Suppose it's the year 2040 - What are the chances of successfully reviving a cryopreserved human body and curing the disease that killed him or her?

My opinion is, like a frozen dead chicken, you won’t be able to bring a DEAD person back to life through cryonics. The person would have to be frozen ALIVE. Who wants that?

There is zero chance of this technology working within 30 years
Life is finite. People need to understand this and live their lives accordingly.

I wonder if our descendants are really gonna be so happy with us for saddling them with all this economic debt and frozen bodies (sometimes just heads) that they’ll just blow it all off and start something new.

In other words, of what benefit is it to future society to thaw out these folks? They won’t have any money or property of their own (they’ve been legally dead.) They likely won’t have any relevant vocational or educational skills that would be marketable. There’s a good chance they might not have any relatives around to take them in.

I, for one, do not want to be a burden. So no, I shall not participate in the freezing.

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The freezing process probably causes more damage than the dying thing.

Well, if the Mians were correct we wont be around to worry about 2040. lol.

The basic scientific precept of cryogenics is fundamentally sound. There is a good possibility that there will exist the technology to reverse the process and theoretically to cure specific diseases.
The idea of being able to bring someone back to life however is a bit more far fetched, like @Mr_M says… curing a disease and resurrection are not the same thing. Disease is theoretically curable, death is irreversible.
Having said that, if it were possible to bring people back after years of freezing… would you want to?

Think of it this way… say someone found a caveman frozen in a glacier (maybe cryogenics will be viable so far in the future that this example will fit)... would that caveman if thawed be able to adapt to modern society? How would he/she cope with the culture clash? the sensory overload? how would he/she communicate? and wil he/she be able to join society?

If you believe you’ll be able to relate to society in 500 years.. go ahead and freeze yourself… otherwise… let go.

@ShauneP82 Mians? do you maybe mean MAYANS?

Zero, since the world would have ended 28 years earlier. ;)

Seriously, before you start thinking about curing the ailment you are going to have develop nanobots that are able to repair the cellular damage caused by ice crystals.

@Dr_C Yeah sure, they probably have some history too. Either nation says it really. lol.

@ShauneP82 LOL

One huge problem with Cryonics is that all the H2O becomes Ice and ruptures the vessels, etc. If that can be solved we would be closer. But even then, it seems so implausible.

@tigran – One approach are plasma replacement fluids. And as @AstroChuck pointed out, nanorobotics might be able deal with the necessary cell repairs.

Instead of freezing peoples destroyed bodies, it’s possible that we can hibernate instead. They are researching suspended animation and has made successful attempts on animals. Who knows how long we could be in the fridge this way, but probably for quite some time.

@oratio – Thanks for the link. Interesting article. Understanding hibernation could be critical in future research. But there are legal issues. It’s legal to cryopreserve a dead person, but it’s illegal to put a healthy person into hibernation. The approach would also offer an alternative approach for astronauts to reach Mars. Learning from bears, hedgehogs and squirrels – By understanding the genetic mechanisms, can humans hibernate their way to Mars? Here’s an interesting article:

Hibernating animals such as bears or woodchucks can either go into full hibernation, in which they effectively sleep through a long stretch of time, or go into a torpor, a sort of periodic sleep from which they awake several times during winter.

“All of them belong to a hypermetabolic stasis, where you lower your metabolism, your energy consumption and your energy needs,” Biggiogera told Space.com. “It’s an adaptive mechanism.” The key seems to be genetic, where special genes allow animals to sleep for long periods, while protecting them from harsh temperatures or a lack of food, Biggiogera said. A professor at the University of Marburg, Germany, specialising in animal physiology, reported a key breakthrough. “There is no real reason to say that humans are so different from other mammals that they are unable to enter hibernation,” Gerhard Heldmaier said last night. Professor Heldmaier is chairman of the International Hibernation Society and his discovery was of two genes which are believed to trigger hibernation. The finding of the genes, which are involved in controlling, or “switching” enzymes to equip the body for hibernation by allowing it to burn fat rather than carbohydrates, is the latest in a series of discoveries about human hibernation. “For many years we have been fiddling around, trying to find a handle or a switch to turn on this metabolism,” he said. “Now, for the first time, we have genes involved in this control. ”

Space travel hibernation, said Professor Andrews, is still “pure science fiction”. But he added: “More realistically, one of the first main benefits of this process could be organ preservation. If you could put organs into long-term stasis, as does a hibernator, you could preserve them for months. At the moment, body organs will only keep for about three or four days. Hibernation could eventually save lives.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/gene-research-scientists-close-to-human-hibernation-breakthrough-626287.html

I like Mr_M’s frozen dead chicken analogy. Maybe we can freeze dead people to feed the teeming billions in 2040 who will need food. Burying them in the ground seems such a waste.

@evelyns_pet_zebra – Yeah, sounds like a small green wafer called Soylent Green. Yummy. Ever had one?

“S o y l e n t
G r e e n
i s
p e o p l e !”

charlton heston rocks

More like Charleton Heston rots, now.

Ah, rot n’roll!
The devil’s music.