good hunches, a lot of the time you'll be right about how the experiment would have turned out if you put $100,000 into repeating it. And most of the rest of the time, it will be years before anybody figures out you were wrong, and they'll probably assume it was an honest mistake rather than fraud. Meanwhile, your career as a scientist is at stake right now. So the temptation can be great.
To me that's the big frustration about research science-- our equivalent of the write-compile-test cycle takes years.
How to fix it? Put more money into basic research, so it's less of a rat-race and scientists can spend more of their energy thinking about science instead of about where their next grant is going to come from. Where to get this money? Oh, I dunno, maybe avoid invading Iran and pass a tiny fraction of the savings to research? Decrease health-care costs by loosening the immigration and accreditation requirements for foreign MDs (like has already been done over the years for foreign PhDs) and pass a tiny fraction of the savings to research? Increase the inheritance tax for estates worth more than, say, $5 million and put it into research? Stop blowing money on the drug war, or on moral crusades, or on music/movie/software "piracy", or on imaginary domestic terrorists (who would kill fewer people than get killed by cancer and heart disease even if they staged a 9-11 every frigging year) and (you guessed it) pass a tiny fraction of the savings to research? Oh heck, if you're some ki
1. Perhaps the purpose of CP hysteria is to give law enforcement broader powers that can be used to bust idiots they don't like in general, be they CP idiots or some other type of idiot which can be made to look like a CP idiot.
2. Like any male adult with a sex drive who isn't a lying sack of shit, you admitted that sometimes individuals that haven't quite reached the age of consent turn you on. I applaud you for your integrity, but think about what you said right afterward: these pragmatic reasons you talk about amount to the laws being so screwed up that you're afraid to do what you want with your own computer in the privacy of your own home. And unless you believe law = ethics, the ethical argument falls apart when you realize there are perfectly civilized, modern, and inhabitable countries where the age of consent falls anywhere between 15 and 18. The US is an anomaly in treating every individual under 18 as a child (except for purposes of administering the death penalty, of course).
What I want to know, is how prevalent is kid porn or what the hell it is? To me, I'm only interested in girls once they get signs of being able to breed.
...which means you're interested in 16 year olds, and the occasional 15, 14, and maybe even 13 year old. Welcome to the club, you pervert, and thank you for confessing. The FBI will be at your house shortly to sieze your computer and take you to a re-education camp. If it turns out you don't have any incriminating evidence on your computer, some will be provided for you.
If you have the brains, create. If you have the charisma to get elected, regulate or ban what people with brains created. If you have neither the brains nor the charisma, write bland articles where you wring your hands about safety without saying anything new.
...the same fundamentalist kooks who oppose the vaccine to human papilloma virus... jump all over this as "encouraging irresponsible behavior" or some such nonsense.
Clothing and hairstyle more important than substance? And these PHB's don't get driven out of business by their screwed up priorities? Someone explain to me again why we take economists seriously at all.
As far as I can tell the main arguments against cryo are "It probably won't work" and "It feels wrong, somehow, and I don't want other people doing it".
The "won't work" argument falls flat immediately because even though there are a lot of risks, nobody has yet proposed any options more likely to work which are mutually exclusive with cryonics. The worst thing that can happen is that you'll die anyway, and be no worse off than if you never got a contract.
I think the "feels wrong" argument will not be able to prevail either, because the will to live is stronger than the will to stop living, and even more so than the will to prevent others from living at no benefit to one's own self. Furthermore, individuals who are so weary of life that they think death is a good thing may also be too passive to win out over the numerically smaller but more determined individuals who want to indefinitely postpone their deaths.
How many times do I have to state the obvious? If I don't like living in the future, death is always an option. I just don't like it being the only option.
And if you're not curious, WTF are you reading this article for? Oh yeah, I forgot, because it's fun to lecture others about the follys of hubris, selfishness, and curiousity.
If, after you're done with your Futurama jokes and "moral" indignation you secretly want to look into this further, read the cryonics funding information page. If you're uncomfortable explaining the whole thing cold to an insurance agent (they're not the most inaginative and open minded people in the world, after all) Alcor also maintains a list of insurance agents who have worked with Alcor members in the past. A phone conversation with one of these folks, a physical checkup a week later, pay your premiums and Alcor fees, and *poof* you too have a cryo contract.
