Classic.
Freezing your own head. Reminds me of the sanatorium in Zork Nemesis.
Flee! Flee! It’s the return of the frozen heads! With childish inevitability, this steaming pile of perennial medi-nonsense is trying to stage a comeback. Walt Disney did it, and now your own bonce can jostle with his for space in the freezer at a fraction of the price. And it’s all going to happen within the next ten years. …
I love the frozen head idea, but realistically you'll be a cyborg with no money if you're ever revived. Now where would it be profitable to put a "technically dead" cyborg ? Somewhere dangerous that no living human would ever accept to go to. So basically you'll be managing a methane factory in Jupiter orbit, or harvesting Oort cloud debris. But you won't have a window to look out of. Fun!
I do wonder if there's a legal mechanism to retain ownership of an investment portfolio ( managed on your behalf by a firm, of course ) when your brain has been frozen.
You could "die" moderately well off and "wake up" outrageously rich ( or dirt poor if the fund manager put it all on black ).
The cyborg problem could be worked around with a head/body transplant ( which ever way you want to look at it ) from somebody who died from a brain injury.
"I would guess that your investment fund would be raided by your heirs"
More likely the government would suck it down to nothing using some kind of wealth tax. Logically it would have to otherwise everything would eventually be owned by dead people that pay no tax.
"> everything would eventually be owned by dead people that pay no tax.
If dead people are ever allowed to "own" anything, you can be damn sure they'll also be paying taxes.
Governments aren't _that_ stupid."
Dead people owning everything, and taxes, and not-very-bright governments are precisely the plot of Lois McMaster Bujold's book Cyroburn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryoburn
Unfortunately for the Bad Guys Who Would Be Frozen To Rule, they decide that running just one planet isn't enough, and want more... and the 'more' is one of the three planets run by Lord Auditor Mad Miles Vorkostigan's boss, Emperor Gregor Vorbarra. This means that they run into Mad Miles. Things don't end well for them. They should have picked a safer target... Cetaganda, say, or Old Earth. The not-bright government was owned by the bad guys, and they made the fatal error of assuming that all governments were as corrupt as theirs was, especially the government of a three-planet empire run from a notoriously backwards home world and including one system taken by conquest and another rather accidentally settled as a brand-new colony. They didn't know that the Vor Counts were, originally, the emperors accountants, and they really didn't understand just how powerful a Lord Auditor was, even if he was the youngest and newest Lord Auditor. Oops.
From the Norweb wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORWEB :
"Holly, the on-board computer of the mining ship Red Dwarf, played a practical joke on Dave Lister. According to Holly, the Norweb federation were looking for Lister for his crimes against humanity; leaving two half eaten sausages on his table before leaving, which over three million years had gone mouldy and now covered seven eighths of the earth's surface, and also because he left his bathroom light on for three million years, resulting in a 180 billion pound fine."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEu0o62ycmg
Also reminds me of how people paid for their meals at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
"I do wonder if there's a legal mechanism to retain ownership of an investment portfolio ( managed on your behalf by a firm, of course ) when your brain has been frozen."
A trust would work (IANAL) I expect. In the UK they pay 1% tax every 10 years and allow avoidance of death duties if the beneficiary changes, even if that change is due to death.
I expect the problem would be in ensuring that the day-to-day trust management doesn't help themselves, or that your descendants (or worse, the state) decides to seize the trust, and expect you to file a response.
Perhaps a series of trusts, paying people to watch over other people, that sort of thing.
Personally it all sounds like a scam for extracting a lot of money for rich people with little potential downside. It's not like defrosting tech has been ever shown to work for humans, so there's no actual enforceable contract. Well, maybe the "keep you on ice until you can't pay the bills" part.
Larry Niven wrote a short story called "Rammer" and then turned it into a novel called "A World Out Of Time."
Both worth reading, IMHO. The State had confiscated all the wealth of "corpsicles," and when revived, they were put to work doing jobs that required "expendable assets." He also pointed out that their cells had been destroyed by freezing, so they actually extracted the memory RNA and put it into the body of a criminal who had been mind-wiped. And if the newly (well, "revived" isn't exactly the word - "reincarnated"?) don't pass their tests, they just wipe the mind again and start over with another candidate.
Works for me. My troubles are from the neck down. As for my prior life, well as the Reverend Jim put it on Taxi when Tony Danza's character was thinking of joining the Navy: "The Navy is like prison, with a chance of drowning." I'm attitudinally prepared.
That last YouTube video was my first FanFlic. Good stuff. Also good attitude adjuster.
miniature railway twice: once when I was 5, then again aged 52.
Similar here - my primary school in Norf Lunnon (can't remember the name - 1/4 of the way up Cat Hill in New Barnet) took us on a week-long trip to St. Mary's Bay when I was a nipper.
Went back there a couple of years ago when I was 50. The accomodation was slightly better than before - ex-WW2 temporary huts converted into kiddie-barracks were not great.
But it was the 70's and we expected nothing better.
There is something about Dungeness I quite like. I popped round to Derek Jarman's 'house' last time I was there. I know he's passed on but I'd much rather think he was out watching a sci-fi space cowboy gunfight on the beach. Though knowing Jarmen; more likely filming half-naked sci-fi space cowboys splashing in the sea, slapping each other about the head with giant rubber willies, while shouting in latin.
Theorem 1:
Anybody who wants to freeze their head for the purpose of returning to life later, has a brain not worth freezing.
Proof of this is beyond the scope of this essay, but should be bleeding obvious to everyone with a brain worth freezing.
Corollary 1: All brains worth freezing will only be frozen for the above purpose against the will of the owner of said brain.
Corollary 2:Freezing of brains for the above purpose is either (i) a waste of space/time/energy, or (ii) evil
Of course, if you want to freeze your head for the purpose of scaring the willies out of your descendants, that is an entirely different matter