Yeah. I just read the entire Wait But Why article linked elsewhere in the thread, and it seems to be taken as a given that technology will continue to increase

Yeah. I just read the entire Wait But Why article linked elsewhere in the thread, and it seems to be taken as a given that technology will continue to increase at an exponential rate, and so the ability to precisely detect and arbitrarily manipulate the positions of individual atoms has got to be in our not-impossibly-distant future. But I think we are having trouble really grasping the magnitude of that challenge compared to the progress made by science and rationalism so far. Today's medical interventions are breathtaking in effect compared to the state of the art of a hundred years ago, but the complexity of those interventions themselves does not even approach the complexity of the biological systems which are being restored. They are really very crude solutions. Even cutting-edge stuff like mRNA vaccines involves hijacking existing machinery rather than creating new machinery from whole cloth. Anyhow, it's possible that humanity will go a long way, and that extinction is not in our future, but that nevertheless some problems will simply forever be beyond our intellectual capacity. It's not hard to imagine that all the requisite knowledge to accomplish this kind of techno-necromancy might not even be attainable in a single lifespan -- even a lifespan augmented by future technology. Maybe AI solves that problem, but it would also be real weird to wake up in the future to discover that a race of incomprehensibly brilliant machines has resurrected you as a pet out of sheer boredom. Ultimately, it appears that the odds of "successful cryonic preservation" due to any foreseeable reason are 0%. So a decision to do it would come down to betting against my own ability to predict the future. Fair enough: I've been wrong before, but I'm probably not wrong this time.