I would personally expect "everyone you know and love" to be the reason any of us schmucks have a hope of being revived.
Even if there is no economic or scientific reason to revive a frozen, preserved person, there could still be sentimental reasons. If my grandfather were frozen and reviveable, and not dead and buried, I would want to revive him. If it were remotely within my financial means, I would save for decades, mortgage or sell everything I own, take on any debt I could trick people into lending me, if it technologically possible to bring a parent back to life.
It is not difficult to imagine a chain of un-freezing in some distant future. Children unfreeze parents; parents unfreeze grandparents; grandparents unfreeze great-grandparents. As long as there is some tenuous connection between the preserved and the living, at some price point a living old friend or third cousin will want to revive the preserved. Add in the odd charity for the few friendless frozen and it is not hard to imagine any frozen person eventually being revived, technology permitting.
> If my grandfather were frozen and reviveable, and not dead and buried, I would want to revive him. If it were remotely within my financial means, I would save for decades, mortgage or sell everything I own, take on any debt I could trick people into lending me, if it technologically possible to bring a parent back to life.
Of course you feel this way. Everyone does. And that's the problem. Imagine most of the world's productive output being redirected to the massive project of unfreezing generations of cryogenically preserved ancestors.
This is one of the cheerier possibilities. Most of the reasons that occur to me that an advanced society, lacking an intelligence cascade, would want to conjure a large number of functioning highly-educated consciousnesses are decidedly darker.
This possibility, and a thousand other unforeseen individual and societal implications of cryogenics, deserve debate.
We are already on the cusp of rapid automation of our current economy. Traditional models of how labor is distributed or utilized will, and have been, going out the window for quite some time.
But I think you can approximate well enough that by the time the technology arises to resurrect the cryopreserved, it won't require the entire effort of humanity to revive their frozen forbearers, because most of humanity won't be putting out any effort to begin with. We are already 20 years away from half the working population being rendered obsolete by automation. If it is something machines cannot do, it just lets us utilize untapped human labor in the future. If it is something machines can do, we will rapidly deploy the necessary infrastructure to enable the automation of revival, and it won't be a problem of anyone "affording" revival, the machines will just revive all the people they can.
The next step in your calculation is to ask, "What are the constraints on production in a society that has ultra-high automation but no artificial intelligence?"
There is only one: intelligence. I can see such a society going to great lengths to obtain that resource. The incentives to revive an individual for unfortunate purposes in such a society would be very large.
How are the purposes unfortunate? I see the connection between the cryopreserved often being smart folk, so that in the future at some point it might be adventageous to revive them for their intellect, but...
Consider that by the time they can perfect the nanotechnology to repair the brain damage dealt by the freezing process, they will easily be able to genetically engineer a near maximally capable brain. Why not just genetically engineer humans that have high cognitive potential than try to reintegrate those so long dead they cannot function in this futuristic society?
It won't cost them much to revive people, but I don't expect the preserved to be sought after for their intellect.
It'd be fantastic if an industrialized nation devoted 5 or 10% of its GDP to revival. We've been suffering dearly from a lack of aggregate demand for nigh on a decade now. A massive medical bubble would hardly be worse than a housing bubble for backfilling demand.
Even if there is no economic or scientific reason to revive a frozen, preserved person, there could still be sentimental reasons. If my grandfather were frozen and reviveable, and not dead and buried, I would want to revive him. If it were remotely within my financial means, I would save for decades, mortgage or sell everything I own, take on any debt I could trick people into lending me, if it technologically possible to bring a parent back to life.
It is not difficult to imagine a chain of un-freezing in some distant future. Children unfreeze parents; parents unfreeze grandparents; grandparents unfreeze great-grandparents. As long as there is some tenuous connection between the preserved and the living, at some price point a living old friend or third cousin will want to revive the preserved. Add in the odd charity for the few friendless frozen and it is not hard to imagine any frozen person eventually being revived, technology permitting.