This is correct. You name Alcor as the beneficiary on your life insurance policy. That's what pays for your suspension.
I'm sure that the trust fund Pizer set up is much more elaborate than that, and goes far beyond just paying for suspension. His might not even involve life insurance, dunno. Most of us are in a very different situation than he is.
Everything this person loves so much that drives them to want to live again or live forever will probably be gone.
What if curiousity is what makes them want to live again? Or the sheer joy of remembering the good times and continuing to be alive?
If you personally knew any cryonicists, I think you'd find that they've thought things through far better than people with the conventional attitude toward death.
If I had a spare $10 million, I would use it to hedge my bets, but not by putting it in trust for myself. I'd give it to Alcor right now on condition that they use it to build a windfarm and solar array large enough to operate compressor units in order to produce their own liquid nitrogen should there be any disruption in the supply.
The second biggest threat to Alcor after legal harassment is extended disruptions in the energy supply or the transportation/distribution networks. From my conversations with other cryonicists, the consensus seems to be "let's ignore the problem and hope it never, ever happens". If they believe that, they really are the wishful thinkers that "normal" people accuse them of being. I feel that given a period of centuries, it's a near certainty that Scottsdale, AZ will experience at least one disruption of one sort or another in its liquid nitrogen shipments lasting a month or longer.
The one indispensible input Alcor needs from the outside world is liquid N2. As long as there's plenty of that, the dewars can function without electricity. By paying for a robust local renewable energy grid, Pizer could have made himself not only cancer and heart disease proof, but also peak-oil resistant and economic chaos resistant... along with all the fellow cryonicists interred at the Alcor facility.
I think that anybody who has a hard time understanding why death is bad has a problem seeing the obvious. But we can agree to disagree.
I don't know what I'd do with $10 million if I had it. I'd probably give some of it to charity. But certainly not all of it... a person is entitled to do what they like with their own money. Otherwise it's not called charity, it's called taxation.
Note that it didn't say either way whether or not he's given to charity... he may have, and those posters exhibiting the standard class envy might be acting very ugly therefore.
I really don't think of myself as being more worthy of life than other people, or somehow so special as to be worth preserving for the future, or anything like that.
I just really like being alive and I don't want to die. I've never once wavered from this desire, and I honsetly don't think I ever will, no matter how much hardship life offers me.
Very early in life I faced this, and admitted to myself that I will do whatever it takes to survive as long as possible as long as I don't have to harm other human beings.
Then, and now, there are three basic options open to me: studying aging, participating in cryonics, and faith in the afterlife. I keep an open mind about all three, but given the lack of hard evidence for the existance of an afterlife in the literal sense, I am concentrating my efforts on the first two.
I don't begrudge other people a long life. In fact, the more the merrier... and the sooner we grow enough balls to admit that we want to LIVE, the sooner we'll force ourselves to solve the technical and social obstacles that stand in our way. And the sooner people will really start taking the long view about how we should be living upon our as yet only planet.
It's okay to not know key facts about modern cryonics, as you clearly don't. You don't start looking like an idiot until you call people who don't share your ignorance of these facts "stupid".
What's the most advanced bio or chem class you've taken?
In the absence of any supreme all-knowing all-powerful authority, the standard-setting defaults to the market. Those of us who are gainfully employed meet this standard. The bar isn't very high.
They also didn't have such a huge proportion of their population be retired people.
But honestly, I don't think this will be abused much. We just need to be vigilant. Get all those pro-lifers urging old people to stay around a little longer and give pain medication a chance to relieve their suffering. Oh, but who am I kidding? Old people are nowhere as cute and innocent as fetuses.
You get to decide what you should do and what you deserve. Other people get to decide what they should do and what they deserve. And the burden of proof is on you to show that the decisions someone else makes about their life or death have more of a negative impact on you than regulations prohibiting that class of behavior would have on everybody.
Since most of us can't afford to go offshore to perform such shenanigans, we have to rely on the infrastructure of organizations like Alcor and Cryonics Institute. Both these places are located in the US (in Alcor's case the UK as well), and scrupulously abide by all applicable laws because they know that just by existing they're already a huge target for greedy heirs, fear-mongering politicians, and self-appointed ethicists.
If a cryo company froze a living subject, they would be put on trial and probably liquidated and all the cryosuspended people would be thawed and buried. No legal precedent yet exists for a frozen person being considered potentially alive, so the execution without trial argument would not hold up. IANAL but as far as I can tell, the legal status of such a person would be the same as that of one who fell into a vat of liquid N2 accidentally-- dead.
