Better off Krang

I don't know that I would want to live forever, but I wouldn't mind a couple hundred years provided that I could live them in some semblance of good health. Like, I wouldn't want to be a brain in a jar or something.

A brain in a sweet android body however...

When have the Germans ever had
a bad...uh...idea...oh...

I mention this because according to a new article in Popular Mechanics, a German startup called Tomorrow Biostasis has ten frozen bodies in tubes with the plan of one day reviving them. And you van be body number eleven! I suppose I should clarify that these were presumably willing participants. That is, people who specified a desire to be cryonically frozen upon death, and, for some reason, paid a startup to handle that for them. How much? Well, that depends, but it's not cheap. 

I mean, what's not to love about
where the world is heading?

It's about sixty or two hundred thousand Euros all told depending on how much of yourself you'd like frozen. Just the head or the full corpsesicle. Ultimately your life insurance will pay for this if you have it, but you give Tomorrow Biostasis twenty euros a month to keep a team on standby should you find yourself circling the drain. A small price to pay to experience the devastation of climate change followed by the inevitable take over of what's left of humanity by super intelligent AI's. So what's the catch? 

From the business model that brought us a
$400 machine that squeezes juice into a cup.

Well, for one, I'm not sure I'd trust my immortality to a startup. I won't even commit to Magic Spoon. I don't know anything about business, but something like 90% of startups fold before they hit the ten year mark. Hopefully one would die of something they find a cure for before 2033, but that feels like cutting it a little close. Changes are your cryotube will go the way of your other subscription services--that is, you cancel it a few years in when you realize you forgot that you subscribed in the first place. Remember Gamefly? Yeah, better check, you might still be paying for it.

Also, what if you die in a blimp explosion or are killed by one of America's well regulated militias? This whole scheme is predicated on the idea that you die of something that kills you slowly enough that Tomorrow Biostasis' freezer squad can get to you. Like, there has to be something left of you to freeze.

The chance of being murdered at any moment is just the
price we pay for the freedom something something...

So this, but the victim will be your
cognitive function and not say, vanilla bean.

But even if that's the case, you still have to have died of something that doctors find a cure for. And this has to happen while the company is still around, which is in no way guaranteed. Then they have to figure out how to revive you. Then you just have to hope they can reverse the inevitable cell damage being frozen causes. Ever leave ice cream in the freezer too long? Exactly. And then you have to contend with the emotional trauma that comes along with waking up in a changed world where everyone you knew or cared for could very well be dead themselves.

Unless you're into that. Anyway, I can understand why someone might want to disinherit their ungrateful children in favor of the thin possibility that their corpse might be reanimated sometime in the indeterminate future. But it kind of sounds like there's quite a lot of if's involved here. So many, in fact, that I'm left with the sense that this might just be some kind of elaborate German insurance tontine that only works if an incredibly specific set of circumstances line up.

Pictured: the Tomorrow Biostasis rapid response team.
Just try not to die while they're on lunch or something...