And historians

He actually appeared ~~again in a later episode~~ in a couple TNG novelizations.

He managed to adapt and fit in to Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, but eventually was called on to use his 1900s business prowess in ~~negotiations~~ becoming Earth's Ambassador to Ferenginar, and then eventually was named the Secretary of Commerce for at least two different Earth Presidents.

*edit, I lied. I'm sorry for misleading you all, you gave me your trust and I squandered it.

My only regret is that I have boneitis.

A friend of mine is so much a fan of Transmetropolitan that he has a spider tattoo on his head in the same place.

He kinda looks like the character to begin with, but with the ink and a bit of cosplay, combined with a shitty fake accent, it's almost like he sprang from the pages lol

It is extremely unlikely that humanity can survive neoliberalism still long enough to birth that world. I think the sterile coming future will not view human life as a burdensome excess to be disposed of like so much effluvia.

Deade

Someone should write a book about that, or even a series of books. A series I should reread before the 5th book comes out.

Lucky? From some of the other comments it sounds like you may be referencing something, but just taking the comment at face value, there is no way that is not the most horrific fate I can possibly imagine.

Assuming you're not conscious the entire time and only 'wake up' when you enter a solar system to study, it's still horrific. You wake up, completely alone. You have no body and cannot move, and your attention is directed toward gathering data on some distant points of light. When you understand what's going on, sure, there's a bit of a sense of wonder...but it quickly becomes tedium, maddening, isolated tedium, as you slowly drift through a star system, gathering data on each planet and its star, over the course of fifty years or so. There's certainly bits of interesting stuff, but we are still talking insane levels of isolation and boredom. Assuming you're somehow prevented from going insane by the software in order to keep you functional, you can't even escape into madness.

...and then we imagine what happens if you aren't shown the mercy of being conscious only during the few decades the probe is drifting through a solar system. What if you're conscious the. entire. time. Once you're in deep interstellar space, you're alone. Able to think, perceive, experience, but in an unchanging, static existence. A year passes, and everything is so close to exactly the same that only with the precision of the measurements your tools can take can you determine there's been any change. Ten years pass, then a hundred, a thousand. You drift, slowly, through interstellar space toward a destination impossibly far away, all while you wait, conscious, unable to die, unable to escape into madness, just...eternal...waiting. Until thankfully you finally enter a target solar system, get a few blessed decades of what, to your new perspective, seems like frantic activity. Something, finally, to do, to see, that actually changes. And then...you drift back out into interstellar space after a few gravity-assisted slingshots around this star system's worlds, only to proceed on to your next destination, another several thousand year journey away.

This is, by far, the most horrific imaginable torture.

This is literally what happens to Helldivers in Helldivers 2. As much as I enjoy the game I'd rather not have Super Earth become a reality.

That sounds like slaves with extra steps, so that tracks with my thoughts.

Tho that seems like a massively dystopian waste of resources when they could just build robots, which surely they will be able to do if they can reanimate humans.

So yeah, that’s likely.

Admittedly I don’t know much about cryopreservation (looked into it many years ago as a curiosity) but my understanding, and the article says the same, is that they clinically die first and then it’s a rush to preserve them before too much breakdown happens. Since it’s quite expensive, most people only preserve their brain or head, which is removed before being frozen. I’m not sure legally they would be able to do this pre-death, since the harvesting/preserving would directly cause death as we currently understand and classify it, and assisted euthanasia of any flavor is illegal in most places.

I don’t see a future utopia (or non-utopian) society a thousand years from now feeling at all compelled by a legal agreement between two independent parties a millennium ago. The law firms that set up the contracts will be long gone, the legal framework that established them will have evolved if not been replaced completely. I mean, compare where we are now with where “we” were in 1024, and then think about how much more quickly things change today. Any money is going to be more meaningless than 11th century money, but with no collector’s value since they’re just numbers in a database that probably won’t even exist in a thousand years.

I think we can legitimately view having your body/head frozen in the hopes of being woken up as a tech version of the Catholic last rites.

okay but how do you establish any of those incentives with people who simply don't exist? eventually the agreements fall apart as all parties involved are either dead or cryostatic, and the agreements will have to compel someone who was never party to them to take some sort of action. Like, I guess you could put a reward in trust but even then you'd need some sort of legal entity to manage and distribute it that would, itself, need an incentive in trust in order to continue, and so on in an infinite regression.

I certainly don’t think a utopia is the only option and even have a bit in there about non-utopian societies.

Utopian societies that are post-scarcity are just the most likely to have the resources and desire, and even then I’m not seeing it as realistic.

And how are you going to incentivize something decades or centuries down the line? I’m not seeing that one working either.

But most societies that would try them will have prisons so nice that they make our prisons look like medieval prisons.