If euthenasia is ever legalized, it might be possible to get suspended while alive, but even then I suspect that cryo companies would be very, very cautious about the circumstances under which this would be done.
I was going to write the same thing about coordinate systems changing, but then I realized it doesn't matter. The Earth will still have the same geometry, and it should be possible to convert the current coordinates into whatever coordinates are being used at the time, though I don't see why anybody would bother changing the system-- it's the same longitude and latitutde that served us for centuries. The thing to worry about is geologic drift, so some backup landmarks would be useful. Also, it might be useful to split the stash up between multiple locations-- that anonymous spot on the continental shelf might be in the middle of a mine someday. Or a shopping center.
As for gold, it might be useful to think about what other small items might retain high value. May even be ordinary things like stamps, newly minted coins, heirloom seeds... but then we're making assumptions about what society will value in the future.
Self preservation is only a small part of evolution. Once you done your duty and raised your kids youre excess baggage whos only function is to annoy your offspring and their offspring and take them fishing once in a while.
I might choose to have kids, if during my lifetime the overpopulation conditions improve. You're mistaken about being excess baggage after having raised kids. You're an evolutionary player for as long as you're capable of having more kids if you want to be technical about it. This is why species with low risk of predation evolve such long lifespans (e.g. humans, tortoises, birds, bats). Furthermore, waking up in the future and having a few more kids would be a great way to insure your bloodline.
With the emergence of civilization, evolutionary pressures continue, but they have become far more complicated, and memetic/cultural evolution has been added to the mix. It may boil down to something like "greatest control over their own and their progeny's survival strategies given to those who are the most useful to society".
But anyway, you're committing the naturalistic fallacy. Just because evolution may favor a particular outcome, doesn't mean that we as individuals would or should want that outcome. The people who believe the universe has an inherent prescriptive morality generally don't believe in evolution in the first place... they tend to believe the creation story of whatever religion they belong to.
Society, especially a more advanced future one, has no interest in reviving rich dead people who will undoubtedly go on and on about how much better it was in the old days.
Wow, you seem to have a lot of inside information about what an advanced society is interested in. Tell you what, share your time-machine secret with me and I'll give up my cryo contract.
What could JP Morgan possibly offer us today? What good would come of a society of eternal old people? Evolution is about CHANGE and people dont change.
Heck, if I had the cash and the technology, and he was frozen, I'd revive his ass. By watching someone experience something for the first time, we all learn something new, whether it's JP Morgan or some nameless schmoe.
A sufficiently old individual is a source of genetic diversity, because just as new genes arise through mutation, old ones can be lost, sometimes due to selective pressures that no longer apply or have been reversed. For example, who knows how many alleles predisposing for intelligence might have gotten lost because they had a pleiotropic effect on neonatal immune function.
Have fun, have kids and get the fuck out of the way.
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Well, if you're going to mod me down as flamebait, you might as well do the same for the parent post instead of giving modding that idiot "insightful".
Science doesn't run on petitions. It runs on data. I don't care how many MDs and PhDs in unspecified fields sign some idiot petition. How many of them have actually published papers on climatology in peer-reviewed scientific journals?
Oh, I forgot, every peer-reviewed scientific journal is part of this vast conspiracy to brainwash the public (probably for the same reasons they're conspiring to suppress zero point energy, biogenic petroleum, the evils of fluoridation, and the reverse-engineered UFO the government is hiding). The only remaining outlet for The Real Story is some crackpot website.
Your approach is identical to that of creationists trotting out random PhDs to vouch for their fraudulent pseudo-science of intelligent design. PhDs in just about every discipline other than biology. It doesn't matter if you bribe every unemployed professor on the planet to shill for you. It won't change reality, only delay acceptance of it. To the detriment of the economy and of our respective nations.
You idiot, nearly every single climate researcher believes that global warming is accelerating at a rate unprecedented in the history of our species. Are you saying that every single one of them is lying? To me the simpler explanation is that politicians and pundits who don't know crap about science and their shills have made up their minds to dismiss global warming as "liberal propoganda" because it might be expensive and all that pleasant to prepare for the now inevitable consequences of global warming.
This guy had to fake data to get grants, which I assume means he had to make his data look like what the grantors expected.
