One clue is the large percentage of people that live there instead of opting for suicide. The other clue is the fact that it is a situation they can, at least potentially, get out of.
I'm not saying it is a pleasant situation. It sounds miserable to me. But people still tend to have friendships, laughter, enough food to survive on (if barely). The human psyche is more adaptable than it is frequently given credit for being. Personally, I'd rather wake up and have to adapt to a shanty town for a few hundred years and then die, than simply die. Better yet would be to escape and live for thousands of years as part of an enlightened civilization that does not make their fellow humans live like pigs.
The assumption that people brought out of cryostasis would be immediately herded into shanty towns strikes me as ridiculous to begin with, i.e. inconsistent with a society being able to revive me. It assumes resource scarcity. To get resource scarcity, you either need technological stagnation or high birthrates. Birthrates are dropping, technology is not. And if technology does, I won't be brought out of cryostasis to begin with.
As far as birthrates go, that is one reason I am so much in favor of everyone (as opposed to a tiny group of geeks) getting cryopreserved. Cryonics is a belief system that lowers conception rates, because a person can (in theory) always have their children later. Resource consumption while in the fridge is minimal -- extremely minimal when done in large quantities. Suspended animation (the no-damage kind) is a necessary prerequisite for revival of cryonauts, and it provides an excellent safety valve for overpopulation (even assuming (!) that space travel is never made economical). Any time populations grow too dense, if you don't have the money to live comfortably you can rent out your stuff and go into suspension for a few decades or until the job market improves. All your cash builds interest in the meantime, and there's laws to protect you because the first few people who get swindled during stasis got mad.
It's interesting to imagine what this will do to the term "human resources". You can always recruit someone fresh off their last job. Their specific skills (like a specific programming language) might be obsolete, but general skills (programming in general) would still be fresh. This would help prevent useful aspects of older paradigms from getting forgotten -- you'd have live experts preserving the knowledge rather than just what happened to get recorded in books.
lsparrish|15 years ago
I'm not saying it is a pleasant situation. It sounds miserable to me. But people still tend to have friendships, laughter, enough food to survive on (if barely). The human psyche is more adaptable than it is frequently given credit for being. Personally, I'd rather wake up and have to adapt to a shanty town for a few hundred years and then die, than simply die. Better yet would be to escape and live for thousands of years as part of an enlightened civilization that does not make their fellow humans live like pigs.
The assumption that people brought out of cryostasis would be immediately herded into shanty towns strikes me as ridiculous to begin with, i.e. inconsistent with a society being able to revive me. It assumes resource scarcity. To get resource scarcity, you either need technological stagnation or high birthrates. Birthrates are dropping, technology is not. And if technology does, I won't be brought out of cryostasis to begin with.
As far as birthrates go, that is one reason I am so much in favor of everyone (as opposed to a tiny group of geeks) getting cryopreserved. Cryonics is a belief system that lowers conception rates, because a person can (in theory) always have their children later. Resource consumption while in the fridge is minimal -- extremely minimal when done in large quantities. Suspended animation (the no-damage kind) is a necessary prerequisite for revival of cryonauts, and it provides an excellent safety valve for overpopulation (even assuming (!) that space travel is never made economical). Any time populations grow too dense, if you don't have the money to live comfortably you can rent out your stuff and go into suspension for a few decades or until the job market improves. All your cash builds interest in the meantime, and there's laws to protect you because the first few people who get swindled during stasis got mad.
It's interesting to imagine what this will do to the term "human resources". You can always recruit someone fresh off their last job. Their specific skills (like a specific programming language) might be obsolete, but general skills (programming in general) would still be fresh. This would help prevent useful aspects of older paradigms from getting forgotten -- you'd have live experts preserving the knowledge rather than just what happened to get recorded in books.