Re:You Only Live Twice
by rsheridan6 on Saturday December 13, 2008 @01:59PM
(#396862)
That's really not much different than the situation a typical very old person lives in now. My grandmother is 95 and has found the world bewildering for decades now. She's a widow, and all of her formerly numerous friends are dead or senile. Her old neighborhood is gone, modern entertainment reflects attitudes that are alien to her, etc. She has descendants she sees sometimes, but some other people her age don't even have that. Yet we don't see them hurling themselves off of cliffs very often.
For some inexplicable reason, I have thus far only read two issues of Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan: Issue #1, which is available free on the web, and an issue that talks about this.
Here's a description from Wikipedia, which I touched up a bit:
In the comic book Transmetropolitan, Revivals are people whose head was preserved in cryogenic stasis, only to be revived years later by a government program and given a cloned body. They are overwhelmed by the dystopian future in which they have awoken and distraught by the complete loss of every one of their friends and loved ones, and they often break down; they are generally ignored by society and are left to fend for themselves.
You should read this -- though probably not when you're feeling lonely -- because IMHO Ellis totally nails the likely emotional state of a person revived from cryonics. If you want to experience the thrill of being the only survivor of a tremendous holocaust that has claimed the life of every single person you've ever met, combined with the thrill of having your entire life experience rendered obsolete, get yourself cryogenically frozen and hope for revival. I, on the other hand, am either getting cremated or am donating my body to science.