Not really (well, except politically charged areas of research like recreational drug use, environment, and the heredity of human intelligence). Other things being equal (researcher's reputation, clinical relevance, novelty) what granting agencies look for are results that tell some kind of self-consistant story, whether it extends the prevailing consensus or overturns it. If it overturns the prevailing consensus, the more persuasive data will be expected, but in both cases the data itself is judged by its coherence.
So if you write that drug foo makes protein bar get upregulated in liver but downregulated in lungs and stay the same in kidneys in young mice and the difference disappears with age except in the brain, where there now is a difference, and on top of that, the measures of protein bar activity don't always agree with protein bar levels, you have a very messy story that is going to be hard to publish, let alone fund, unless there are other studies published that put it into some kind of interpretable context. It just sounds like you're chasing random noise.
If you write that drug foo makes protein baz get upregulated in every organ system studied, at several different ages, and several independent tests (mRNA level, protein level, protein activity) are all in perfect agreement, you have yourself a paper in a nice journal and convincing data to back your next grant application.
The problem is that in real life, almost all data looks like the first protein instead of the second one. So you pretty much have to use your own experience (and sometimes intuition) in figuring out which experiments to repeat or expand on, and which ones really are likely to be random noise.
So if you're an honest scientist you spend more of your grant money, buy more mice, repeat the experiments using more precise measurements and larger sample sizes. You pore over the literature and come up with elaborate theories that tie these disparate results together. You publish your paper in a lower quality journal. You risk getting passed over for tenure or getting your next grant application rejected.
If you take the easy way out, you just say "I know what the data is really supposed to be, we just screwed up the experiment, I'll just drop a few data points here, and make up a few over here, and now it all makes sense".
The scary thing is, if you have good hunches, a lot of the time you'll be right about how the experiment would have turned out if you put $100,000 into repeating it. And most of the rest of the time, it will be years before anybody figures out you were wrong, and they'll probably assume it was an honest mistake rather than fraud. Meanwhile, your career as a scientist is at stake right now. So the temptation can be great.
To me that's the big frustration about research science-- our equivalent of the write-compile-test cycle takes years.
How to fix it? Put more money into basic research, so it's less of a rat-race and scientists can spend more of their energy thinking about science instead of about where their next grant is going to come from. Where to get this money? Oh, I dunno, maybe avoid invading Iran and pass a tiny fraction of the savings to research? Decrease health-care costs by loosening the immigration and accreditation requirements for foreign MDs (like has already been done over the years for foreign PhDs) and pass a tiny fraction of the savings to research? Increase the inheritance tax for estates worth more than, say, $5 million and put it into research? Stop blowing money on the drug war, or on moral crusades, or on music/movie/software "piracy", or on imaginary domestic terrorists (who would kill fewer people than get killed by cancer and heart disease even if they staged a 9-11 every frigging year) and (you guessed it) pass a tiny fraction of the savings to research? Oh heck, if you're some ki
1. Perhaps the purpose of CP hysteria is to give law enforcement broader powers that can be used to bust idiots they don't like in general, be they CP idiots or some other type of idiot which can be made to look like a CP idiot.
2. Like any male adult with a sex drive who isn't a lying sack of shit, you admitted that sometimes individuals that haven't quite reached the age of consent turn you on. I applaud you for your integrity, but think about what you said right afterward: these pragmatic reasons you talk about amount to the laws being so screwed up that you're afraid to do what you want with your own computer in the privacy of your own home. And unless you believe law = ethics, the ethical argument falls apart when you realize there are perfectly civilized, modern, and inhabitable countries where the age of consent falls anywhere between 15 and 18. The US is an anomaly in treating every individual under 18 as a child (except for purposes of administering the death penalty, of course).
What I want to know, is how prevalent is kid porn or what the hell it is? To me, I'm only interested in girls once they get signs of being able to breed.
...which means you're interested in 16 year olds, and the occasional 15, 14, and maybe even 13 year old. Welcome to the club, you pervert, and thank you for confessing. The FBI will be at your house shortly to sieze your computer and take you to a re-education camp. If it turns out you don't have any incriminating evidence on your computer, some will be provided for you.
If you have the brains, create.
If you have the charisma to get elected, regulate or ban what people with brains created.
If you have neither the brains nor the charisma, write bland articles where you wring your hands about safety without saying anything new.
...the same fundamentalist kooks who oppose the vaccine to human papilloma virus... jump all over this as "encouraging irresponsible behavior" or some such nonsense.
Clothing and hairstyle more important than substance? And these PHB's don't get driven out of business by their screwed up priorities? Someone explain to me again why we take economists seriously at all.
As far as I can tell the main arguments against cryo are "It probably won't work" and "It feels wrong, somehow, and I don't want other people doing it".
The "won't work" argument falls flat immediately because even though there are a lot of risks, nobody has yet proposed any options more likely to work which are mutually exclusive with cryonics. The worst thing that can happen is that you'll die anyway, and be no worse off than if you never got a contract.
I think the "feels wrong" argument will not be able to prevail either, because the will to live is stronger than the will to stop living, and even more so than the will to prevent others from living at no benefit to one's own self. Furthermore, individuals who are so weary of life that they think death is a good thing may also be too passive to win out over the numerically smaller but more determined individuals who want to indefinitely postpone their deaths.
How many times do I have to state the obvious? If I don't like living in the future, death is always an option. I just don't like it being the only option.
And if you're not curious, WTF are you reading this article for? Oh yeah, I forgot, because it's fun to lecture others about the follys of hubris, selfishness, and curiousity.
If, after you're done with your Futurama jokes and "moral" indignation you secretly want to look into this further, read the cryonics funding information page. If you're uncomfortable explaining the whole thing cold to an insurance agent (they're not the most inaginative and open minded people in the world, after all) Alcor also maintains a list of insurance agents who have worked with Alcor members in the past. A phone conversation with one of these folks, a physical checkup a week later, pay your premiums and Alcor fees, and *poof* you too have a cryo contract.
This is correct. You name Alcor as the beneficiary on your life insurance policy. That's what pays for your suspension.
I'm sure that the trust fund Pizer set up is much more elaborate than that, and goes far beyond just paying for suspension. His might not even involve life insurance, dunno. Most of us are in a very different situation than he is.
Everything this person loves so much that drives them to want to live again or live forever will probably be gone.
What if curiousity is what makes them want to live again? Or the sheer joy of remembering the good times and continuing to be alive?
If you personally knew any cryonicists, I think you'd find that they've thought things through far better than people with the conventional attitude toward death.
If I had a spare $10 million, I would use it to hedge my bets, but not by putting it in trust for myself. I'd give it to Alcor right now on condition that they use it to build a windfarm and solar array large enough to operate compressor units in order to produce their own liquid nitrogen should there be any disruption in the supply.
The second biggest threat to Alcor after legal harassment is extended disruptions in the energy supply or the transportation/distribution networks. From my conversations with other cryonicists, the consensus seems to be "let's ignore the problem and hope it never, ever happens". If they believe that, they really are the wishful thinkers that "normal" people accuse them of being. I feel that given a period of centuries, it's a near certainty that Scottsdale, AZ will experience at least one disruption of one sort or another in its liquid nitrogen shipments lasting a month or longer.
The one indispensible input Alcor needs from the outside world is liquid N2. As long as there's plenty of that, the dewars can function without electricity. By paying for a robust local renewable energy grid, Pizer could have made himself not only cancer and heart disease proof, but also peak-oil resistant and economic chaos resistant... along with all the fellow cryonicists interred at the Alcor facility.
I think that anybody who has a hard time understanding why death is bad has a problem seeing the obvious. But we can agree to disagree.
I don't know what I'd do with $10 million if I had it. I'd probably give some of it to charity. But certainly not all of it... a person is entitled to do what they like with their own money. Otherwise it's not called charity, it's called taxation.
Note that it didn't say either way whether or not he's given to charity... he may have, and those posters exhibiting the standard class envy might be acting very ugly therefore.
I really don't think of myself as being more worthy of life than other people, or somehow so special as to be worth preserving for the future, or anything like that.
I just really like being alive and I don't want to die. I've never once wavered from this desire, and I honsetly don't think I ever will, no matter how much hardship life offers me.
Very early in life I faced this, and admitted to myself that I will do whatever it takes to survive as long as possible as long as I don't have to harm other human beings.
Then, and now, there are three basic options open to me: studying aging, participating in cryonics, and faith in the afterlife. I keep an open mind about all three, but given the lack of hard evidence for the existance of an afterlife in the literal sense, I am concentrating my efforts on the first two.
I don't begrudge other people a long life. In fact, the more the merrier... and the sooner we grow enough balls to admit that we want to LIVE, the sooner we'll force ourselves to solve the technical and social obstacles that stand in our way. And the sooner people will really start taking the long view about how we should be living upon our as yet only planet.
It's okay to not know key facts about modern cryonics, as you clearly don't. You don't start looking like an idiot until you call people who don't share your ignorance of these facts "stupid".
What's the most advanced bio or chem class you've taken?
Whoops, sorry. I must have lapsed into my humourless cryonically correct mode.
In the absence of any supreme all-knowing all-powerful authority, the standard-setting defaults to the market. Those of us who are gainfully employed meet this standard. The bar isn't very high.
They also didn't have such a huge proportion of their population be retired people.
But honestly, I don't think this will be abused much. We just need to be vigilant. Get all those pro-lifers urging old people to stay around a little longer and give pain medication a chance to relieve their suffering. Oh, but who am I kidding? Old people are nowhere as cute and innocent as fetuses.
You get to decide what you should do and what you deserve. Other people get to decide what they should do and what they deserve. And the burden of proof is on you to show that the decisions someone else makes about their life or death have more of a negative impact on you than regulations prohibiting that class of behavior would have on everybody.
Since most of us can't afford to go offshore to perform such shenanigans, we have to rely on the infrastructure of organizations like Alcor and Cryonics Institute. Both these places are located in the US (in Alcor's case the UK as well), and scrupulously abide by all applicable laws because they know that just by existing they're already a huge target for greedy heirs, fear-mongering politicians, and self-appointed ethicists.
If a cryo company froze a living subject, they would be put on trial and probably liquidated and all the cryosuspended people would be thawed and buried. No legal precedent yet exists for a frozen person being considered potentially alive, so the execution without trial argument would not hold up. IANAL but as far as I can tell, the legal status of such a person would be the same as that of one who fell into a vat of liquid N2 accidentally-- dead.
If euthenasia is ever legalized, it might be possible to get suspended while alive, but even then I suspect that cryo companies would be very, very cautious about the circumstances under which this would be done.
I was going to write the same thing about coordinate systems changing, but then I realized it doesn't matter. The Earth will still have the same geometry, and it should be possible to convert the current coordinates into whatever coordinates are being used at the time, though I don't see why anybody would bother changing the system-- it's the same longitude and latitutde that served us for centuries. The thing to worry about is geologic drift, so some backup landmarks would be useful. Also, it might be useful to split the stash up between multiple locations-- that anonymous spot on the continental shelf might be in the middle of a mine someday. Or a shopping center.
As for gold, it might be useful to think about what other small items might retain high value. May even be ordinary things like stamps, newly minted coins, heirloom seeds... but then we're making assumptions about what society will value in the future.
I might choose to have kids, if during my lifetime the overpopulation conditions improve. You're mistaken about being excess baggage after having raised kids. You're an evolutionary player for as long as you're capable of having more kids if you want to be technical about it. This is why species with low risk of predation evolve such long lifespans (e.g. humans, tortoises, birds, bats). Furthermore, waking up in the future and having a few more kids would be a great way to insure your bloodline.
With the emergence of civilization, evolutionary pressures continue, but they have become far more complicated, and memetic/cultural evolution has been added to the mix. It may boil down to something like "greatest control over their own and their progeny's survival strategies given to those who are the most useful to society".
But anyway, you're committing the naturalistic fallacy. Just because evolution may favor a particular outcome, doesn't mean that we as individuals would or should want that outcome. The people who believe the universe has an inherent prescriptive morality generally don't believe in evolution in the first place... they tend to believe the creation story of whatever religion they belong to.
Wow, you seem to have a lot of inside information about what an advanced society is interested in. Tell you what, share your time-machine secret with me and I'll give up my cryo contract.
Heck, if I had the cash and the technology, and he was frozen, I'd revive his ass. By watching someone experience something for the first time, we all learn something new, whether it's JP Morgan or some nameless schmoe.
A sufficiently old individual is a source of genetic diversity, because just as new genes arise through mutation, old ones can be lost, sometimes due to selective pressures that no longer apply or have been reversed. For example, who knows how many alleles predisposing for intelligence might have gotten lost because they had a pleiotropic effect on neonatal immune function.
No.
Except for the have fun part.